The future of employment is connected

Problem: Corporate Merch knew integrating with HR and payroll systems was mission-critical, but they needed to get to market quickly while also ensuring their customer base was fully covered. Before the company could commit to partnering with Finch, they needed us to add two key integrations to our 180+ list of supported systems—fast.

Solution: With a proven process in place to build integrations quickly, we successfully added both providers within weeks, and Corporate Merch was able to go live with automated integrations as large customers started onboarding.

Swag-as-a-service Platform

Corporate Merch is a new breed of swag company. Not only do they create quality branded gift items for their customers to send to employees, clients, and partners, Corporate Merch also provides state-of-the-art storage and packages and ships swag item-by-item to intended recipients. The linchpin of their operation is a proprietary software system that lets customers easily view, manage—and automate—their inventory, orders, and shipments.

Integrations as a path to differentiation

Early on, it became clear to Corporate Merch that the employee swag space, in particular, needed disrupting. The reason? People operations professionals typically have to use antiquated and ad hoc solutions like spreadsheets and Google Forms to collect and track employee data and manually distribute merchandise.

Corporate Merch knew that automating these tasks would be a gamechanger—and that the key to automation would be integrating with the HR and payroll systems customers use every day to house employee data. The problem was, building all of the integrations they required to cover their customer base would take two years and a lot of patience. For Corporate Merch, that was a non-starter.

A ready and responsive partner

Corporate Merch needed a partner that could help them get integrated quickly, so they could go live with automations just as fast. Finch emerged at the top of the pack for its employment system expertise, ease of use, overall support, and technical responsiveness.

Working with the Finch team has been a breeze, and they know this space through and through—that's why we chose them.

Daniel Spirgel, Corporate Merch's President

But the partnership came with a stipulation: Finch first had to integrate with two new SMB and enterprise systems essential to Corporate Merch’s customers that were missing from Finch’s coverage network.

With a proven, proprietary system for building integrations in place, our development team was able to successfully build and test the both complex integrations in a matter of weeks, enabling Corporate Merch to get unblocked with larger customer implementations.

Finch held our hand through the whole process. They showed us the endpoints that we would want to focus on and what to stay away from. They answered all of our questions. We wouldn't have gone live so quickly if it wasn't for their help and their concern about us building it the right way.

Daniel Spirgel, Corporate Merch's President

What’s more, the support didn’t stop at implementation. Spirgel says he values the guidance Finch continues to offer the Corporate Merch team as they plot out their product roadmap, including how responsive Finch is to their questions over Slack.

Automating celebration

The effect on Corporate Merch’s user experience has been remarkable. Now, customers have the option to securely connect their HR or payroll system at onboarding, all in a matter of moments:

1. Customers select their HR or payroll platform from the options provided.
2. They sync their account and permission the data transfer by passing their credentials through Finch's secure, compliant, and white-labeled Connect modal.

This connection allows customers to set up triggers that automate the swag process, like sending out gifts for employees’ birthdays or work anniversaries or distributing onboarding kits when new hires join the team. Most importantly, the connection is continuous, so that as employees come and go from customers’ organizations, Corporate Merch’s system is kept up to date.

As for coverage, Corporate Merch hasn’t run into a customer yet who hasn’t been able to integrate via Finch.

Now, we are confident that when we walk into a demo meeting, the integration that a prospective client needs is already built. I’d say 95% of our clients’ HR and payroll systems are covered through Finch.

Daniel Spirgel, Corporate Merch's President

At Finch, we're committed to enabling innovative platforms like Corporate Merch create the best experience for their customers. If you’re interested in getting hands-on with org-wide employment data, sign up for a free Finch developer account today!

Problem: To be the best-in-class employee rewards platform customers want and expect, PerkUp needed seamless, reliable access to employee data that could power time-saving automation.

