We're looking back at 2023, which brought some major milestones: 3M+ employees connected, our newest product launch, and improvements to the developer experience.
Employers felt the repercussions of a slew of macro trends and technology changes in 2023: workforce volatility, challenging economic conditions, growing data security threats, and the rise of generative AI.
To adapt, employers turned to technology, seeking fast, user-friendly, and integrated tools to automate manual tasks and enable their teams to focus on high-priority work. More than ever before, they relied on their platforms’ ability to access and share employment data that has historically been locked within systems of record.
Since 2020, Finch has been committed to democratizing access to the otherwise complex, closed, and fragmented employment ecosystem so innovators are empowered to build powerful new solutions. Now, we’re looking back at what we accomplished together in 2023—and sharing our big goals for the year to come.
In 2023, we continued to expand the breadth and depth of Finch’s integration coverage and took our first step into write-back capabilities with the public launch of our newest product, Deductions. We hyper-focused on the developer experience to make connecting to Finch as seamless as possible, so our customers can focus on investing in their core product and bringing more value to employers.
A few major milestones helped us get here—from raising our Series B and expanding our Finch team to growing our network of partners and expanding our data coverage in new ways.
Let’s take a closer look:
Finch started the year strong with a $40 million Series B round led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures, with participation from PruVen Capital, Altman Capital, and QED Investors. A few months later, we received an additional investment from Intuit Ventures, reflecting their trust and interest in Finch’s aim to enable Intuit Quickbooks’ partners and small business customers to connect applications to their payroll data.
This new capital helped us support our customers in building new, innovative use cases across HR, fintech, and benefits verticals.
Our product is only as good as the team that stands behind it—so we invested in that team, growing our headcount by 67% to 80 employees. These reinforcements helped us reach new heights in 2023, like…
Since we started Finch in 2020, we’ve connected more than 3 million employees across nearly 40,000 employers.
Traditionally, for benefits providers, employer onboarding and enrollment has been a long, tedious process requiring a series of manual operations, heavy administrative burden, and coordination across multiple teams. Our recent survey of over 1,000 HR professionals revealed that HR teams invest 3-5 hours per payroll cycle to ensure accurate deductions and contributions for employees.
To automate this process, we launched a new product: Deductions APIs. This offering enables benefits applications to create and update employer contributions and employee deductions in their customers’ payroll systems, enabling use cases like automatic enrollment. We’re proud to be the only unified API offering it today.
Employers took notice: Deductions saw a 9x increase in adoption since its beta release. By leveraging this product, some of the largest retirement and benefits companies in the country offered employers greater compliance capabilities with new legislation like the SECURE Act 2.0, providing peace of mind for employers and an easier enrollment experience for employees.
This was just our first foray into Deductions—looking ahead, we plan to expand our coverage of popular payroll systems to serve more employers, broaden our deduction type support, and support complex edge cases like tiered and catch-up contributions.
In 2023, we forged partnerships with leading employment providers, unlocking read and write capabilities to these employment systems of record.
Partnerships like these were huge stepping stones toward our broader vision of building a more connected experience for employers and accelerating innovation in the employment space.
Our mission is to democratize access to employment data, so it’s important that we make it easy for developers to connect applications to Finch. We introduced several features this year to provide more timely access to data, help developers build to Finch better and faster, and expand our data coverage in new ways.
A successful 2023 paved the way for a brighter 2024—and we’re incredibly excited for what's to come. This year, we'll scale Finch’s product offering to accommodate greater coverage and more complicated setups, dive into payment operations, and expand across more employment systems. Here’s a preview of what we have up our sleeves for this year:
To catalyze this revolution in employment data access, we started with HR and payroll. But we’ll need to go beyond these systems of record and connect with new segments to unite the entire employment stack. We’re looking forward to exploring those next steps—stay tuned.
In 2023, we worked alongside our customers to deliver the infrastructure that connects the employment industry, helping employers own their mission-critical data. This year, we’ll build on our momentum with continued investment in our talent, our resources, and our products to create an employment ecosystem where data and payment flow is safe, fast, and convenient.
We’re always looking to help innovators address crucial problems across the ecosystem and get to market faster. Get in touch with us or sign up for free.
Like any regulated industry, the retirement field is thick with jargon and complicated nuance. Even pros that have been in the business for a long time have to keep up with ever-changing legislation and technology terms to stay ahead of the curve.
We've meticulously created this retirement glossary to be your go-to resource for mastering fundamental terms related to savings plans, compliance regulations, 401(k) payroll integrations, and beyond. Whether you need a quick refresher on common retirement terms or you're diving into the retirement industry for the first time, this guide will provide you with the knowledge you need to make informed decisions and strategic adjustments.
Let’s get started.
Plan sponsors are entities, generally employers, that offer retirement plans to their employees.
Employees contributing to and receiving benefits from retirement plans are plan participants. Beneficiaries or dependents who are nominated by the employee to receive benefits are also considered plan participants.
Plan administrators are the parties responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations of 401(k) plans for participants and beneficiaries. While the employer could be the administrator, the work is often outsourced to a third party. Responsibilities of plan administrators include:
Third-party administrators, or TPAs, are companies that provide qualified retirement plan administration services to employers. They typically oversee transactions, handle the documentation requirements and legal compliance of running a retirement plan, and offer guidance on the plan design. TPA responsibilities include:
401(k) recordkeepers manage retirement plan records, including participant details, payroll data transfers (like employee deductions and employer matches), and notice distribution. They act as bookkeepers tracking funds, contributions, loan payments, tax deferrals, and rollovers. The recordkeeper is the employee-facing element of retirement plans, providing the website for participants to access their accounts. Recordkeeping services are offered either as standalone services or bundled with TPA services.
The custodian for a 401(k) plan acts like a bank. They handle fund transfers, payments, and asset safekeeping in a 401(k) plan. They don't provide investment advice. While the plan administrator or a TPA monitors these transactions to keep compliant, the custodian is the entity that actually holds assets and invests the funds in a plan.
In 401(k) plans, key employees are crucial business figures with significant ownership or decision-making roles. According to the IRS, key employees must fulfill at least one of the following criteria:
Retirement plan participants are divided into two buckets: highly and non-highly compensated employees. The IRS defines a highly compensated employee as any individual who either:
Businesses must identify HCEs for 401(k) plans to pass IRS-mandated non-discrimination tests and keep their deferrals within permissible limits.
What is a Highly Compensated Employee (HCE)?
A non-highly compensated employee or NHCE is any employee that doesn't meet the highly compensated employee (HCE) criteria required by non-discrimination testing.
When plan participants withdraw funds from their retirement accounts, it's termed distribution. Most distributions are taxable by the IRS based on the participant's tax bracket. There are different types of distributions based on the type of retirement plan and the timing of the distribution. For example:
Many rules govern retirement plan distributions, with financial penalties for noncompliance. For instance, withdrawing funds from a tax-advantaged retirement plan before reaching eligibility age often triggers penalties, except in select circumstances.
