Exhale is a financial wellness platform that delivers a comprehensive suite of employer-sponsored benefits ranging from earned wage access to interest-free advances and smart savings tools with rewards.

With a focus on hourly workers in industries like services, transportation, and retail, Exhale needed a way to pull current and historical pay statements to get a holistic view of each employee and their variable earnings. Before launching the product, they sought out a unified API provider that could give them direct integrations to multiple payroll systems.

Today, Finch’s payroll integrations save the Exhale team 40 hours per week and allow employees to access their benefits two weeks faster.

Financial wellness benefits for every employee

Exhale was created to help employers who were struggling to navigate the administrative and regulatory complexities of giving their employees cash advances. A well-intentioned advance to help an employee pay for a flat tire or medical bill can put undue risk on the employer if not administered appropriately. At the same time, many financially stressed employees are hesitant to ask for help directly, which can make them more likely to turn to payday lenders or rack up credit card debt. 

The platform makes it easier for employers to support their workforce with financial wellness benefits that keep employees financially healthy while helping them build a safety net. 

“We found that people need different things at different times. The goal of the product is to help alleviate cash flow problems for people,” said Giaco Corsiglia, Exhale’s Lead Engineer. 

Exhale’s “Perks” include Earned Wage Access (EWA), interest-free cash advances that can be paid back from an employee’s paycheck, and saving tools that reward employees for contributing  for a certain period of time or hitting designated benchmarks.

On the employer side, Exhale helps reduce turnover, fosters employee loyalty, and boosts productivity by mitigating financial stress among employees. 

“It's a super cost-effective way to drive retention and employee loyalty in a way that is actually doing right by your employees,” Corsiglia said. 

Getting established with time-saving automation

To deliver on their product vision, the Exhale team knew they’d need visibility into each employee’s expected take-home pay and the ability to route funds from payroll—whether that be to the employee’s bank account, an Exhale Save account, or back to themselves in the form of repayment for cash advances. All this would require integrations to potentially hundreds of different payroll systems—or significant manual work from employers.

Exhale chose to work with Finch for its industry-leading coverage of payroll systems and data granularity. As Corsiglia put it, the team was confident that their product roadmap wouldn’t be hindered by limitations of Finch’s API. 

“Payroll is just so fragmented, and we didn’t want to limit our client pool by picking one payroll software to integrate with,” Corsiglia explained. “Without Finch, we would have had to build API integrations with 100 different payroll systems in-house or we would have had to say no to a bunch of our early clients.”

"Without Finch, we would have had to build API integrations with 100 different payroll systems in-house or we would have had to say no to a bunch of our early clients."

Exhale still supports manual operations for some employers, but the resource-intensive process takes an hour each week per each employer. By leveraging automation through their payroll integrations, Exhale estimates they’ve saved about 40 hours per week for their Operations team.

“Our manual version works, and we make it as painless for our customers as possible, but it's always preferable to just say, ‘Oh, you sign in to payroll, and then you just never worry about it again.’”

‘Set it and forget it’

Employers, especially those in fast-paced service industries, have enough on their plate; so it’s important to Exhale that their product is as easy to use as possible. 

With integrations to each employer’s payroll system, Exhale is able to  pull organization and payroll data automatically to enroll employees as they’re hired, unenroll employees after a termination, and receive new and historical pay data without manual file uploads. Once the initial connection is made, employers don’t have to think about administering the benefits; an automatic invitation system allows employees to sign up for Exhale’s Perks whenever they want.

“With our integrations, we can offer these benefits automatically, and setting up Exhale is sort of set-it-and-forget-it,” Corsiglia said. “If employers had to be duplicating records manually between payroll and Exhale, not only would it be error-prone, it would just be time consuming. Our goal is to give employers less to worry about, not more.”

Plus, with access to historical pay data through Finch, Exhale can offer all of their Perks to employees on the same day the payroll connection is verified—up to 2 weeks faster than if Exhale had to wait for data from the next pay cycle. 

Unlocking new value and insights with payroll data

Because most people using Exhale are hourly employees, take-home pay can fluctuate significantly with each pay period. To get a holistic view of each employee’s financial situation and determine what they can safely afford to borrow, Exhale needs access to historical data. 

Rather than relying on the employer to send pay data dating back months or delaying employees’ access to their financial benefits, Exhale is able to pull that information directly from the payroll system at any time. 

“Take Earned Wage Access for example. We have to know how much you've earned to give you a portion of your pay ahead of time. We also have to know what your earnings typically are, so we can give you an amount that you can safely pay back,” Corsiglia said. “By pulling that data out of payroll via Finch, we can get tons of historical pay data for our users. They sign up for Exhale, and it's like, ‘Oh, here you go. You can have $100 today because we know what your paycheck is going to be.’”

Nikki Collister, Product Content Lead at Exhale, added that historical payroll data allows the product to surface insights for employers that they might not be able to glean from their payroll system alone, like average income levels across different business locations or average tenure. 

“The payroll integrations we have through Finch have helped us to understand our impact on each of these clients and show how Exhale has delivered value over time,” she said. “It not only helps us provide better benefits, but it helps the employers better understand their business and their employees.”

“[Finch] not only helps us provide better benefits, but it helps the employers better understand their business and their employees.”

Unlocking innovation with payroll integrations

In the coming months and years, Exhale plans to expand their suite of financial wellness solutions with Finch’s payroll integrations. The latest product the company is working on addresses one of the biggest reasons employees request advances from Exhale today: rent payment. This solution—which will allow Exhale to facilitate on-time rent payments that employees then pay back in smaller increments from their paycheck—is another way of providing extra breathing room for those living paycheck-to-paycheck or looking to better manage their budget.  

“We’ll continue to grow our suite, and some of that growth will require deeper integrations with payroll,” Corsiglia said. “Our goal is to become the home for all of the financial benefits you might offer your employees.” 

We’re excited to announce that Finch has partnered with isolved, a leading provider of human capital management (HCM) technology. Through this partnership, developers using Finch will soon be able to access employer data from isolved and partners in the isolved Network.

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As the #1 Unified Employment API, Finch is committed to creating a more accessible, open, and standardized future of employment technology—one in which all the tools employers use to manage their workforce can share data easily and automatically. To make this possible, we’re constantly growing our network of HRIS and payroll partners to sync the mission-critical data within these systems with the trusted third-party applications their customers are using to run their businesses.

So today, we’re thrilled to announce our latest partnership with isolved, the most trusted human capital management (HCM) partner.

“Partnerships with providers like isolved are critical to our mission at Finch. By collaborating closely with leading technologies like isolved, we’re empowering developers to build new, innovative tools that will help employers to manage their workforce more effectively and efficiently.” — Runae Lee, Head of Partnerships at Finch

What the partnership means for developers

Available through the isolved Marketplace, developers using Finch will soon be able to access organization and payroll data from isolved and write changes back to isolved’s payroll through Deductions. This bidirectional, evergreen access to employer data can be used to power innovative use cases across HR tech, benefits, and fintech:

• 401(k) and retirement providers – Use census and payroll data from isolved to streamline sponsor onboarding, automate 401(k) enrollment, and manage deductions on the employer’s behalf.

• Employee benefits administrators – Easily pull employee data to streamline employer onboarding, benefits enrollment, and deductions management.

• B2B fintech applications – Collect data to power financial insights, compensation benchmarking, equity programs, and much more.

• Insurance carriers – Stay up to date on ever-changing employer data to reduce premium leakage and unlock pay-as-you-go pricing.

• HR technology software – Deliver automated experiences, workforce insights, and KPI tracking to help your customers work more efficiently.

• Tax and compliance applications – Automate employee provisioning requests, streamline security certification processes, and determine tax credit eligibility based on employer data, pulled straight from the source.

Help us build our roadmap

Because of the breadth of the isolved Network, Finch will be rolling out support for providers in batches. Have a provider you want to see supported? Tell us which are most important to you so we can get to work on them first!

Not using Finch yet? Talk to sales to learn more about our API, or take it for a test drive yourself—your first five connections are free.

A 2024 survey of nearly 1,000 working Americans found that less than half (47%) report feeling financially healthy. In the US, workplace benefits like medical insurance and tax-advantaged savings accounts have a direct impact on employees’ financial health and stability; but employers are struggling to afford the benefits their employees need and expect. 

This is especially true for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), many of which have struggled for years to afford even the most basic benefits. Only 56% of small employers offer health insurance, and 98% of those said they’re concerned that the cost of medical benefits will become unsustainable in the next 5-10 years.

Employers of all sizes are looking for more accessible, affordable benefits that can scale with their workforce without exponentially increasing costs. Fortunately, a convergence of factors, from government legislation to evolving technology, has paved the way for a new wave of modern benefits providers. These tech-forward companies are quickly gaining traction, and stand to revolutionize the benefits industry as we know it.