Solution: With Finch, PerkUp was able get up and running with HRIS integrations in a sprint and offer their customers a seamless syncing experience. After using Finch for over a year, PerkUp was able to lower support costs, create stickier customer relationships, and expand their TAM, all without having to dedicate resources to maintaining the Finch integration.

Rewarding and recognizing employees. globally

PerkUp helps businesses drive employee engagement by making it easy for them to manage and scale their employee rewards program. Through PerkUp’s comprehensive but simple-to-use platform, customers can send incredible, curated gifts to employees worldwide.

The data conundrum

PerkUp’s primary users are busy HR and people operations professionals who are increasingly protective of their time. PerkUp knew that to be a vital solution, they would need to deliver on ease of use and reliability through automation.

But automating employee gift-giving requires employee data—fields like name, start date, birthday, location, and manager. That gave PerkUp a choice: build a sophisticated CSV uploader or find an integration solution that connects directly to customers’ HR information systems (HRIS).

PerkUp knew that a CSV uploader would not only be a heavy lift, it would also only transfer static data that would need to be regularly refreshed by the platform’s users—a friction PerkUp wanted to avoid.

Next, PerkUp considered an iPaaS provider, but ultimately didn’t want to take on the burden of managing the workflows in-house. They needed an integration solution that would enhance the performance of their product without taxing their internal resources.

That’s when PerkUp turned to Finch.

Streamlining the onboarding experience

In less than a single engineering sprint, PerkUp was up and running with Finch, creating a truly best-in-class data syncing experience.

The mechanism by which Finch works is easy, secure, and intuitive. PerkUp customers simply connect their HRIS at onboarding in two steps:

1. They select their HRIS from the options provided.
2. They sync their account and permission the data transfer by passing their credentials through Finch’s white-labeled Connect modal.

Instantly, PerkUp has data access, and customers can create the rules they need to automate their gift-giving workflows—like sending employees rewards on their birthday or company swag on their first day on the job.

What’s more, the data connection is continuous and refreshes every 24 hours, ensuring PerkUp is always working from the most up-to-date employee information. Compared to flat-file transfers and manual data syncs, the efficiencies are enormous.

Finch saves our customers time and headaches, which means they require less customer support from us. We've had 400-person companies connect their system in minutes. When that happens, it's amazing.

Thomas Mirmotahari, PerkUp's Co-Founder & CEO

Built to set and forget

Finch is designed to create a seamless "set-it-and-forget-it" experience for both PerkUp's engineers and customers.

In the year that PerkUp has been using Finch the engineering team was able to shift virtually all resources away from managing the Finch integration, only having to make updates for new data fields. Moreover, PerkUp's customers were able to establish long-lived connections to their HRIS without having to check if data was stale, creating a smooth, consistent experience.

Finch is like the Plaid of HRIS. We love that they’re going deeper, both in terms of the providers they’re adding and the data they’re retrieving. That's the type of partner that we want.

Thomas Mirmotahari, PerkUp's Co-Founder & CEO

Driving lasting business impact

Finch’s ever-growing coverage of the long-tail also expands PerkUp’s target addressable market and helps the sales team make inroads with innovative employers using next-generation HRIS.

When Finch released the HiBob integration, for instance, PerkUp was able to go back to leads who had been asking for it. PerkUp says that made their team look great to prospective customers—like they had done the work to cater to their request—when, really, it was their Finch partnership that made it possible.

Beyond sales, Finch also supports one of the platform’s primary revenue streams. For PerkUp, the business case is clear:

Finch makes our product much stickier. As our customers grow, Finch reduces the admin burden for them, embeds us more deeply in their operations, and generates additional per-employee-per-month fees for us. It supports our business on multiple levels.

Thomas Mirmotahari, PerkUp's Co-Founder & CEO

In fact, there are a surprising range of business outcomes that Finch's integrations can impact. Learn more about the eight key business KPIs that we can improve at your company here.

At Finch, we’ve made it our mission to enable innovative platforms like PerkUp create the best experience for their customers. If you’re interested in getting hands-on with employment data, sign up for a free Finch developer account today!