A rollover occurs when plan participants transfer all or part of their 401(k) balance from a previous employer's plan to a new retirement plan or IRA within 60 days. Rollovers are typically tax-free unless the rollover is to a Roth plan. Typically, recordkeepers are responsible for overseeing rollovers in a retirement plan, making it simpler for employees to manage and track their retirement investments while offering greater control over assets.
While participants own their contributions immediately, employer contributions to qualified retirement plans often follow a vesting schedule defined in the plan document. This schedule determines when participants gain full non-forfeitable ownership rights to the plan assets.
Employers implement vesting schedules to encourage employees to stay with the company longer. Typically, these schedules span three to five years, ensuring that all employees are fully vested by the time they reach normal retirement age or before the plan ends.
Form 5500 is an annual document prepared by plan sponsors. It discloses sponsor details and organization data like participants’ legal names and employer identification numbers (EIN), and plan details like plan characteristics, assets, fees, and eligible employees to the IRS and Department of Labor. Sponsors usually hire TPAs for this job. Meeting this filing requirement is crucial to staying transparent and compliant with regulations.
The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), established in 1974, is a federal law that requires plan administrators to provide participants with information about the plan, comply with fiduciary responsibilities, offer legal protections, and more. The law mandates that plan providers uphold specific standards, such as:
Under ERISA, entities that are involved in retirement plan management—including plan sponsors, administrators, and investment advisors—must fulfill several fiduciary responsibilities:
Notably, fiduciary responsibilities only include the standards to be followed for carrying out the plan functions, not the results. For example, fiduciaries are not responsible for the degree of success of a plan investment as long as they ensure a well-diversified investment portfolio and follow a prudent process for documenting and communicating plan activities.
According to ERISA, a plan fiduciary is any entity that has discretionary authority and control over the management and administration of retirement plans and investments. Based on their roles, fiduciaries can fall into three categories:
Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act, enacted in December 2019, aims to address Americans’ lack of retirement savings by making retirement savings plans accessible to more employees.
Updated in December 2022, SECURE 2.0 introduced several new rules to encourage wider plan adoption and enhance retirement security. Some of the mandates with the biggest impacts on 401(k) plan administrators are:
SECURE 2.0 Overview for Plan Providers
Section 603 Implementation Plan
401(k) Recordkeeper’s Guide to SECURE Act 2.0 Start-up Tax Credits
Non-discrimination testing, required by the IRS, assesses whether all employees have equal access to a retirement plan. It requires that key employees and highly compensated employees (HCEs) stay within a specific contribution rate, which is determined by the contribution rate of non-highly compensated employees (NHCEs). Non-discrimination testing involves several assessments:
Non-discrimination Testing: 401(k) Compliance
Employer-sponsored retirement plans operate by automatically deducting a portion of an employee's earnings from each paycheck and placing it into a retirement fund. Employers can also pitch in, either matching a fraction of the employee's contributions or making a fixed contribution. There are different variations of employer-sponsored retirement plans like 401(k)s, defined benefit plans, simplified employee pension (SEP), etc. These often come at minimal or no cost to employees and provide significant tax benefits to employers.
A defined benefit plan, more commonly known as a pension, is an employer-sponsored retirement plan that guarantees a specified monthly payout for employees at retirement. This can be a fixed dollar amount or calculated based on factors like salary and years of service. Most defined benefit plans are protected by federal insurance from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC).
Defined contribution plans are voluntary employer-sponsored retirement plans that allow tax-deferred contributions from employees and employers. Each pay period, a fixed percentage of the employee's pay goes into their retirement account, with these funds being invested on their behalf.
However, unlike defined benefit plans, defined contribution plans do not promise a specific benefit, and the plan's value can fluctuate based on investment performance. Examples of defined contribution plans include 401(k), 403(b), employee stock ownership plans, and profit-sharing plans.
Among all the employer-sponsored defined contribution plans, 401(k) is the most popular. 401(k) plans enable employees to save for retirement through payroll deductions. Employees can choose to defer a portion of their salary (up to a set limit) into the plan before taxes, which is then invested on their behalf. Employers may also match employee contributions, making it a valuable retirement savings tool.
While 401(k) plans are available to employees of for-profit, private organizations, 403(b) plans, also dubbed tax-sheltered annuity plans, are a defined contribution option for eligible employees in public schools, churches, and tax-exempt organizations under Code Section 501(c)(3). Like 401(k) plans, 403(b) plans allow employees to defer money from their paychecks, with the added perk of potential employer matching contributions.
The SIMPLE IRA Plan (Savings Incentive Match Plan for Employees) is a tax-deferred retirement plan tailored for small businesses with fewer than 100 employees. Similar to 401(k) plans, employers have the option to match employee contributions that go into individual retirement accounts (IRAs) or annuities. However, SIMPLE IRA plans typically have lower contribution limits compared to larger employer-sponsored plans like 401(k).
Simplified employee pension (SEP) plans offer employers of any size, including self-employed individuals, the opportunity to contribute to traditional IRAs set up for their employees. With lower start-up and operational costs than other workforce retirement plans, SEPs allow employers to contribute up to 25% of each employee's pay, up to a limit of $66,000 in 2023. Contributions are tax-deductible, and investments grow tax-deferred until retirement. Notably, SEPs only permit employer contributions.
A multiple employer plan (MEP) is a retirement savings arrangement where multiple employers participate in a single plan, typically sponsored by a professional employer organization (PEO) or an association. By sharing a common affiliation, such as membership in an association or engagement with a PEO, participating companies collectively enjoy several benefits, such as:
However, customization options are limited compared to single employer plans.
Introduced by SECURE Act 2.0, pooled employer plans (PEPs) are a variation of multiple employer plans (MEPs). In a PEP, participating employers delegate all administrative responsibilities to a designated pooled plan provider (PPP, or P3) acting as a 3(16) fiduciary. Unlike traditional MEPs, PEPs don't require participating employers to share a common affiliation.
Key Points:
A safe harbor 401(k) plan is a tax-advantaged retirement option that requires the employer to make tax-deductible contributions on their employees’ behalf, either through a match of the employee’s contributions or through a non-elective contribution. The funds must also be fully vested at the time of contribution. These plans help employers automatically pass the IRS-mandated non-discrimination tests and allow employees to contribute the maximum permissible amount to their 401(k) accounts.
The Roth 401(k) is an employer-sponsored retirement plan allowing contributions to be made after taxes. Contribution limits mirror those of traditional 401(k) plans, while qualified participants enjoy tax-free withdrawals upon retirement.
Catch-up contributions, established by the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA), enable individuals aged 50 or older to exceed the usual contribution limit as they approach retirement. In 2023, eligible employees could contribute an extra $7,500 annually to qualified retirement plans like a 401(k) or 403(b).