Unlocking Scale: The Revolution in Employer-Sponsored Benefits

What are workplace benefits?

Before we dive into the new benefits on the rise, it’s important to understand what we mean by workplace benefits, or employer-sponsored benefits. To put it simply, these are perks or financial incentives that are available to employees through their employer. While most of these are available to individuals, they’re typically far cheaper when accessed through an employer (or sponsor).

Common workplace benefits, or employer-sponsored benefits, include:

• Health insurance
• Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) or Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs)
• Retirement plans, like a 401(k), 403(b), or pension 
• Financial Wellness tools or access to a financial advisor
• Physical and mental wellness programs or tools, like a gym membership or access to a mental health counselor 
• Equity 
• Student loan assistance or tuition reimbursement
• Commuter benefits

Most of these programs are nothing new, although fringe benefits like student loan assistance, commuter benefits, and pet insurance have risen in popularity in recent years. But the latest wave of benefits providers have approached these traditional benefits in novel ways that have allowed them to offer their services to employers more affordably. 

The state of workplace benefits

Employees rely on workplace benefits, especially at a time when inflation, high interest rates, and skyrocketing healthcare costs have made it increasingly difficult for individuals to save: 56% of Americans say they cannot afford a $1,000 emergency expense.

But employers are also struggling to afford the benefits their employees expect. The average per-employee cost of health insurance alone rose 5.2% in 2023 to a whopping $15,797. That number is even higher for SMB employers—over $16,000. And that’s just one workplace benefit. Employees are also seeking access to tax-advantaged savings accounts, emergency assistance, and fringe benefits like help paying down debt and funding their commute.

As a result of these macro economic trends, accessibility and affordability have been the defining trends in the employer-sponsored benefits market over the past five years. The federal government has responded by introducing new legislation and incentives aimed at encouraging benefits enrollment. These changes have lowered the barrier to entry for a new breed of employer-sponsored benefits to emerge in what has otherwise been a closed and complex industry. 

Scaling workplace benefits: the tech advantage

New legislation may have opened the door for a new breed of benefits providers to enter the market, but technology is the linchpin that has allowed them to compete with established incumbents on price and the accessibility of benefits administration. 

Despite the intense competition in the workplace benefits industry, these companies have thrived by optimizing their products for ease-of-use, affordability, and scale—a combination perfectly tailored to small employers, some 95% of which have been underserved by benefits providers. 

Their secret to success? HRIS and payroll integrations. 

By accessing employers’ data directly via APIs, modern benefits providers are powering time- and cost-saving automation that renders their products more efficient and more profitable. They also take on a greater portion of the administrative burden associated with benefits management, making them even more attractive to businesses big and small. 

Unlocking Scale: The Revolution in Employee-Sponsored Benefits

In our latest white paper, we explore the new-age benefits providers that are leveraging technology to deliver high-quality, high-impact benefits experiences for employers of all sizes—from 10-person startups to enterprises with tens of thousands of employees. 

Download your free copy now to learn more, including:

• The economic trends that are driving a fundamental shift in workplace benefits
• The new employer-sponsored benefits that are on the rise 
• How modern providers are leveraging new technology to optimize their products for under-served markets
• Success stories from real providers—and the actual impact integrations have had on their business

The Finch team just got back from SHRM24 in Chicago, where we joined more than 26,000 HR professionals in exploring the current human resources landscape.

We met with dozens of attendees to discuss all things HR tech, including accessing employer data from HRIS and payroll systems for use cases like employee benefits, engagement and learning, accounting and financial forecasting, and more. 

Below are our top takeaways—including the biggest insights from our survey of nearly 200 HR professionals.  

1. Industry-leading providers made a splash

This year’s conference drew lots of attention from industry-leading HRIS and payroll providers like Rippling, ADP, UKG, Paychex, Paycom, Paycor, Insperity, and Bamboo. They came prepared to both educate and entertain: Paycom brought “unnecessary action hero” Shemar Moore, while Insperity hosted a speakeasy-style bar and UKG printed edible photos on cookies.

The competition is still fierce among payroll providers—the latest data shows there are 5,700 payroll companies in the US alone, and the market share of the top 10 combined is only about 55%. 

Many of the attendees at SHRM24 were in the market for a new HRIS or payroll solution. Top-tier, human-centric customer service was a big selling point for most of them, as was tech that could cater to small businesses. 

2. System connectivity—or a lack of it—is top of mind

We spoke with dozens of attendees who were excited about increasing connectivity between the HR systems they use via integrations. Our own research has found that almost half (49%) of HR professionals use 7 or more employment systems of record—so keeping information up-to-date and accessible across those databases is paramount. 

We surveyed nearly 200 HR professionals at SHRM24. The respondents were fairly evenly distributed across company sizes, though the biggest group (40%) worked for enterprise companies with 500 or more employees. The professionals ranged from individual contributors to managers and executives.

In the survey, we asked respondents about the tools they use that don’t integrate with their HRIS or payroll system—and what challenges they face because those systems don’t communicate. The biggest problems they reported were a high degree of manual work, lost time, and keeping data updated across systems.

• Too much manual work — 34%
• Takes too much time — 30%
• Difficult to keep data updated across systems — 20%
• Administrative costs are too high — 18%
• Lack of reporting capabilities — 17%
• Security risks — 14%

Finch is on a mission to alleviate these pains by creating the Open Employment Ecosystem—an open, standardized, interconnected future of employment technology. You can learn more about it—and see our market map of companies at the intersection of payroll, HR tech, benefits, and fintech—here.

3. AI continues to be a hot topic

We already knew artificial intelligence was hot from the conversations we had with HR professionals at Transform 2024—but SHRM doubled down on it. Twelve of the sessions at the conference were focused on AI and how it can help HR teams be more effective and productive. 

Much of the conversation at SHRM24 was around how AI can answer internal questions and act as a second set of hands for busy HR professionals. While AI has been around for years, companies’ investment in it has accelerated recently—and will likely be at the heart of the next wave of disruptive technologies. 

Unlock hundreds of integrations with Finch

Finch's Unified Employment API allows applications across HR tech, benefits, and fintech to integrate with hundreds of HRIS and payroll providers, enabling streamlined employer onboarding, time-saving automation, and evergreen access to the employee data you need. Learn more by scheduling a call with our Sales team, or try it yourself for free.

Almost half (49%) of HR professionals use seven or more different software products every day to manage their workforce. These systems are rarely able to communicate with each other, which means the data often differs slightly in each database—unless the HR team manually updates each system daily—making it difficult for employers to get a comprehensive overview of their workforce. Fortunately, there’s a better way: payroll integrations. 

From streamlining pay to keeping retirement benefits up-to-date and efficiently managing benefits enrollment and deductions, payroll integrations enable the faster, more accurate workflows that HR professionals want. 

In this guide, we’ll look at payroll integrations in detail—including common use cases, benefits, and challenges—as well as how they’re commonly built and maintained. 

What are payroll integrations?

Payroll integrations are a means of connecting payroll systems to the other HR, benefits, and fintech solutions HR teams use to manage their workforce. Built on APIs, payroll integrations automate the exchange of data between the employer’s primary source of truth (the payroll system) and other applications, so the information held in each system is always accurate and up to date.  

As payroll processing becomes more complex, API payroll integrations offer a range of benefits, including easier access to accurate data, automation, and more intuitive workflows.

Common use cases for payroll API integrations

From managing 401(k) plans to streamlining tax compliance, payroll API integrations optimize various HR and administrative functions, enhancing efficiency and accuracy. Typical use cases for these integrations include:

401(k) and retirement

By integrating with payroll systems, 401(k) recordkeepers and third-party administrators (TPAs) can streamline sponsor onboarding, automate retirement plan enrollment, easily manage deductions, and access all the information required for yearly record-keeping audits. 

Real-world success: How Human Interest Streamlines 401(k) Operations and Onboarding with Finch

HR tech

HR tech platforms are supposed to integrate with a company’s existing systems—but with so many payroll providers, that’s not always feasible. With an API-based payroll integration, there’s no need to update employee data across systems—it’s synced automatically.

Employee benefits

Benefits platforms rely on frequent, manual updates, often leading to errors and delays. Using a payroll integration helps employers onboard new hires, enroll them in any benefits programs, and automatically manage deductions.

Real-world success: How Lane Health Helps More Employees Afford Medical Expenses 

B2B fintech

By connecting payroll and HRIS data, API integrations allow employers to quickly and easily access insights around pay data, operational expenditure, compensation benchmarking, and more.