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Problem: Green Places relies on customers’ HR data to perform key carbon footprint calculations. To get what it needs, Green Places had to ask customers to upload the data via spreadsheets and CSV files—a high-friction, time-consuming, and low-fidelity process.

Solution: By integrating with Finch, Green Places has direct, secure, and permissioned data connectivity to 90% of the HR platforms its customers use every day—saving customers 5 to 7 hours at onboarding and unlocking new possibilities for Green Places’ product roadmap.

Collective action against climate change

It has never been more critical for businesses to minimize their environmental impact, but traditional pathways to assessing and reducing a business’ carbon footprint are, for many businesses, prohibitively expensive.

Green Places is changing that. Through its tech-first, science-backed approach to calculating, reducing, and offsetting emissions, Green Places is making sustainability attainable, so that businesses of all sizes have the power and opportunity to make a difference.

A friction-filled onboarding flow

To arrive at accurate emissions calculations, Green Places taps into many different kinds of data sources, including utility companies, databases managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, Google Maps, business accounting systems, and more.

One of Green Places’ most important data sources is the HR platforms its customers use to manage their human capital. HR platforms house many of the keystone data attributes Green Places depends on, including the number of employees a customer has, where each employee is based, and the location of their workspace. When combined with data from other sources, Green Places can determine important markers like how much clean energy versus fossil fuels a customer expends to power its physical operations and the total environmental impact of its employees’ commute.

But without direct connectivity to HR platforms, Green Places had to ask its customers to upload their HR data manually via spreadsheets and CSV files. It was tedious, time-consuming, and compromised Green Places’ mission to put seamless sustainability within reach.

The impact of connectivity

Green Places knew it had to automate the data retrieval process and set a goal of pulling 80% of emissions data across all source types. But when it came to HR data, Green Places found that most integration providers lacked breadth and depth of coverage. The sustainability platform was about to embark on a piecemeal initiative to cobble together multiple partial solutions, when it learned about Finch.

Above all, Green Places was impressed with Finch’s comprehensive coverage. With Finch’s single, universal API, Green Places gained real-time connectivity to more than 90% of its customers’ HR platforms. Just as critically, Finch affords Green Places more time and bandwidth to allocate to other areas of product development.

"We’ve always had the goal of making our product as straightforward as possible through integrations. So, now that we have a universal integration into HR platforms through Finch, we can devote our time to focusing on unlocking commerce data and other data silos."

Alex Lassiter, Green Places’ Founder and CEO

Where Finch fits in

Since partnering with Finch, customers have the option to securely connect their HR platform directly to Green Places’ system. From start to finish, the connection takes moments:

1. Customers select their HR platform from the options provided.
2. They sync their account and permission the data transfer by passing their credentials through Finch's secure, compliant, and white-labeled Connect modal.

Instantly, via a single API integration, Green Places has access to the data it needs to perform 40% of a customer’s emissions calculations. Meanwhile, customers are spared anywhere from 5 to 7 hours they would otherwise spend manually collecting and uploading HR data.

Fueling future innovation

Finch also opens up a world of potential for the sustainability platform.

Traditionally, carbon accounting is based on historical data, but with Finch’s live data connection, Green Places is uniquely positioned to upend the status quo and build carbon accounting services that are based on real-time computations.

Green Places is also planning to leverage Finch’s comprehensive HR endpoints, including employee email addresses, to fuel a higher degree of employee interaction. The goal is to foster authentic sustainability cultures within workplaces that influence systemic change.

"With Finch, we have the opportunity to make sustainability and green policies core to employees’ work experience, so that change doesn’t just happen at the top; it comes from all directions."

Alex Lassiter, Green Places’ Founder and CEO

At Finch, we’ve made it our mission to support innovative platforms like Green Places access the global employment ecosystem. If you’re interested in learning more about the potential and power of workforce data, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.