SECURE Act 2.0 introduced new rules for catch-up contributions:
How to Prepare for Section 603 of Secure Act 2.0: An Implementation Plan
Automated payroll processing uses technology to streamline payroll calculations, management, and payment distributions. This modern approach to payroll offers numerous advantages:
Inefficient data handling practices can lead to errors in eligibility checks, documentation, or contribution management—resulting in compliance issues and penalties. Error handling or plan error correction involves identifying and rectifying all the inconsistencies in employer-sponsored retirement plans. For information on common 401(k) mistakes, solutions, and prevention, check out the IRS's 401(k) Plan Fix-It Guide.
Automatic enrollment is a mandate stipulated under Section 101 of SECURE Act 2.0 that requires employers to enroll eligible employees in qualified retirement plans by a specified date unless they opt out.
Section 101 is effective beginning January 1, 2025, which means that 401(k) and 403(b) providers must soon put in place and test the technology they will need to automatically enroll and increase the contributions of millions of participants. Failure to do so correctly and on time could result in noncompliance, stiff fines, and legal fees associated with disputing any penalties in court.
What Retirement Plan Providers Need to Know about Secure Act 2.0 Section 101
Eligible automatic contribution arrangement (EACA) is a method for automatically enrolling employees in 401(k) plans. Unlike basic automatic enrollment, EACAs:
401(k) payroll integrations allow recordkeepers or plan administrators to access the data held within the sponsor’s payroll system and facilitate seamless data exchange between systems. Integrating payroll systems with 401(k) plans streamlines plan management by:
Guide to 401(k) Payroll Integrations
Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) is a method that uses shell encryption to securely send and receive sensitive information, like employment data, between businesses using a shared server. SFTP involves preparing data in a flat file format (like CSV or JSON), encrypting it, and then transmitting the files through a secure connection between two platforms. While SFTP is the most commonly used data-sharing method in the retirement industry, it requires a long, expensive setup process, cannot facilitate real-time data exchange, and is prone to errors caused by human intervention.
APIs, short for Application Programming Interfaces, act as bridges that enable communication between two different applications. They create a standardized pathway for two softwares—such as a payroll system and a recordkeeping platform—to exchange data and information, regardless of the programming languages they're built on. API integrations offer the same security as SFTP as well as near-real-time data access, but eliminate the need for time-consuming manual processes.
SFTP vs API: Which Integration Method is Best for Employment Data?
Payroll APIs are simply APIs that are specific to payroll systems. They offer:
Unified APIs are a technology layer that provides access to many different applications and systems through a single API integration. Unified API providers sell pre-built connections to a multitude of applications within a category of software, meaning that users need only build one integration to the unified API provider to access the data within all of the systems the unified API has connections to. Unified APIs are standardized, meaning that all the data that flows through the API arrives in the same format, regardless of its origin. They’re an alternative to building dozens or hundreds of integrations in-house, which require high upfront capital investment, lengthy building periods, and long-term maintenance.
Build vs Buy: Leveraging Employment Data Via HRIS and Payroll Integrations
The employment ecosystem is the collection of B2B software providers that employers use to manage their workforce. The ecosystem is vast, but any system that touches employment data is part of the employment ecosystem. These companies fall into 2 main categories:
A unified employment API is a vertical-specific unified API focused on the employment ecosystem. Unlike generalized unified APIs, unified employment APIs offer targeted market coverage, deeply granular data sets, and both read and write functionality to developers that require expertise in the employment ecosystem—along with the typical features of a generalized unified API.
These APIs are best suited for B2B products where the end users have administrative access to employment systems, such as HR admins, people operations professionals, benefits managers, or even finance team members. These users can then authorize a secure connection to key sources of employment data housed in their HRIS or payroll system. Developers can then leverage that data to create deeply integrated and personalized solutions for their customers.
The Emergence of Unified Employment API
API authentication is vital in retirement technology to confirm users' identities when accessing sensitive employment data. Authentication is the process of verifying the identity of a user making an API request. It involves presenting credentials such as a username and password, API key, or digital token, which are then accepted or rejected.
Various authentication protocols, such as API keys, JSON Web Token (JWT), OAuth 2.0, user credentials, token-based authentication, and two-factor authentication protect sensitive data by reducing potential risks like data breaches, corruption, deletion, and denial of service (DoS) attacks.
However, authentication alone isn't sufficient for total security. It needs to be paired with authorization, which determines the level of access users should have based on their credentials.
Data mapping is the process of reconciling data from different API endpoints to seamlessly sync data between systems. Even if two fields contain the same information, they might be named or structured differently. The process involves literally “mapping” two distinct data fields that hold the same information to one another, so the data can be automatically synced.
For example, when handling "employee address" in two different HRIS, what's referred to as 'location' in one system might be called 'residence' in another, causing confusion and making it harder to use the data. Data mapping involves training the API integration to recognize that the data held under ‘location’ in one system should sync with the data field called ‘residence’ in the other.
Data mapping can be tedious, especially when dealing with multiple APIs from different providers. This is where a unified API can help—it lets vendors map data from different providers to one common model. Users can then request data from various providers without fretting over their differences.
Data inconsistency among payroll systems can occur due to different data storage protocols followed by different providers. Data standardization normalizes data formats across endpoints to prevent loss of data due to mapping errors. Recordkeepers often opt for unified APIs for standardizing data obtained from multiple HRIS and payroll systems.
Data synchronization is the process of automatically updating data changes between two or more systems to maintain consistency. Frequent and timely data synchronization is vital for effective collaboration and compliance. Most automated API integrations sync data every 24 hours but will allow users to sync the data on demand.
Encryption is the practice of disguising sensitive data in transit so it cannot be intercepted or accessed by unauthorized entities. In the retirement industry, end-to-end encryption protocols like AES 256-bit or TLS 1.2 are essential to safeguard sensitive employment data such as personal identifiable information (PII) and bank details and ensure compliance with data protection regulations.
Visit the Finch Blog to learn more about the best practices and trends shaping the retirement industry and discover what the experts are saying.
Runae Lee is the Head of Partnerships at Finch. He’s spent years working in the human resources industry, where he’s seen first-hand the evolution of employment technology. At Finch, Runae leads our efforts to partner with leading HRIS and payroll providers as we work to create a more standardized and connected employment ecosystem.
Want to collaborate with us? Get in touch with our team and join industry leaders like Gusto, UKG, BambooHR, HiBob, and more.
I didn’t have “watch a live performance by Flo Rida with a cameo from Flavor Flav” on my 2024 bingo card, but that’s the thing about Transform—the HR conference of the moment is full of surprises.
Some Finch colleagues and I attended the Las Vegas event last week, where we got to talk shop, meet hundreds of like-minded HR tech professionals, and celebrate Finch being named a finalist in the Transform Awards’ Innovators category: “Transformative Tech of the Year.”
Most importantly, we came back energized and with fresh insights into the state of employment technology. Here are my key takeaways from Transform 2024.