Real-world success: How Rillet Stood Up 40 Payroll Integrations in Just 5 Days 

Insurance

Insurance carriers need accurate and up-to-date company and employee data when providing quotes, underwriting policies, and managing claims. Integrations allow carriers to access the data held in employer systems of record. 

Tax and compliance

Up-to-date information is also crucial for tax and compliance platforms, but collecting this data is labor-intensive and manually sharing that data can often produce errors. Payroll integrations allow instant access to critical employee data in near real time. 

Benefits of payroll integrations

Payroll integrations bring numerous benefits, from saving time and eliminating data silos to enhancing the employee experience. Here's a closer look at how they benefit various stakeholders, including app developers, employers, and payroll providers:

Benefits for application developers

• Improves access to high-quality data: Your potential customers have had enough of dealing with out-of-date, inaccurate data. But they also want to know that their data is in safe hands. Payroll integrations can reduce compliance risks by only collecting strictly necessary data directly synced from employer systems of record—not via email or other unsecured channels. By pulling the data automatically, your application can build automated workflows to expedite payroll processing, increasing the likelihood of meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs). 
• Simplifies workflows: Streamlined onboarding and an intuitive user experience help your customers achieve a faster time to value. Since they no longer need to manually enter data or switch between multiple applications, they can operate more efficiently and realize a return on their investment much faster. 
• Increases total addressable market (TAM): HR teams don’t want more solutions that can’t integrate with their existing tech stack—they’ve got enough of those. Integrations are now table stakes for them. For employment tech SaaS tools, ensuring your solution integrates with as many payroll systems as possible significantly increases your potential customer base—and ultimately, your revenue.

Benefits for employers

• Reduces administrative burden: Payroll integrations streamline HR tasks, saving valuable time. With 84% of HR professionals emphasizing the importance of tech stack integration, it's clear they spend too much time—up to 10 hours a week—working in disparate employment systems. Integrations free them from mundane data entry, allowing them to focus on HR tasks that require a human touch.
• Improves employee experience: Payroll integrations make it easier to create a comprehensive experience for the employee across all the systems they use to log hours, review pay statements, and manage their benefits, like health insurance and retirement plans. When all of this data is synced across platforms, employees can make changes—like updating their 401(k) contribution, for example—and rest assured that it will be accurately reflected in their next paycheck. 
• Removes data silos: Instead of toggling between multiple applications, integrating payroll systems with other HR applications creates a centralized system for managing employee data. This kind of integrated experience isn’t just more user-friendly—it’s more accurate and efficient, too.

Benefits for payroll providers

• Efficient, reliable connections: Payroll providers are the gatekeepers of mission-critical employee data. Integrations allow these systems of record to freely exchange data with the other applications their customers use. That creates a better experience for the employer and further cements the provider’s role as the primary source of truth for their customers.

3 ways to build payroll integrations

Payroll integrations can be split into three main build options—building a direct (custom) integration using the payroll provider’s API, using a unified API, or using an iPaaS solution. Here’s a closer look at the pros and cons of each method—and when they are most appropriate to use:

Custom API integrations

Custom API payroll integrations are usually created in-house, connecting the application to a single payroll provider. These are best suited for organizations that require a high level of customization and that have significant development resources.

Unified payroll APIs

Building payroll integrations with a unified API like Finch means organizations only need one integration to seamlessly connect with any one of hundreds of payroll providers. A unified API is an excellent choice for organizations with limited customization needs that don’t have the time or resources to build custom integrations in-house. Choosing a unified payroll API also allows for rapid scalability and data standardization across multiple providers.

iPaaS solutions

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) solutions help internal development teams create custom 1:1 payroll integrations. iPaaS solutions are best suited to organizations with limited in-house technical capabilities that don’t need to move quickly. That’s because they are fairly low-code solutions as compared to other approaches and provide the basic rails for building an integration but still require a decent amount of internal development work to customize the integration to the particular application using it. iPaaS solutions can be difficult to scale because they’re often tailored to specific, well-defined use cases.

Challenges of building and maintaining payroll integrations

Building and maintaining payroll integrations can pose significant challenges, from varying data quality standards to ongoing maintenance demands. Common challenges include:

Data quality and standardization

The format and quality of data often vary significantly between payroll providers, so applications building a custom 1:1 payroll integration need to ensure the data is standardized to match their internal field names and formatting. Otherwise, the Operations team would need to manually map each data field, costing precious time and making it more difficult to build automated workflows. Establishing data standards can help standardize the quality, accuracy, and consistency of data from a wide range of sources. 

Gated APIs and partnership requirements

Payroll platforms don’t often have public APIs, which means partnerships with providers are required to access API keys, documentation, and other essential information. Getting these agreements approved can take a significant amount of time, on top of the additional burden of security checks and fees. This can be challenging to overcome for start-ups looking to integrate their products with the broader market.

Cost of building and maintaining 1:1 integrations 

The cost of building just one custom integration can quickly run into six figures—our research shows that just one in-house integration typically costs upwards of $187,000. In the highly fragmented payroll market, where the top three providers only account for about 45% of employers, applications need to build dozens or even hundreds of in-house integrations to support all of their customers, which is rarely cost-effective. 

Source: Finch’s Guide to the U.S. Payroll Landscape

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Ongoing integration maintenance requirements

Building 1:1 integrations is one thing—maintaining them is another. Even after they're built, these integrations need ongoing maintenance—including updates as and when required—which can be costly and resource-intensive. 

Lack of scalability 

Scaling in-house payroll integrations is expensive and requires significant time from software development teams. From accessing the API and developer documentation for each payroll provider to creating custom code and untangling data intricacies, it’s a massive amount of work. Multiply that by the number of integrations required—and it’s an untenable option. 

Get started with payroll API integrations

For businesses looking to simplify payroll integrations, Finch’s Unified Employment API streamlines connectivity across hundreds of payroll providers. Only Finch offers secure, standardized, and comprehensive two-way integrations with the largest network of payroll and HRIS systems. 

Our experience makes Finch the best choice for developers working in employment tech, too: we’ve got the integration know-how, data depth, granularity (down to individual employee pay statements), and SME knowledge you need to succeed. Finch also uses assisted integrations to significantly expand data coverage—particularly important for niche or “long-tail” providers with only a small market share—and Finch Flatfile for organizations that want the benefits of a unified API without the need to build an integration to Finch.

If you’re ready to tap into the power of payroll integration, we’re here to help. Try Finch for free or schedule a consultation with our team.

We are thrilled to announce that we have partnered with Rippling, an innovator in workforce management software. Now, approved developers can use Finch to read organization data from Rippling and get featured in Rippling’s highly competitive App Shop. This partnership is a major step toward realizing our mission: to make it easier for employers to share data across the suite of HR, Benefits, and Finance products they use.

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Today’s employers use dozens of software products to manage their workforce; but few of these products are able to share data directly. Maintaining complete and accurate data across these disconnected systems is an enormous challenge that hinders productivity and efficiency, especially among small or quickly scaling teams.

Finch recognizes this as the biggest problem facing the employment industry. 

“Finch and Rippling have approached the challenge of connecting employment infrastructure in complementary ways,” said Jeremy Zhang, CEO and Co-Founder of Finch. “This partnership will allow us to unite our efforts toward realizing Finch’s mission: to create a connected future of work where employers can seamlessly and automatically share data across the products they use to manage employees and track business KPIs.”

Rippling at a glance

Rippling is pioneering a new category of workforce management through its Unified Workforce Platform: a compound suite of products that together create the source of truth for employers. Rippling’s product offerings include systems of record like HRIS and payroll, as well as verticalized tools to manage Benefits, IT, Finance, and more.

In addition to its in-house products, Rippling offers integrations with 500+ software applications through its App Shop. 

The Finch + Rippling partnership 

With our partnership, approved developers will be able to access organization data from Rippling through Finch. Those developers will also be able to list their application on Rippling’s App Shop. 

Finch will submit the application to be listed on the App Shop on our developers’ behalf, so integrating with Rippling is as simple as integrating with any other Finch-supported provider. 

Benefits of integrating with Rippling through Finch 

Through an API integration with Rippling, developers using Finch will be afforded evergreen access to organization data, updated daily or on-demand. This continuous, direct access to the most up-to-date employee data can power innovative use cases across workforce management, employee engagement, learning and development, and more.

• Workforce Management — Automate and streamline HR teams’ tasks to help your customers improve efficiency. Automatically trigger on- and offboarding processes based on employment status, and quickly review benefit eligibility to manage enrollment. 

• Employee Engagement — Empower your customers to personalize their employee recognition programs and save time by automating rewards for milestones like birthdays and work anniversaries, or for achievements like promotions. 

• Learning & Development — Help employers navigate the development of their workforce by syncing their employee roster, automating enrollment in training, and customizing training requirements based on job title or department.

Integrate with Rippling through Finch

Finch’s Unified Employment API allows developers to access employee data across hundreds of HRIS and payroll systems, including Rippling, through a single integration. Talk to our sales team to get started, or sign up for free.

If you’re a provider, increase compatibility with third-party applications by partnering with Finch. Contact us for partnership information.

Saveday, a zero-employer cost 401(k) provider, has built its company ethos around the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be. To cultivate this service-first culture, the company needed a way to remove as much friction as possible from the employer experience, from onboarding to day-to-day operations. 

Today, Saveday integrates with 40 different payroll providers through Finch to power retirement plans for more than 300 employers. Since transitioning from manual operations to automated integrations, Saveday has reduced onboarding time from 5 hours to less than 15 minutes and reduced payroll processing time by nearly 100%.

Manual Processes: When Good Isn’t Good Enough

Before partnering with Finch, Saveday ran its operations the way most 401(k) providers have for decades: the Operations team collected employers’ payroll data through automated file transfer, manual uploads, or even tools like Dropbox, then normalized and entered that data into the Saveday system. 

“We were too inefficient, we were losing too much money, we were experiencing too many errors. We were spending all of our time trying to be in compliance with plans,” explained CTO Albert Swantner. “Just because of the sheer amount of data we were trying to sift through, it was hard for us to keep track of it all.”

"We were spending all of our time trying to be in compliance with plans. Just because of the sheer amount of data we were trying to sift through, it was hard for us to keep track of it all.”

Even under the best of circumstances, processing an individual sponsor’s payroll took 2 hours on average. But there were other factors at play: sometimes sponsors forgot how to export the data correctly, or their main point of contact left the company or went on vacation, taking their institutional knowledge with them. Other times, typos made their way into the manual data entry, or sponsors were late in sending their data.

Processing hundreds of payrolls manually each week was time-intensive and made it all too easy to make contributions late or calculate deductions wrong. That had big implications for Saveday, from spending hours on back-calculations and corrections to making up the cost difference in what the investment should have been—all of which amounted to direct, hard costs against the company’s bottom line.  

“There was a whole workflow of things that all had to be perfect,” Albert said. “It's not good enough to just be good in this business—it has to be perfect.”

Data at the right place at the right time

The team at Saveday had tried to make their processes more efficient by building 1:1 API integrations with the payroll providers they encountered most often, but none ever made it “across the finish line.” When Albert joined as CTO in 2023, he immediately began looking for a unified API solution.

“From an engineer’s perspective, it’s easy to imagine you can just do it by yourself; but the other side of me is business-oriented. If we tried to build this all ourselves, the maintenance would be insane. That’s all we’d do—maintain the product. We’d never achieve our other goals and hit our growth metrics.”

Finch ultimately came out on top, in large part because its Unified Employment API standardizes data across all payroll providers, so Saveday’s operational and technical teams don’t have to. 

Saveday uses Finch to natively integrate with 40 different payroll providers. Processing a single payroll for a sponsor—a process that used to take 2+ hours—is now instant for Saveday and the sponsor.

“There have been a lot of benefits to Saveday. We’ve saved a ton of money, made our model profitable, and reduced compliance issues. Everything has gotten better for our team,” Albert said. 

“We’ve saved a ton of money, made our model profitable, and reduced compliance issues. Everything has gotten better for our team."

401(k) in 15 Minutes or Less

Saveday is focused on making it as easy as possible for SMB employers to offer a retirement plan, partially by stripping out the “million and one bells and whistles” that the majority of employers don’t need or want.

By coupling those simplified investment portfolios with Finch’s payroll integrations, Saveday was able to reduce its standard onboarding time from 5 hours to just 15 minutes.

Aaron Frankel, Saveday’s VP of Marketing and Sales, recalled speaking to the owner of a 5-person company that turned to Saveday after another 401(k) provider had them sit through 5 one-hour meetings just to choose all the specifics of their plan. 

“They told us, ‘It was maddening. I don’t have time for all of that,’” Aaron said. “With the Finch integration, once you hit that button to start onboarding, it’s 15 minutes or less, and you don’t even have to have a conversation with anyone at Saveday about it.”

Once the initial onboarding is complete, Saveday is able to pull employee data and write changes back to the payroll automatically, meaning the sponsor doesn’t need to have any involvement with the day-to-day management of their plan. 

“The plan administrator doesn't have to do anything, because the payrolls are synced, the censuses are synced, everything is done,” Albert said. “Most people are just like, ‘That can't be it.’ And we can tell them no, really, that’s it. You don't have to think about us ever again.”

More Transparency Means Better Compliance

Saveday’s bidirectional access to its sponsor's payroll systems does more than just bring critical employee data into its own system; it also allows the team to make changes back to the employer’s payroll. 

Before Finch, when a participant made a change to their contribution amount, Saveday’s team sent a notice to the sponsor, who then had to manually update the payroll system. This created a problem on two fronts: it put more work on the sponsor’s plate, and it left Saveday completely in the dark as to whether the change had actually been made. 

“There was always a kind of disconnect between the participant, the sponsor, and us. It was hard for us to validate whether a change had been made or not, or if they put in the right number, because we had no access,” Albert explained. “When we integrated, we were able to go back and validate: are the deduction percentages correct? If not, we need to update them with what the participant thinks they are.”

These 360° integrations have made it far easier for Saveday to stay compliant under SECURE 2.0, because they can automatically enroll participants and auto-escalate those participants’ contributions, all without ever having to go through the sponsor.

“Pre-integrations, that additional manual workload on the back end translated to a higher expense for the customers,” Aaron added. “Every time we can gain efficiency, that allows us to be much more competitive and accessible for our clients.”

“Every time we can gain efficiency, that allows us to be much more competitive and accessible for our clients.”

Innovating at Lightning Speed

Saveday already has impressive market coverage with the 40 payroll integrations the company uses today, but Albert and Aaron have plans to add more—much more.

“With Finch, we were able to get 40 integrations up and running in 3 months. We might have had a single payroll integration in 3 months if we’d written it ourselves,” Albert said. 

Whenever the team encounters a new payroll provider through a prospective customer, their first step is to see if Finch already has an integration with that provider. And if the integration doesn’t already exist, Saveday asks if they can make an introduction. 

The way Aaron sees it, Saveday has an opportunity to make retirement benefits more accessible to the 57 million Americans that don’t have a plan for the future. Partnering with a unified API like Finch makes it possible to expand Saveday’s offering at scale and at an affordable price. 

“It's been great for our business,” Albert added. “Finch has helped us deliver on the promise of a high-quality 401(k) at a price that everyone can afford and be happy with.”

Finch kicked off the 2024 fiscal year by being named San Francisco Startup of the Year by HackerNoon, and recognized by Activant Capital as a leader among Unified APIs—an emerging market that Activant anticipates will grow rapidly. 

Following a strong fiscal 2023, Finch continued to build momentum in the first fiscal quarter of 2024, which ended April 30, with the following accomplishments:

• Grew platform usage at a 99% annualized growth rate. 
• Announced a partnership with Oyster, a leading global employment solution, and finalized partnerships with six more HRIS and payroll providers, to be announced in the coming months.
• Signed a major payroll and benefits provider to assist them with connectivity for their benefits product in cooperation with existing partners.
• Finch Dashboard updates, including: a new way to enable, disable, and configure integrations, more granular permissions with role-based access control, and enhanced dashboard security with MFA (multi-factor authentication).
• Finch API updates, including a new rehire date field in the /employment endpoint, and a new endpoint to help ‘register’ existing payroll deductions (/register).
• Improved or expanded integrations with five leading HRIS and payroll providers: Workday, UKG Ready, Justworks, TriNet, and Paychex. 
• Expanded support for the Finch Sandbox, which can now be used to test our Deductions product and assisted providers. 

“As part of our commitment to the Open Employment Ecosystem, we’re excited to work with one of the largest payroll and HRIS providers in the US to assist them with their benefits product,” said Jeremy Zhang, Co-Founder and CEO. “We look forward to working with providers as customers in concert with our partners to facilitate complementary use cases where everyone wins.”

To learn more about how Finch can help your organization broaden connectivity to HRIS and payroll systems, speak with an integration expert today. 

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About Finch

Finch is the #1 unified API for employment systems, with industry-leading coverage across hundreds of payroll and HRIS providers. Our technology underpins the employment ecosystem, securely connecting applications with the employers they serve. Finch powers integrations for hundreds of platforms including Human Interest, Carta, and Nayya.

Applications across HR technology, benefits, tax and compliance, fintech, and insurance use Finch to access a wide range of employment data — including company information, employee directories, employment status, pay statements, benefits eligibility, and more. 