Artificial intelligence, like many emerging technologies (crypto, Web3, 3D TVs, AR/VR, etc.), was a bit oversold last year, when seemingly all vendors added "AI-powered [fill in the blank]" to their marketing materials. That was scaled back a touch this year, as most tech companies refocused their attention on their core products, but there is no doubt in anyone's mind that AI is coming.
I had more than one friendly debate with other attendees in which I sided with the skeptics, but we all agreed that it’s critical we prepare our workforce for the fundamental changes AI will bring in the coming years. That means it’d be prudent to invest in the employees who are most likely to see their jobs disrupted by training them on new skills or upleveling their current strengths.
Bottom line, AI is having its “moment” with technologies like ChatGPT and DALL-E already in the hands of consumers; but the reality is, it's been around for years. It's already being used, but in ways that are behind the scenes and mundane. However, investment in AI is accelerating and undoubtedly creating the next wave of disruptive tech that will change the way we work and play. Let's start preparing for that future.
A slew of employment technologies across various verticals, from people analytics to ATS, have recently launched their own HRIS: Chartop, Workable, and Lattice to name a few. Seemingly a trend, it begs the question—why?
I have a few theories.
First of all, HRIS is easier to build than a full-fledged payroll system. But alongside payroll, HRIS has true platform power. Point solutions need to be in sync with systems of record like BambooHR or HiBob, since they also house important employee data. So it would make sense that these point solutions want to bring HRIS in-house to deliver a more seamless, unified experience to customers.
In speaking with these companies, a recurring theme became abundantly clear: customers who are fanatical about your products and services want you to solve more of their problems. Tech companies are very sensitive to customer pain, and will build adjacent products where there is strong demand and where they feel confident that they can deliver something unique and truly special.
This one wasn’t much of a surprise, but it’s worth mentioning just how much this concept permeated the entire conference. Long gone are the days where integrations were a value-add. Employers want modern solutions, and every vendor touts their "seamless" and "automated" workflows to attract new buyers. This means that today’s leaders need to adapt their integration and API strategies to fend off new-age, tech-forward upstarts that feature integrations out of the box for customers.
For many of the new solutions on the block, the SMB segment is still paramount; but all big companies started out small, and as the winning SMBs grow, even the tech-forward platforms will likely need to look to outside solutions like Finch to continue scaling their integrations and expanding upon the integrated experiences they offer to their customers.
This probably won’t come as a surprise to any seasoned venture capital folks, but it was definitely a strong learning for me. I attended several VC panels during Transform, and at least one of the speakers noted something that stuck with me: Products change over time; founders do not.
Their point was that when investors are evaluating a company, what they’re also asking themselves is if they believe in the people that are building the product. You can’t exactly fire a founder. Meeting in person is crucial, because it helps both parties gauge each others’ personalities and the other intangibles that don’t stand out on a Zoom call or in a slidedeck.
This doesn’t only apply to VC. Meeting remotely is fine, but there’s something electric about meeting prospects, customers, or partners in person that we need more of. We all want in-person events to come back because there’s no better way to build rapport and trust.
A conference is a conference is a conference—until it’s not. Transform really took the monotonous and breathed some life into it. I was so invigorated by the passionate group of People leaders and early stage founders in attendance, from CHROs and their teams to CEOs pounding the pavement for their companies with fire in their bellies (and probably too much caffeine).
To put it simply, Transform just had good vibes. Who could argue with a welcome reception complete with hors d'oeuvres served under a massive tent and a live drum line?
While we eagerly await Transform 2025, our team is busy preparing our conference schedule for the next few months. If you’re attending the NAPA 401(k) Summit or SHRM Annual Conference, swing by our booth to say hi and learn about Finch’s Unified Employment API. Or try it yourself for free.
We’re delighted to announce our new partnership with Oyster, a leading global employment solution. This partnership takes us one step closer to our vision of democratizing access to employment data by supporting innovators who are creating an integrated experience for employers.
Finch is on a mission to empower innovators to build the next generation of employment technology. Through our Unified Employment API, Finch unlocks instant access to employment data from hundreds of HRIS and payroll systems with a single integration—making it easier for developers to build useful tools for employers.
Partnering with like-minded platforms is vital for Finch's success, which is why we’re thrilled to team up with Oyster, a leading global employment solution for compliantly hiring, paying, and providing benefits to employees around the globe.
“We’re beyond thrilled to partner with Oyster. We share a vision of empowering employers who onboard and support people around the world with the latest technology. Our partnership will help us deliver amazing integrated experiences for employers and accelerate innovation across the employment ecosystem." — Runae Lee, Head of Partnerships at Finch
Recognized as a Leader among global employment platforms by G2, Oyster is trusted by thousands of businesses. These businesses rely on Oyster to simplify and automate hiring, onboarding, payroll, and employee rewards processes as well as to develop sustainable global talent strategies. As a popular Global Employment Platform (GEP), Oyster is designed to meet compliance standards in 180+ countries, which makes it a lucrative choice for global enterprises.
Employers love Oyster because it provides access to deep local intelligence that can be used to build a competitive global employment strategy and a single platform to hire, onboard, pay, and care for talent without the need to open a legal entity in multiple countries. This saves time and costs, reduces administrative burdens, and simplifies compliance requirements associated with global hiring, payroll, benefits, and more.
Oyster integrates with several HR tools including popular HRIS and ATS tools to help employers build custom workflows and improve team productivity.
Oyster is committed to assisting innovators in creating solutions for a connected future of work, aligning well with Finch's mission to unify the fragmented employment ecosystem. This partnership highlights our shared goal and dedication to advancing employment technology.
The rapid growth of the HR tech landscape over the past decade has caused employment data to be dispersed and siloed across thousands of payroll and HR systems—causing inefficiencies and blocking innovation across the employment ecosystem. To create a seamless user experience, HR systems must be able to interact with one another and share information easily.
However, building integrations and forming 1:1 partnerships is an uphill battle that requires a considerable investment of time, money, and talent, both upfront and on an ongoing basis.
By fostering a close relationship with Oyster, Finch continues its mission to democratize access to the employment ecosystem. Together, we aim to lessen the integration woes for developers and employers in several ways:
1. Enable developers to unlock employment data in minutes: For years, data silos have been a burden on tech applications in the employment space, requiring an outsized investment in building 1:1 integrations and siphoning resources from product-enhancing initiatives.
With this new partnership, approved developers can use Finch’s unified API to seamlessly read data from Oyster, enabling innovative use cases and solutions. Businesses can now focus 100% of their efforts on building tools that help employers create a productive, engaged workforce. At the same time, by partnering with Finch, Oyster can expand its network of developers and accelerate innovation for SMBs.
“Delivering an integrated experience to our customers is the driving force behind all of our partnership efforts at Oyster. Working with Finch is a great opportunity for us to simplify integration-based partnerships and encourage more developers to connect with Oyster, ultimately providing a better user experience for our shared customers. We’re excited to support innovation and tackle unique use cases across the employment tech space with Finch.” — Mark Frein, Chief Operating Officer at Oyster
2. Create an integrated employer experience: Employers are turning away from data silos and manual data entry practices and looking to invest in integrated experiences in the workplace. This partnership presents a great opportunity for developers to use Finch’s API to create a connected experience or embed Oyster’s global hiring functionality into their platform.