Finch has helped over 40,000 employers securely connect their data between applications. As the world moves toward standardized, open and interconnected data systems, Finch is building the infrastructure to make it easy to share employment data securely. Our vision is to create a connected and programmable employment ecosystem for all.

Is the tech stack about to topple over? 

In the employment tech market, switching between multiple applications has become the norm, with 49% of HR professionals juggling seven or more different employment systems within their tech stack. 

But this way of working isn’t just tiring and frustrating—it’s sending productivity into a nosedive. Research shows that after switching between apps, it takes an average of nine and a half minutes to get back into a focused and productive workflow. What’s more, 56% of HR pros report finding incorrect or outdated information in employee data at least weekly—often a result of having to manually enter and move data between systems of record.

Consequently, it's unsurprising that 97% of HR professionals emphasize the importance of integration among their employment systems. But how is this possible in the expansive and fragmented employment technology landscape, where there are nearly 6,000 payroll systems alone?

The answer lies in unified APIs. 

Also known as universal APIs, this rapidly emerging market addresses the pressing demand for platform connectivity. As the employment tech market encompasses many systems of record and point solutions, connecting the employment ecosystem can bring immense benefits. In this article, we’ll delve into the world of unified employment APIs, exploring their benefits and how to get started with them.

What is a unified API? 

In the employment technology space, point solutions—the applications that employers use to manage human resources, employee benefits, and finances—must integrate with systems of record like HRIS and payroll to pull in pertinent employee data. 

A unified API acts as an abstraction layer or an API aggregator, pulling information from all these applications and systems and presenting them in a secure, standardized way. Companies only need to build one integration—to the API provider—to connect to dozens or hundreds of outside systems. The provider handles the complexity of varying backend data models and the ongoing maintenance of the connections. 

To use an analogy, think of a unified API as a power strip, with the systems of record as the appliances and the electricity as employee data. When using a unified API, applications need only to plug the strip into their own outlet to send data flowing between their own software and every system of record their customers use.

Unified APIs offer seamless connectivity between systems that vastly improves the user experience. In turn, that allows the applications and systems of record to grow their market share and free up internal teams to focus on building a better product. 

Types of unified APIs

The unified APIs available today can be broken down into two types: generalized and niche. Each type serves distinct purposes and offers unique advantages:

• Generalized or horizontal unified APIs: These connect and integrate software systems across various verticals and use cases. For example, they could provide API integrations to systems that range from marketing automation platforms to accounting tools. While generalized APIs are great for accessing surface-level data, they lack the deep data coverage and granularity that's found in a niche unified API.

• Niche or vertical-specific unified APIs: These are hyper-focused on a specific sector, like employment tech. They’re best for nuanced use cases that need deeper data granularity than what’s available with a generalized API, like administering retirement benefits. For example, a niche payroll API is able to go down to an individual pay statement level—something a generalized API can’t offer. Finch’s Unified Employment API is specifically focused on the employment ecosystem at the intersection of HR tech, benefits, and fintech.

Benefits of unified APIs

From offering a great return on your investment to making things easier for users, there’s a lot to like about unified APIs. Here’s a rundown of the most common benefits. 

Drive cost efficiencies

Building custom integrations doesn’t just take a long time—it’s expensive too. Our research shows that creating just one in-house integration can easily cost $187,000 (or more). And that’s before you consider any ongoing maintenance costs.

On the other hand, choose the right unified API and you can unlock access to hundreds of employment systems in just a few moments. No matter how many integrations you need, the cost is far less than creating custom integrations from scratch.  

Improve the developer experience 

Burnout is rife among software developers and IT professionals, with work exhaustion being one of the main reasons developers leave their jobs. When developers can’t easily connect to new systems and need to repeat tedious manual integration work, it’s no wonder they feel frustrated and exhausted.

But demand for developers is high across all industries, so keeping hold of your team is critical. One way to boost retention is to focus on improving the employee experience for your dev team. A unified API frees up developers' time to focus on value-added tasks—instead of fighting fires all day.

“The best developers are the laziest. They focus on tasks that add value to the product and avoid work that doesn’t. Reproducing what other people have already done and reinventing the wheel is just useless for them.” — Nimrod Hoofien, former Head of Engineering at Gusto

Enhance the end-user experience 

HR and benefits professionals who use employment technologies are expected to do more with less—but the systems they rely on are often slow, clunky, and frustrating. 

In The 2023 State of Employment Technology Report, we surveyed HR professionals and uncovered:

• 68% switch between different employment systems throughout the day
• 49% leverage seven or more employment systems in their tech stack
• 26% spend 10 or more hours per week in their employment systems 

The kind of seamless integration that a unified API offers makes for a better user experience. For the employers that use your application, it also allows them to achieve faster time to value—streamlining the onboarding process, eliminating manual work, and creating a better product experience that ultimately drives adoption.

Easily scale product integrations 

Building custom integrations is a costly, time-consuming exercise. Add up all the integrations you’d need to create to connect to the number of HRIS and payroll systems available today, and you’re looking at a serious amount of time and money.

Instead, a unified API allows you to build and maintain product integrations at scale. But despite the name, not all universal APIs are truly universal—because they don’t always integrate with all employment systems. Before choosing a unified API provider, it’s essential to ensure it offers extensive coverage of employment systems. 

Increase total addressable market (TAM)

For HR teams, whether or not your application can easily integrate with their existing tech stack is one of the most critical buying considerations. They don't want yet another disconnected, siloed solution cluttering their tech stack—they crave integration and efficiency.

Choosing a unified API that connects with many systems of record ensures you’re reaching as much of the market as possible. Take Finch, for example, which integrates with over 200 different HRIS and payroll systems—the same ones nearly 90% of all U.S. employers use—including top employment providers like Gusto, ADP, Paychex, and Quickbooks. 

Unified APIs vs. other integration methods

Unified APIs aren’t the only option when it comes to integration. Here's a closer look at some popular alternatives and how they compare:

• Custom 1:1 API integrations: A custom integration between two specific systems offers the same benefits as a unified API, but only for one provider. Since each integration requires additional development efforts, they’re time-consuming and expensive to implement and maintain.

• Workflow tools: These streamline data analysis and automate time-consuming manual tasks within a specific system, which can reduce the amount of effort required to manually move data between systems. But because these aren’t true integrations, they cannot facilitate the flow of information between two systems; that part still requires manual intervention.

• iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service): iPaaS platforms are tools that help internal dev teams build custom 1:1 integrations faster. They provide the basic rails for integrating with various systems and manage the governance and security of these connections. iPaaS platforms are useful for businesses that need a high degree of customization for every integration, but compared to unified APIs, they require much more work of the internal development team.

• iMaaS (Integration Management as a Service): iMaaS is a managed service that helps SaaS companies distribute integrations to their customers by providing access to other applications’ APIs through a marketplace within their app. Similar to iPaas, this service can help expedite the time it takes to build an integration, but the integrations still need to be built one at a time and require development work. 

When to opt for a unified API

Unified APIs offer distinct advantages over other integration methods, but determining when to opt for a unified API depends on various factors. Here are a few scenarios where choosing a unified API is ideal:

• Limited development resources: If your organization operates with a small or underresourced development team, it makes sense to use a unified API. This removes the expense and time involved in creating custom-built APIs—not to mention the effort required by your team.

• Need for wide integration coverage: Suppose you're an employment application aiming to integrate with as many payroll providers as possible. If you can build just one integration (to the unified API) to connect with multiple providers, you can quickly increase your market potential. In this case, a unified API makes the most business sense.

• Desire to reduce ongoing costs: Operating and maintaining custom-built integrations is expensive and time-consuming. By outsourcing the burden of ongoing maintenance to the unified API provider, teams can spend their time on tasks that add value to the business rather than routine maintenance activities.

How to choose the best unified API tool 

Ready to start exploring unified employment APIs but unsure what to look for? Our comprehensive buyer’s guide gets into the nitty gritty of key features to consider, such as broad coverage, dataset granularity, and a frequent data sync cadence. With these insights, you can confidently evaluate your options and make an informed decision. 

Scale your integrations with Finch

If you’re looking for a unified employment API that checks all the boxes (and then some), look no further than Finch.

Finch allows employment applications to access data and make changes across hundreds of HRIS and payroll systems—covering 88% of US employers—through a single API. See why Finch is the #1 Unified Employment API. Try it for free today.

Download the Open Employment Ecosystem Market Map

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The employment ecosystem—the collection of B2B software applications that employers use to manage their workforce—is deeply fragmented and complex. 

To date, this has been broadly accepted as the unavoidable reality of a highly regulated, disconnected industry. But at Finch, we have a vision for an open, standardized, interconnected future of employment technology. We call it the Open Employment Ecosystem. 

To illustrate this vision, we created the Open Employment Ecosystem Market Map: a visual representation of the technologies that sit at the intersection of payroll, HR tech, benefits, and fintech. Alex Tran, Managing Director at General Catalyst, put it this way:

"Companies today use many applications to manage their workforce, leaving critical employee data scattered across systems of record and point solutions. While companies continue to choose best-of-breed tools for their specific needs, the lack of connectivity between these systems is a huge challenge—especially to and from payroll systems.

"The vision of an Open Employment Ecosystem where data flows seamlessly is the primary reason we backed the Finch team, and we’re thrilled to see the first version of their market map feature other General Catalyst portfolio companies such as Awardco, Factorial, Gusto and Thatch."

Understanding the Open Employment Ecosystem Market Map

The employment ecosystem consists of two types of technology: systems of record and point solutions, or applications. 

Systems of record are tools like HRIS and payroll that act as the source of truth for employers. These systems hold all of the information about a company’s workforce: census details, earnings statements, employment history, tax data, and much more. Applications are the standalone human resource, benefits, and financial tools that rely on that employee data to function. 

Given this relationship, all of the tools within this ecosystem are interlinked and must rely on each other in some way. At the center of the map are HRIS and payroll systems: where all employee data originates. From here, the data must be shared with applications that fall under one of three main categories: HR tech, benefits, and fintech. Data may ultimately move from application to application, but only after being routed through the systems of record at the foundation of the ecosystem.

In our vision for the Open Employment Ecosystem, all of these applications and systems of record will benefit from bidirectional integrations with one another. Any time an employer makes a change in one application, that information will be seamlessly and automatically relayed back to the system of record, which will in turn push that change out across the rest of the applications in the employer’s tech stack.

The promise of the Open Employment Ecosystem

More than 150 million employment records are exchanged via CSV upload, SFTP, and manual operations every year. While the world has advanced technologically, the employment sector is still reliant on antiquated, cumbersome, error-prone processes, because until now, there’s been no alternative. 

What the ecosystem lacks is a shared infrastructure: a means for quickly, securely, and automatically sharing data across disparate systems. As a result, innovation is stifled, and HR departments are bogged down with unavoidable administrative work: 64% of HR leaders report wasting up to nine hours on manual data entry each week, where the average cost of a single point of data entry is $4.78.

At Finch, we’re building the foundational infrastructure that has evaded the employment industry for decades. Our unified API bridges the gap between systems of record and applications on behalf of employers. We’ve built integrations with hundreds of HRIS and payroll systems that use data standardization and clear rules of engagement for seamless syncing, so employee data is securely delivered to applications in a standardized format, regardless of its origin system.

Similar to the way Plaid introduced the era of Open Finance through its financial API, Finch aims to create the Open Employment Ecosystem through our Unified Employment API. Our mission is to empower innovators with democratized access to global employment systems. With security and compliance as the backbone of our infrastructure, Finch will ultimately build the connection between all of these platforms and empower a new wave of innovators to create a better future of work—one that benefits systems of record, applications, and employers in equal measure. 

Download the market map, or learn more about Finch’s vision for the Open Employment Ecosystem.

Today, the employment ecosystem is very fragmented and siloed, and developers across HR tech, employee benefits, and fintech face significant hurdles when it comes to building integrations. As the #1 Unified Employment API, Finch’s mission is to create a more accessible and connected infrastructure that will allow all of these systems to share data seamlessly, similar to the way Open Finance has unleashed a new era of innovation in fintech. We call this the Open Employment Ecosystem.

On May 9th, Finch hosted a webinar with two employment technology leaders: our CEO Jeremy Zhang and Nimrod Hoofien, former Head of Engineering at Gusto. The conversation centered around the need for greater connectivity between technologies in the employment sector, the challenges these software providers face in building those integrations, and the new solutions that are emerging to create a more unified, accessible future of employment data.

Watch the fireside chat on-demand now, or read the recap below!

Webinar recap: A Q&A with Jeremy Zhang and Nimrod Hoofien

How has the employment industry evolved in terms of connectivity and related technologies over the years?

Nimrod: The world's getting more complex. Earlier, everything revolved around one big HRIS like Workday and applications were built around that one product. But that kind of old-school monolithic approach just doesn't cut it anymore.

First of all, offering a best-in-class product today requires high levels of customization and capabilities to support different and unique use cases. Flexibility is key; staying ahead means being able to listen to the market and constantly add to the capabilities. 

In addition, the days of connecting systems through hefty databases are gone. Now, different systems hold different data, each crucial to supporting specific use cases. This means being able to work with API connectivity and integrations is no longer optional. It’s a must.

Jeremy: In the last few years, connectivity has taken the central stage in sectors like fintech. In employment tech, while many providers agree that greater connectivity would benefit everyone involved, most don’t know how to build integrations using APIs. That’s where we at Finch saw a need for a unified employment API: something that makes life easier for providers by simplifying API integrations and helping them easily share data with the other point solutions that employers use for employee benefits, engagement, financial planning, and so on.

How can APIs help address scalability issues in connectivity?

Jeremy: The problem with scaling API connections is twofold: the employment tech market is highly fragmented with tens of thousands of providers, including payroll, HRIS, time and attendance, benefits administration, and more. Here, hundreds of millions of dollars move each year through CSV uploads, SFTP, and EDI file feeds, or simply by manual operations. Plus, the cost of setting up SFTP, downloading and verifying data files is quite high. With APIs, we can bring these costs down to make the process more efficient and encourage innovation. Having standardization or a unified API allows developers to build API integrations without dealing with different data models from thousands of providers.

Nimrod: Jeremy is spot on. APIs are complex, and the specialization needed to build highly personalized use cases takes time. A good developer knows that they cannot build for everyone and serve all the tens of thousands of different use cases possible. As a result, they’re forced to rely on other people’s products to offer all the capabilities without draining in-house resources. 

How do providers use APIs in this space? How did embracing integrations help Gusto to grow?

Nimrod: For providers, three kinds of API matter the most. First, they need to access functionalities from other systems to expand their offerings without building themselves. Gusto used integrations to build capabilities that they didn’t want to build in-house like time-tracking, 401(k), and more. Even when you want to eventually build those capabilities yourself, using integrations can give you a time-to-market advantage. 

Another advantage of integrations is when you want to add long-tail offerings that are too small to scale. However, there are some applications that want to serve these niche use cases. You need to allow these developers to use your capabilities to build their own products with a low touch from you. That was the basis of Gusto’s extensive partner program. 

And lastly, you can benefit from integrations by taking your core offering and making it available to other big providers who don’t want to build everything themselves. That’s how Gusto’s embedded payroll offering came to be. 

There’s a huge benefit to being able to build with other people’s APIs and allow others to use yours. This enabled Gusto to offer 401(k) products they would’ve never been able to build from scratch. Allowing others to use its payroll API also allowed Gusto to serve edge cases across industries. 

What’s preventing the wider adoption of APIs in the payroll space? 

Jeremy: There are two issues here. The first is that there’s a widely accepted status quo in this industry when it comes to sending files. Most applications still use emails or SFTP, even when they aren’t secure enough to send PII data. But payroll is a highly regulated industry, and it has a complex infrastructure—so unless something absolutely needs to change, people don’t want to mess around with what’s working underneath. 

The other factor is that adopting an API strategy requires a huge technical lift, especially when you haven’t built your backend infrastructure to support this. 

Nimrod: Absolutely! The technical difficulties of building API integrations are huge. You need to be careful about who gets access to your data and test their reliability and performance because the security risks and the cost of slip-ups are high in this space. 

For example, if you allow an application to make changes to your census data, you need to trust that it’s going to be correct. In short, you need to carefully design your APIs and create clear support guidelines in case an issue arises. Tools like Finch are great in this context because they take much of these considerations away from providers. 

What are some of the emerging technologies that are making connectivity easier?

Jeremy: When we consider new technologies, we need to first acknowledge the need for standardization across the employment industry. Finch is primed to solve this. We standardize the data from hundreds of different systems into common fields so applications can use a single data model. We understand the complexities and regulations within the industry and have created an infrastructure that allows applications to build products without worrying about the details. 

We’re also building a strong partnership network with top providers to offer instant access to application developers. We offer extensive documentation, a sandbox environment, and developer experience tools to make it easy for developers to build with Finch. We also add a strong authentication layer to make it easier for employers to grant granular access to applications so data is protected and safe. 

For partners, we meet them where they are. We work hand-in-hand with these providers to help them structure and release their APIs, or if they aren’t ready to build APIs, we connect to their SFTP and EDI file feeds and convert the data into a standard format to make sure the entire industry is moving towards this API connectivity. 