With Finch Connect, employers can now connect their Oyster accounts and start syncing data with other third-party applications in their tech stack in a fraction of the time—eliminating hundreds of hours each pay period required to manually assist HR workflows.
Developers who build B2B applications with Finch can now enable users to connect their Oyster accounts through a simple workflow that is baked into their application. Using Finch Connect, employers can safely grant permission to access data housed in Oyster to the third-party applications they use.
Finch Connect can be displayed at any point in an application’s customer flow and handles credential validation, multi-factor authentication, and error handling for each system Finch supports—including Oyster. With Finch Connect, employer onboarding time is significantly reduced compared to antiquated integration methods—making it simpler for Oyster users to onboard with any third-party platform they need.
Once the employer has completed the process with Finch Connect, our Unified Employment API starts syncing data between the two platforms, enabling various use cases. By establishing data flow from Oyster to third-party applications, this integration can enable use cases like these:
Learn more about Oyster’s API by visiting their integrations page. Or, if you’re building your Oyster integration via Finch, check our developer docs.
As the #1 Unified Employment API, Finch allows users to access organization, payroll, and deduction data across multiple payroll and HRIS systems, including Oyster, through a single integration. Talk to our sales team to learn how we can help.
If you’re an HRIS or payroll provider, increase compatibility with third-party applications by partnering with Finch. Contact us for partnership information.
The retirement industry is on the precipice of explosive growth. Alarmed by Americans’ lack of retirement savings, the US government has enacted new legislation to incentivize small businesses to offer 401(k) plans and to increase employee participation. Key to those incentives are the SECURE Act 2.0 tax credits.
SECURE Act 2.0 established three tax credits for small businesses that offer retirement savings plans to their employees—two of which are specific to plans established after 2022—including a credit that covers the startup costs of establishing a plan for the first time.
This presents a golden opportunity for 401(k) administrators: there has never been a better time for small businesses to offer a retirement plan. Recordkeepers are in a position to capitalize on this push, leveraging the urgency SECURE Act 2.0 tax credits are driving among small employers to earn new business and increase revenue from existing customers.
In this article, we’ll cover the new requirements and tax credits of the SECURE Act 2.0, how they’re driving more small businesses to offer retirement plans, and what 401(k) recordkeepers and TPAs need to do to stand out and win these sponsors’ business.
The Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2022—better known as SECURE Act 2.0—aims to boost individual retirement savings and encourage employers to offer attractive retirement plans by reducing startup expenses. The three tax credits offered under the new provisions are:
Employers that take advantage of all three tax credits could be eligible for up to $55,500 in tax credits in the first year alone—an enormous potential cost savings.
The employer contribution and startup cost credits only apply to plans established after 2022; the automatic enrollment credit is also applicable to older plans. All three credits are only available to businesses with fewer than 100 employees.
Sponsors offering new 401(k), SEP, and SIMPLE plans are eligible to receive tax breaks for employer contributions, up to a maximum of $1,000 per employee per year. Businesses with fewer than 50 employees can claim up to 100% of their contributions; larger businesses’ claims are reduced by 2% for every employee over 50. These credits can be claimed for up to five years; the percentage decreases each year by 25%, beginning in year three.
Sponsors can also claim the startup and maintenance costs of new plans for up to three years. These credits cover 100% of plan costs for employers with fewer than 50 employees and 50% for employers with 51–100 employees. Sponsors can claim $250 for each eligible Non-Highly Compensated Employee (NHCE), up to a maximum of $5,000.
This is the only credit that applies to retirement plans in place before 2023. Sponsors that incorporate automatic enrollment into their plans under the Eligible Automatic Contribution Arrangement (EACA) before the mandated deadline of January 1, 2025 can earn a $500 annual credit for up to three years.
Also read: Secure Act 2.0 Implementation Plan
401(k) recordkeepers have an opportunity to take advantage of the urgency SECURE Act 2.0 is driving among small employers, both through compliance mandates and tax incentives.
Traditionally, small businesses have been less likely to offer retirement plans for a variety of reasons. In addition to the startup costs, small teams may be particularly concerned about the administrative burden of a retirement plan and intimidated by the stringent regulations that govern them.
That means that while 401(k) recordkeepers can expect an influx of new sponsors seeking their services, they’ll need to be prepared to accommodate these sponsors’ unique needs to stand out among the competition and win new business and establish positive, long-term relationships with customers.
This all boils down to three key strategies:
As a first-time sponsor, many employers are wary about the hassle of plan administration and the degree of resource involvement. To deliver a high-quality customer experience, recordkeepers need to ensure fast sponsor onboarding, ease of using the plan administrator’s service, and reduced administrative work for the plan sponsor.
Traditional methods of pulling employee data and setting up data-sharing processes are highly time and resource-intensive tasks—leading to lengthy onboarding processes for sponsors. Employers need to spend hours on HR administrative work each pay period to keep the 401(k) running smoothly, which can negatively impact customer satisfaction.
Recordkeepers that want to take advantage of the new business spurred by the SECURE Act 2.0 tax credits will need to offer an alternative that minimizes the sponsor’s responsibility. Payroll integrations offer a solution—when the recordkeeper can pull data directly from the sponsor’s payroll and send changes in contributions and deductions back, much of the manual work is eliminated, which reduces the burden on both the sponsor and the recordkeeper.
These 401(k) payroll integrations, powered by APIs, are game changers—but they’re also expensive and time-consuming to build and require ongoing maintenance. Rather than trying to build integrations to multiple payroll systems in-house, recordkeepers can leverage unified APIs to gain access to a multitude of payroll providers in the time it takes to build just one integration.
SECURE Act 2.0 set forth new requirements, including the auto-enrollment of employees and new eligibility criteria for part-time employees and catch-up contributions. Recordkeepers must be prepared to quickly and accurately check employee eligibility and enroll them in their sponsors’ plans to maintain compliance.
All new retirement plans established after 2022 are required to have automatic enrollment enabled by 2025, meaning employees have to opt out of participation, rather than opting in. 401(k) recordkeepers that make it easier for employers to conduct eligibility checks and simplify the process of automatically enrolling employees in specific plans will win against the competition.
Also read: SECURE Act 2.0 Timeline for Retirement Plan Providers.
However, there are two issues that can make auto-enrollment problematic for plan administrators:
Both of these problems can be solved by removing the element of manual data entry. Payroll and HRIS integrations give retirement plan providers real-time access to employee census and payroll data, allowing them to perform eligibility checks and automate plan enrollment based on information from the employer’s source of truth. When the payroll integration offers both read and write capabilities, the recordkeeper can also automatically update changes to employee deductions and employer contributions directly within the sponsor’s payroll systems—no manual intervention required.