Nimrod: Spot on! APIs are pretty nuanced, and data standardization is key. Banking used to have the same problem, and Plaid helped them use a common universal language. Finch is doing the same for payroll. They’re reducing the effort to normalize data from various systems.

How does the Open Employment Ecosystem benefit systems of record, third-party applications, and employers?

Nimrod: It’s a win-win-win for all parties involved. 

The best developers are the laziest. They focus on tasks that add value to the product and avoid work that doesn’t. Reproducing what other people have already done and reinventing the wheel is just useless for them. So, for developers, API connectivity offered by the Open Employment Ecosystem is a clear win.

For partners, one of the biggest challenges is to assess the effectiveness of a partnership deal in the beginning. There’s no way we can predict which partnerships will succeed and which won’t. The resistance to invest heavily in partnerships is low due to risk aversion. If you can lower the integration cost to close to zero, you can integrate more partners at a much lower risk. 

For employers, the Open Employment Ecosystem will bring more options to choose the best tools for their needs. An open market will benefit the players that offer the most value, make the employment market more efficient, and allow all players to access equal information.

Jeremy: Yeah, Nimrod explained it perfectly. I’d only add that in the future, there will be even more parties that stand to benefit from the Open Employment Ecosystem, from healthcare providers to local governments that want to understand how the state of employment is shifting over time. 

There are so many ways that democratized access to employee data can benefit not just the employment industry, but all of us—everyone who is employed.

At Finch, we categorize our B2B software integrations into two buckets: automated and assisted. Both are tools that allow software applications to share data directly. The difference between the two is the path the data takes to get from one system to another: while automated integrations facilitate automatic data flow from app to app, assisted integrations require a few additional steps behind the scenes.

Assisted integrations serve an important purpose. Fully automated integrations are the gold standard in software connectivity, but they only work when the underlying data provider has an accessible API. In the employment industry, where most systems of record either lack APIs or keep them under lock and key, assisted integrations empower employers to share their data to whatever application needs it automatically.

They aren’t suitable for every use case; but in many situations, assisted integrations are a valuable tool that significantly expands system coverage. Finch supports both automated and assisted integrations in order to provide access to as many HRIS and payroll systems as possible, furthering our goal of democratizing access to the infrastructure that underpins the employment ecosystem. 

What are assisted integrations?

Assisted integrations are secure connections between two software systems that offer many of the same benefits as automated integrations: data is shared between the two platforms in a standardized format. The difference is how the data gets there. Finch provides access to our assisted integrations through a feature called Finch Assist, which supports integrations with hundreds of HRIS and payroll systems.

Here’s how Finch Assist works: The end-user (the employer) adds Finch as a permissioned, third-party user to their HRIS or payroll system using Finch Connect. Finch’s Product Operations team then works behind the scenes, leveraging scripts that pull the relevant data, standardize its format, and make it available via the Finch API.

Like automated integrations, this data is standardized and made available by API request. Developers can also be notified when data has changed—like when a new employee joins or leaves. The most significant difference is that data is refreshed every 7 days (rather than daily).

While assisted integrations require an extra step, they’re a vast improvement over manual data entry, which is the only alternative when a system has a limited API or no API at all. Employers or HR admins aren’t downloading data as a flat file and uploading it to another system—technology is still retrieving and standardizing the data on their behalf. Day-to-day, there is no extra effort required of the system of record, third-party application, or the end-user; Finch handles the syncing process.

Automated vs. assisted integrations

Aside from their workflows, the biggest differences between assisted and automated integrations are the configuration period (how long it takes to activate the integration), how often the data is refreshed, and how many providers are supported through each. 

• Automated integrations — These integrations are pre-built and fully automated, meaning there is no configuration period and data syncs automatically every 24 hours. Users can also run syncs on demand at more frequent intervals if needed. Finch currently supports automated integrations for more than 30 of the most popular providers (by market share).
• Assisted integrations — The configuration period for assisted integrations is 1-2 weeks, and the data is refreshed weekly. Finch’s assisted integrations can support Organization data coverage from any HRIS or payroll system in the US market and double the Payroll data coverage of our automated integrations.

Both automated and assisted integrations are supported by connection monitoring, meaning you can monitor the status of an assisted integration just as you would an automated integration. Both types also allow users to set up webhooks.

Benefits of assisted integrations

Finch created assisted integrations in response to the number of retirement and benefits providers that were building manual data processing in-house—a cumbersome and inefficient workaround necessitated by the lack of open APIs in the employment ecosystem. By leveraging assisted integrations, Finch is able to offer the widest (and deepest) coverage of employment systems available—4x more than any other unified API on the market.

Expand coverage

Integrations are becoming increasingly table stakes for employers; but too few systems of record allow other applications to integrate directly. Since Finch was founded, we’ve found that 99% of payroll providers either have a gated API or no API at all. HR systems are generally more accessible, but the problem still persists here on a smaller scale. 

Relying solely on automated integrations puts thousands of HR and payroll systems out of reach. Some unified APIs don’t support assisted integrations, but this significantly reduces their data coverage, especially among niche or “long-tail” providers that have only a small market share. And it’s worth noting that in payroll, that’s no small number of exclusions—there are more than 5,700 payroll providers in the US alone, and the top 10 competitors only account for 54.8% of the entire market. In other words, using automated integrations alone leaves nearly half of the total addressable market on the table.

Finch’s assisted integrations serve as a supplement to our automated integrations. With assisted integrations, we’re able to support 2x more payroll integrations and 7x more 360° integrations, which allow the two-way flow of data (read and write capabilities).

Write back to payroll systems

While payroll systems are behind the curve on API accessibility, it’s still a crucial source of truth for employment data—especially when it comes to employee benefits. Employer-sponsored benefits must be able to create and manage payroll deductions on behalf of enrolled participants, which requires writing changes to payroll systems.

As a result, benefits providers have been forced to use Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), manual file sharing, or even email to communicate those changes to either the employer or the payroll provider, who then must manually update the payroll system. 

Assisted integrations improve this workflow by allowing the benefits provider to automate deductions by pushing changes directly back to the payroll system via the Finch API—no involvement from the employer or payroll provider required. 

Eliminate manual data processing

Without an open API to build to, the only alternative to assisted integrations is manual data transfer. This poses several challenges: 

1. It creates significant friction for the employer, elongating their onboarding process and delaying the point at which they begin realizing value from your solution. 
2. It puts the onus of standardizing data on your operations team–or worse, the employer. 
3. It introduces more opportunity for human error.

Assisted integrations take the work of your customer’s plate so they can start realizing the ROI of your solution faster. They also offer automated data standardization, and because the integration is powered by scripts—not manual downloads and uploads—there’s a reduced risk of inaccuracies or missed fields. 

Who should use assisted integrations?

Because the data is refreshed weekly, assisted integrations aren’t a fit for every use case. For time-sensitive tasks, like deprovisioning employee access upon termination, the weeklong period between data refreshes is too long. 

But for processes that require access to data that coincides with payroll cycles (like retirement deductions) or data that rarely changes (like employee birthday or anniversary rewards), assisted integrations can provide the same benefits as their automated counterparts.

Here are a few examples to give you an idea of the kind of use cases that can be powered by assisted integrations:

• Employee engagement and recognition — Use organization data like start date, birthday, or title changes to engage and reward employees automatically when they reach milestones.
• 401(k) retirement benefits — Automatically pull income and deferral rate each pay cycle, then write deductions changes back to the payroll system without involving the sponsor. 
• Compensation/equity management — Pull all employee salary, benefits, and equity data automatically to create a holistic view for accounting and headcount management purposes. 
• Professional development/training — Use employee directory data to assign trainings and professional development courses based on title, department, tenure, and so on.
• People/HR analytics — Access the employer’s HRIS to provide a snapshot of company demographics and track KPIs like employee retention and mobility.

Are assisted integrations secure?

When supported by a reliable provider, assisted integrations are just as secure as API integrations. 

Finch is SOC 2, CCPA, GDPR, and HIPAA compliant—meaning we engage in annual audits and maintain strict internal protocols to safeguard the security of sensitive data. We also use data classification to control who is able to access what data and use encryption at rest, in transit, and on the application level to prevent data from being accessed by unauthorized users and bad actors. 

The data that flows through our assisted integrations is subject to strict access controls and monitored by audit logs so we’re always able to account for changes, track who accessed the system and when, and ensure personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data is kept private. 

Why Finch supports assisted integrations

Our company mission is to democratize access to employment infrastructure in order to facilitate faster, more transformative innovation in employment tech. The way we see it, the more systems of record we can provide integrations to, the closer we are to realizing that goal. 

The truth is that assisted integrations aren’t the solution for every company and every use case; but when it’s a choice between assisted integrations and no API support at all, the choice is clear. Assisted integrations are secure and more efficient than manual processes, which put an administrative burden on the employer. 