Retirement is a heavily regulated industry due to the sensitive nature of employment data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), bank details, and so on. Many small businesses starting 401(k) plans for the first time are concerned about ensuring compliance and safeguarding data.
Although plan sponsors tend to delegate data cybersecurity duties to recordkeepers, they have a fiduciary duty to ensure that their recordkeepers follow maximum security practices. As a result, to win customer confidence, all 401(k) plan administrators need to ensure total transparency and comply with industry standards like SOC2 and HIPAA when dealing with employment data.
Once again, integrations can play a pivotal role here: because integrations eliminate the need for manual data-sharing through CSV uploads or SFTP, they incur less risk that sensitive data could be exposed. Unified API providers typically come with industry-standard security for data in transit and data at rest, offering peace of mind for both the recordkeepers that use them and the employers whose data travels through them.
SECURE Act 2.0 tax credits stand to drive many more small businesses to offer retirement plans for the first time. As a 401(k) recordkeeper, you have an opportunity to capitalize on this movement and win new business; but doing so will require a user experience that reduces the burden on sponsors and ensures compliance.
Finch’s Unified Employment API can help by unlocking integrations to 200+ HR and payroll providers, covering 88% of US employers. That affords your team to focus your efforts and resources on providing innovative solutions for your sponsors.
Talk to our sales team today to explore the ways you can use Finch to help small businesses start a 401(k) plan and take advantage of the tax credits afforded by SECURE Act 2.0.
Employers must meet the following criteria for employer contribution and plan startup tax credits:
All new and existing 401(k) plans that add the automatic enrollment feature under EACA before the January 2025 deadline are eligible for a $500 automatic enrollment credit for up to three years.
Yes, all eligible employers, including those in a multiple employer plan (MEP) or pooled employer plan (PEP), can avail the small business tax credits under SECURE 2.0.
The following plans are eligible for small business tax credit under SECURE 2.0:
Qualified startup costs refer to the essential expenses a small business incurs for:
The credit doesn't cover costs paid through plan assets or investment expenses.
The most effective method for 401(k) plan sponsors and recordkeepers to automatically enroll participants into retirement plans is through integrations with the sponsor’s HRIS and payroll systems. Finch’s Unified Employment API offers access to over 200 HRIS and payroll providers, allowing automatic eligibility checking and enrollment based on employment data directly from the employer's source of truth. Contact us to learn more.
Employers felt the repercussions of a slew of macro trends and technology changes in 2023: workforce volatility, challenging economic conditions, growing data security threats, and the rise of generative AI.
To adapt, employers turned to technology, seeking fast, user-friendly, and integrated tools to automate manual tasks and enable their teams to focus on high-priority work. More than ever before, they relied on their platforms’ ability to access and share employment data that has historically been locked within systems of record.
Since 2020, Finch has been committed to democratizing access to the otherwise complex, closed, and fragmented employment ecosystem so innovators are empowered to build powerful new solutions. Now, we’re looking back at what we accomplished together in 2023—and sharing our big goals for the year to come.
In 2023, we continued to expand the breadth and depth of Finch’s integration coverage and took our first step into write-back capabilities with the public launch of our newest product, Deductions. We hyper-focused on the developer experience to make connecting to Finch as seamless as possible, so our customers can focus on investing in their core product and bringing more value to employers.
A few major milestones helped us get here—from raising our Series B and expanding our Finch team to growing our network of partners and expanding our data coverage in new ways.
Let’s take a closer look:
Finch started the year strong with a $40 million Series B round led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures, with participation from PruVen Capital, Altman Capital, and QED Investors. A few months later, we received an additional investment from Intuit Ventures, reflecting their trust and interest in Finch’s aim to enable Intuit Quickbooks’ partners and small business customers to connect applications to their payroll data.
This new capital helped us support our customers in building new, innovative use cases across HR, fintech, and benefits verticals.
Our product is only as good as the team that stands behind it—so we invested in that team, growing our headcount by 67% to 80 employees. These reinforcements helped us reach new heights in 2023, like…
Since we started Finch in 2020, we’ve connected more than 3 million employees across nearly 40,000 employers.
Traditionally, for benefits providers, employer onboarding and enrollment has been a long, tedious process requiring a series of manual operations, heavy administrative burden, and coordination across multiple teams. Our recent survey of over 1,000 HR professionals revealed that HR teams invest 3-5 hours per payroll cycle to ensure accurate deductions and contributions for employees.
To automate this process, we launched a new product: Deductions APIs. This offering enables benefits applications to create and update employer contributions and employee deductions in their customers’ payroll systems, enabling use cases like automatic enrollment. We’re proud to be the only unified API offering it today.
Employers took notice: Deductions saw a 9x increase in adoption since its beta release. By leveraging this product, some of the largest retirement and benefits companies in the country offered employers greater compliance capabilities with new legislation like the SECURE Act 2.0, providing peace of mind for employers and an easier enrollment experience for employees.
This was just our first foray into Deductions—looking ahead, we plan to expand our coverage of popular payroll systems to serve more employers, broaden our deduction type support, and support complex edge cases like tiered and catch-up contributions.
In 2023, we forged partnerships with leading employment providers, unlocking read and write capabilities to these employment systems of record.
Partnerships like these were huge stepping stones toward our broader vision of building a more connected experience for employers and accelerating innovation in the employment space.
Our mission is to democratize access to employment data, so it’s important that we make it easy for developers to connect applications to Finch. We introduced several features this year to provide more timely access to data, help developers build to Finch better and faster, and expand our data coverage in new ways.
A successful 2023 paved the way for a brighter 2024—and we’re incredibly excited for what's to come. This year, we'll scale Finch’s product offering to accommodate greater coverage and more complicated setups, dive into payment operations, and expand across more employment systems. Here’s a preview of what we have up our sleeves for this year:
To catalyze this revolution in employment data access, we started with HR and payroll. But we’ll need to go beyond these systems of record and connect with new segments to unite the entire employment stack. We’re looking forward to exploring those next steps—stay tuned.
In 2023, we worked alongside our customers to deliver the infrastructure that connects the employment industry, helping employers own their mission-critical data. This year, we’ll build on our momentum with continued investment in our talent, our resources, and our products to create an employment ecosystem where data and payment flow is safe, fast, and convenient.
We’re always looking to help innovators address crucial problems across the ecosystem and get to market faster. Get in touch with us or sign up for free.
A lack of integrations between your product and other software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools can be a dealbreaker for potential customers. In Gartner's 2023 report, B2B buyers ranked integration with their existing tech stack as the third most crucial factor in provider selection. To stay competitive, companies are increasingly turning to integration partnerships.
Simple integrations aren’t enough. Today’s customers demand seamless data exchange, but they also expect customizability and that the features of each tool will work in harmony to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Integration partnerships lay the foundation for creating this kind of user experience.
In this article, we'll discuss everything you need to know about building successful integration partnerships—from how to choose the right partner and best practices to common challenges and how to overcome them. We'll also answer some frequently asked questions.
Let's dive in.
Partnerships don’t always involve integrations, and vice versa. Software providers can form partnerships with one another for a variety of reasons—to cross-promote their solutions or share resources, like splitting the cost of a co-branded industry report. Similarly, two companies can integrate their applications through an open API under developer terms and conditions governing use.
An integration partnership is the combination of a formal business relationship and a software integration between systems. These partnerships can support stronger, more strategic integrations and formalize a working agreement between both companies that empowers both to grow.
Companies that offer distinct but complementary services and share the same ideal customer profile (ICP) will partner to blend services, technologies, and resources that make both products stronger and enhance the customer experience. This offers a distinct advantage over competitors whose products don’t work with the other tools in their customers’ tech stacks.
Often, integration partnerships also involve cross-promotion efforts—they may list each other on their product marketplaces, share leads, or establish referral programs to mutually grow one another’s business.
A good integration partnership opens new revenue opportunities and fosters business growth for both parties in several ways:
The ultimate goal of integrations and partnerships between SaaS applications boils down to driving more revenue, which is achieved through better products and an elevated customer experience. Integration partnerships can add to your bottom line in several ways:
Integrations help applications improve their product offering and automate workflows. This increases the utility of your app—making it integral to your customer’s tech stack and difficult to replace.
For instance, tax credit platform MainStreet uses Finch to integrate with their customers’ payroll and HR systems, which allows MainStreet to programmatically pull the data they need from each customer in moments. This means the end user no longer has to get on a support call with MainStreet to integrate their payroll system, dramatically improving the user experience.
When two companies establish an integration partnership, they may be able to offer more useful integrations by collaborating on use cases and common customer requests.
Establishing strong partnerships with industry leaders can bolster your company’s reputation, potentially paving the way for future partnerships. These partnerships can include referral agreements that send leads to your company when your partner has a customer who would benefit from your solution.
Integration partnerships also lead to co-selling opportunities by creating a bespoke solution that combines both companies’ strengths. For example, last year Workday and ADP announced an extended partnership to improve data visibility between systems and provide a technology-first experience to their joint customers.
The bottom line is that building integrations and creating strong, lasting partnerships can offer both direct and indirect benefits that will help your business to grow.
Given their time and resource-intensive nature, whether or not to enter an integration partnership is a strategic business decision that should be made carefully and depends on how important the use case is to your ideal customer.
You should consider opting for an integration partner in the following scenarios:
While the details may differ by industry, the general process for building integration partnerships is roughly the same. Here's what a standard integration partnership process entails:
The first step is finding a potential partner and starting the conversation. Many vendors have an established partner program and an intake form on their website; others may require more direct outreach to Partnership or other company executives. Be prepared to explain what you’re looking to accomplish and how a partnership would benefit you both.
Next, you need to outline how you want to collaborate, which may include setting timelines and goals and agreeing to both technical and commercial terms. Some common conversations at this stage include:
Most companies will have a standard set of legal contracts, such as NDAs, licensing agreements, terms of use, privacy contracts, liability and indemnity clauses, and so on. These contracts clearly define ownership, intellectual property usage, and risk mitigation clauses.
Once all parties are in agreement, the engineering teams can begin testing technical compatibility, synchronizing data, and building the integration. In some cases, developers can leverage an integrations platform like Finch to eliminate the need to build a bespoke integration and go live with their partnership in much less time.
Now that the integration has been established, both companies can leverage the benefits of their new partnership, whether that’s through co-selling a robust solution, co-marketing the new integration features, advertising one another on their marketplaces, or whatever other benefits the partnership entails.
Remember: integrations and partnerships are distinct, and they’re not mutually inclusive—one can exist without the other. Applications can integrate with each other without a formal partnership, and partnerships can be established without ever connecting technologies.
When two companies form an integration partnership, they connect their applications and institute a formal agreement that leverages the integration to help both companies grow.
So, best practices for a successful integration partnership include best practices on both the technical side (the integration) and the business side (the partnership). The following best practices may apply on one end, the other, or both, as we’ll discuss below:
Integration partnerships require a lot of work to do well, so the first step is to choose the right partner—one that will offer long-term value to your business.
To choose the ideal partner, you’ll have some considerations that are specific to the integration, some that are specific to the partnership, and some that apply to both. We’ll explore the best practices based on where they fall on each side of this coin.
Once you’ve identified the right partner and both parties have agreed to work together, you’ll need to build trust to be effective partners.
Large organizations recruit entire partnership teams to effectively develop and maintain relationships. If you’re a smaller organization without a dedicated Partnership team, start by assigning partnership responsibilities to someone who can own the relationship with the partner organization. These Partner Managers play a pivotal role in maintaining healthy relationships between the companies—they’re responsible for identifying opportunities to drive mutual revenue and user growth with your partner.
There are two things to consider here: how the integration itself may be monetized, and how the partnership can lead to new revenue from customers.
Many SaaS tools charge direct and indirect fees to their partners, like API usage fees and flat partnership fees. In this case, one company or both may pay for the right to use the integration they’ve built. Be aware that while they’re common practice, API usage fees often lead to friction and frustration between the two parties.
On the other hand, the business partnership may include agreements to promote each other’s products, with incentives like referral bonuses or customer discounts. These formal agreements can help one or both companies grow their user base at a lower customer acquisition cost.
Separately, partners may engage in co-marketing commitments like co-hosting events, campaigns, and webinars, which typically don’t involve exchanging money. These collaborations can build mutual trust and goodwill while bringing each company new leads.
Partner onboarding can be helpful both for building the integration and defining the partnership. For example, you may exchange product walkthroughs so both you and your partner develop a better understanding of each product and how they can best work together before engineering the integration.
Once the integration is built, sharing enablement resources and marketing collateral as well as establishing support paths can help each partner to effectively serve shared customers and engage in cross-promotional efforts.
Integration partnerships, like any long-term relationship, require ongoing maintenance—both to the technical bridge and the human one. It’s good practice to assign dedicated points of contact to your partnerships—you may even establish routine meetings—to keep both parties on the same page about:
The dual nature of integration partnerships can make them especially taxing, because they require the effort of building the integrations and the effort of establishing and maintaining a business relationship.
Unified APIs like Finch can alleviate the strain on your team, empowering you to build integrations at scale. Instead of investing time, money, and resources in one-off integrations, companies that use Finch build just one integration to access hundreds of systems of record for HR and payroll. Finch’s Unified Employment API is intentionally focused on the employment ecosystem, but there are other unified APIs that serve additional markets and verticals.
Once you’re able to support connections to hundreds of providers through a unified API, you may choose to augment some of those connections with a formal partnership. In that case, unified APIs like Finch can speed these partnerships' time to launch by eliminating the technical element and giving your team the freedom to focus on building relationships and investing more heavily in your core product.