Our goal is to eventually offer automated integrations to most, if not all, of the systems of record that underpin the infrastructure of employment tech, but with nearly 6,000 of these systems in the US alone, realizing that goal will take time. In the interim, assisted integrations provide a much-needed solution that is bridging the gap between systems of record with closed APIs and the third-party software applications that need access to the data they hold. 

Unlock access to hundreds of HRIS and payroll systems with Finch

Finch’s Unified Employment API powers connections to 200+ systems of record through a single integration, so you can spend less time building technical bridges and more time focused on product innovations. Schedule a call with our sales team to learn more, or try it yourself for free.

SECURE Act 2.0 is driving fundamental shifts in how retirement plan administrators operate. 

The most immediate impact of these laws on recordkeepers will be related to compliance, but the ripple effects will reach much further, putting recordkeepers under tremendous pressure to adapt—fast. 

Our whitepaper explores how recordkeepers can keep pace with the ever-changing landscape. Download today and learn: 

• How to maintain compliance in the era of SECURE Act 2.0 
• Strategies to enhance the sponsor experience 
• How automated integrations will empower recordkeepers to work faster and more efficiently

Human Interest is a full-service 401(k) provider on a mission to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to offer retirement plans to their employees. An early adopter of 401(k) payroll integrations, Human Interest needed a reliable way to expand their home-grown 360° integrations to more providers—especially those that were hard to build directly.

Integrations are “number one”

Human Interest was ahead of the API integration curve. The 401(k) recordkeeper’s leadership recognized early on that the benefits that seamless, 360° data flow payroll integrations could offer were critical to their success, both to offer a best-in-class user experience and to support the wide range of plan designs sponsors need.

“Integrations are often the number one thing when differentiating yourself,” said Drew Obston, Manager of Product Operations. “We’re always looking for an opportunity to improve our value offering. With integrations, we’re able to go above and beyond and say, ‘You don’t have to upload payroll data. You don’t have to be provisioning someone on our team to log in to your payroll.’” For small and midsize businesses, where HR admins wear a lot of hats, that kind of user experience is paramount.

Human Interest boasts more than 500 payroll integrations, many of which were built in-house. While there's inherent value in all types of integrations, the company's Product Operations team considers fully automated payroll integrations—those that require zero day-to-day manual work—their north star metric. Eliminating the need to download files, check date ranges, validate data, and more has a big impact on efficiency. Drew shared that fully automated integrations allow Human Interest to process payroll up to 4x faster and make it so the team is 3x more likely to hit their Service Level Agreements (SLAs), ensuring customers get the experience they expect.

“If we were 100% relying on manual work by our Operations team to process payroll data, we would not have a sustainable business,” Drew said. “We’re at nearly 100% of our SLA to invest participants’ contributions within five business days. Without automation, we’d be at about 30% because the Operations team would just be underwater.”

“If we were 100% relying on manual work by our Operations team to process payroll data, we would not have a sustainable business."

“Worst-case scenario”

Human Interest has built an impressive arsenal of integrations on their own, but found they weren’t able to build bi-directional connections to every payroll provider their customers use.

Before partnering with Finch, Human Interest was using another third-party vendor to access sponsor data from two commonly used payroll providers that proved challenging to integrate with directly. However, the team ran into issues with the outsourced connections, which forced them to route most of the work through the Operations team. 

“It’s the worst-case scenario,” Drew said, due to security concerns and inefficiency. “It’s not a tenable solution; it doesn’t scale. We don’t want to keep hiring people to keep up with revenue growth. We would rather take our resources and dedicate them to good customer management, troubleshooting, and exploring better opportunities.”

Human Interest needed a reliable solution that would take the menial day-to-day work off their plate without passing the buck to their customers.

Unlocking access to closed systems

In early 2022, Human Interest partnered with Finch to get better access to the data their Operations team had been manually collecting and validating. Since then, they’ve launched a second integration with Finch for a separate payroll provider, and have begun to explore write-back functionality that will allow them to achieve full automation for both integrations. 

“The ease and support Finch has provided is what laid the foundation for us to consider Finch for additional payroll connections,” Drew said. “Going deeper is our biggest priority. We don’t want to just roll an integration out to say we have an integration. We want it to actually provide true value, both to our internal teams and more importantly, to the end user.”

By going through Finch, Human Interest wasn’t just able to build previously inaccessible integrations—Drew also estimates that the time to build was cut by 66%, primarily because the discovery process was already complete. When a single integration normally occupies 25% of the internal development team, that time savings is significant. 

“So much of what you’re doing when building a new integration is just trying to find all the weird things hiding around corners that you don’t know about. Finch is eliminating that work and giving us a level of confidence that we’re going to get an integration that works,” Drew said. “With that time, there’s a whole lot of other things we’re able to do. We’re able to make the product better.”

Streamlined onboarding

Automation saves the Operations team time and resources, but it also goes a long way in providing a better user experience for sponsors—especially when it comes to onboarding. 

Human Interest’s mission is to make it easier for all employees to save for retirement. Traditionally, SMBs have seldom offered retirement plans because they’ve been expensive, complicated, and required lots of administrative work. To combat this, Human Interest strives to make onboarding and plan administration as easy as possible. 

Enabling more self-service onboarding is a big goal for Drew’s team and a major part of their plan to establish fully automated integrations through Finch. “Sponsors shouldn’t have to get on more than five phone calls with their 401(k) recordkeeper and payroll provider just to set up a plan,” Drew said.

With Finch Connect, Human Interest’s customers are able to grant access to their payroll system in minutes. Drew anticipates that in the coming months, Human Interest will leverage Finch to augment their in-house integrations to enable that same kind of seamless onboarding to more payroll providers. 

The way Drew sees it, Finch’s Unified Employment API is another tool in Human Interest’s arsenal. There hasn’t been a drive to replace Finch’s connections with direct, in-house integrations because Finch provides all the functionality they need.

“We’ve built hundreds of integrations ourselves and we’re comfortable doing it when needed; but when we’re deciding where to dedicate developer resources, we ask ourselves how our current solution is working. If we can use a third party that will take work off our plate and still deliver the same end-user experience, why wouldn’t we?” 

“We’ve built hundreds of integrations ourselves...[but] if we can use a third party that will take work off our plate and still deliver the same end-user experience, why wouldn’t we?” 

Up next: Scale, scale, scale

The retirement industry is poised to see massive growth in plans offered by SMBs, largely driven by SECURE Act 2.0 and new state mandates that require employers to offer a retirement plan. For Human Interest, that’s a great opportunity that makes payroll integrations—and their ability to scale—more important than ever. 

Drew noted that one of Finch’s most valuable traits is the scalability of its integrations. “We don’t have to revisit a Finch integration when it grows. We feel very confident in what’s already being provided to us.”

With nearly 6,000 payroll providers serving the SMB market, Drew sees plenty of opportunity to continue growing the number of providers Human Interest can support with Finch.

“With Finch, part of the win is that we feel like we’re actually along for the ride,” Drew said. “There’s an element of collaboration that I’ve loved—so I see that continuing.”

The votes are in

Finch is HackerNoon’s Startup of the Year in San Francisco! We’re honored to be recognized as the top startup in a city brimming with technology trailblazers. 

Startup of the Year is HackerNoon’s global community-driven award that celebrates the world’s most innovative and game-changing tech ventures. This year’s competition included more than 30,000 entities across six continents and 4,200 cities. 

In addition to being designated as the top startup in San Francisco, Finch placed third among all startups in North America. We’re committed to building on this momentum in 2024 as we continue our mission to democratize access to employment data, unlock innovations, and create an integrated user experience for employers and employees.

"Today's macro environment requires companies to do more with less, so it's not surprising that HR professionals are looking to their tech stacks and process improvements to help them accomplish this. The tools that offer the best user experience, functionality, and connectivity will win in a competitive landscape," said Ansel Parikh, COO and Co-Founder of Finch. 

World-class win

While the winners were chosen by voters around the world, the nominees were required to fulfill either or both of the two following criteria:

• Generated between $50,000 to $50 million in annual expected revenue
• Secured $1 million to $100 million in funding

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"Reflecting the technology industry requires a comprehensive company database, and with this campaign, I'm excited to discover and showcase the world's best startups," said David Smooke, HackerNoon Founder and CEO. "We are building an open, reliable, and editable technology startup database that will enable technologists to make informed decisions about which emerging startups to learn about, invest in, partner with, or even work for."

Finch is a unified API for employment data. We are working to provide innovators with mission-critical employment data, including read and write compatibility with 200+ employment systems (HRIS, payroll, directories)—with just one integration. If you are driving innovation with employment data, get started with our self-serve platform today—it’s free!