In short, you should consider a tool to leverage more integrations in the following scenarios:
Finding the right integration partner that is collaborative and fits your strategic roadmap can pose several challenges:
Negotiating legal contracts and commercial terms can take weeks or months to finish—often delaying time to market. This is especially difficult for startups or companies who want to go live with partnerships quickly and launch integrations with customers.
Some companies may require their prospective partners to undergo technical evaluations to ensure compatibility, security compliance, and adherence to data protection standards—this is especially true of systems of record that hold sensitive data like PII.
Many also require their partners to have a minimum number of shared customers before allowing them into the integration marketplace, which acts as a barrier to entry into the partnership ecosystem for early startups.
Most integrations are built through APIs. Integrating with a provider’s API is challenging for multiple reasons, including data mapping errors, API versioning, ongoing maintenance, and more. We expand on these hurdles in our article "Common Challenges of Building Multiple API Integrations."
Integration partnerships are often a source of additional revenue for systems of record. As a result, partners may charge a flat fee or incremental fees for API usage—adding to the monetary burden for budget-conscious companies.
A lot of time, energy, and resources go into building just one integration partnership. Companies that want to establish many integration partnerships face long timelines, tricky resource allocation decisions, and compounding long-term maintenance work—rendering it nearly impossible to scale without sufficient resources.
Few companies have a surplus of time, talent, and capital. Invest those precious resources in your partnerships and product by using Finch’s Universal Employment API to access integrations to 200+ HR and payroll systems.
Finch partners with industry leaders like Gusto, Paycor, Personio, UKG, and others, empowering innovators to focus on building their core product while leveraging our partner network to deliver a smooth user experience.
Talk to our sales experts or sign up for free.
Almost all successful integration partnerships involve the following:
Partnership efforts—identifying a partner, vetting them, developing outreach programs, building integrations, and implementing a shared go-to-market strategy—can take a few months to a few years.
Finch is a unified employment API that helps you scale HR integrations faster. You can unlock integrations with 200+ HRIS, directory, and payroll systems by building and maintaining just one integration with Finch. Finch also partners with multiple HR and payroll providers your customers use, including Gusto, Paycor, Personio, UKG, BambooHR, HiBob, and more. By leveraging Finch's extensive network, you can save months of integration-building efforts and reduce time-to-market while creating a more integrated, seamless customer experience.
Typically, integration partnerships involve:
To protect their customer data, sometimes applications will decline partnership offers if data and security standards are not met. It’s crucial to ensure you meet the technical requirements, such as encrypting data in-transit and at-rest, before entering into a partnership.
According to our June 2023 survey of 1,000+ HR professionals, 97% of employers agree that employment systems like HR and payroll should integrate with other tools in their tech stack. But building and maintaining these integrations can be a big challenge for PMs and developers.
That’s where Finch comes in.
On February 6th, Finch teamed up with HR platform Deel to demonstrate how easy it is to connect to employers’ HR or payroll systems through our API and sandbox. With these tools, any PM or developer can connect to live HR and payroll systems, generate mock data, and simulate real-world testing scenarios — for free.
We covered the following topics:
Below, we provide highlights from the webinar. You can also watch the complete recording by filling out the form below.
HR and payroll systems are every business’s source of truth for their employees. It’s where you can reliably find if individuals are actively employed, where they work and live, how much and how often they’re paid, what benefits they’re enrolled in, and more.
But there are literally thousands of HR and payroll systems on the market that your customers may be using — more than 5,700 in the US alone.
While all of this variety is great for employer choice, it can make integrating with those providers a big challenge. With so many integrations to build, it can be hard to know where to start.
Beyond the sheer number of providers you’ll want to integrate with, the variation between providers poses another set of challenges. Every provider expects PMs and developers to integrate in a unique way (if they’re willing to support integration at all).
Typically, PMs and Developers find they have 3 options:
For more information on how these integration methods stack up, you can also check out our SFTP vs API whitepaper.
With Finch, you only need to build and maintain one API integration to unlock connectivity with 200+ HR and payroll providers. And with one shared data model, you don’t need to worry about nuances between providers. No matter what HR or payroll system your customers use, all data is returned in a standardized format.
But instead of taking out word for it, we encourage PMs and developers to try it themselves. That’s where our sandboxes come in.
Finch has two testing environments — the Provider Sandbox and the Finch Sandbox.
Our Provider Sandbox allows you to connect to demo instances of live HR or payroll providers. You can utilize them as you would a real production connection.
Watch the demo to learn step-by-step how to:
The Finch Sandbox allows you to create mock connections for any provider that Finch supports, giving you greater configurability and control over testing scenarios.
Perhaps the most valuable part of the Finch Sandbox is that the mock data generated reflects what can actually be returned by each provider—a valuable insight when determining if an integration is going to be able to adequately support your use case.
While Finch generates the data, the user can configure these connections any way they want using our sandbox API. Using the API rather than relying on a provider’s dashboard makes it easier to set up bulk or repetitive testing scenarios. For example, you could quickly generate multiple pay statements with specific earnings and deductions amounts, and replicate that scenario across multiple connections.
In the Finch Sandbox demo, we explain how you can:
To recap, there are 3 key benefits to using our developer sandboxes.
1. You can set up live, external connections for free.
There’s nothing that can beat getting to jump in and try out your use case with real providers. The provider sandbox can really help you identify the opportunities and boundaries around what you can build with Finch.
2. See exactly what data can be returned, and what features can be supported for each individual provider.
This is important since different providers may support different fields and functionality.
3. Use the Sandboxes to demo Finch Connect to your own customers.
While this wasn’t included in the demo, our customers love that they can use our sandbox to demo Finch to their own customers. For example, you could incorporate the connection flow and return mock data from our sandbox in your own live product demo. This helps employers see just how easy it is to set up their connection through Finch.
If these benefits sound interesting to you, reach out to our team for more information, or sign up for free to try Finch yourself.
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.
Curious what problems the Startup of the Year is solving? Discover the real-life use cases our Unified Employment API is powering across applications like Rillet, TempoPay, and Thatch.
"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.
While the winners were chosen by voters around the world, the nominees were required to fulfill either or both of the two following criteria:
"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!
Building SaaS integrations doesn’t have to feel intimidating; but let’s face it, it usually does. Many factors—from complex APIs to poor documentation—can make it tough for product teams to scale integrations.
In this article, we'll cover common obstacles SaaS companies face while building multiple API integrations and how to overcome them.
But before we delve into that, let's first discuss what API integrations are and use an example to understand why they can be more complex than you think. (You can skip to the next section to jump quickly into the list of challenges.)
APIs, or application programming interfaces, enable two applications to connect and seamlessly exchange data. APIs allow these systems to specify how requests are made and data is shared. The convenience of API integrations makes them a popular choice for SaaS developers.
However convenient, APIs are far from simple. Their complexity makes building and maintaining multiple API integrations challenging for engineering teams.
To understand this better, let's consider the HR and payroll integrations landscape.
Today, an average HR tech stack has seven or more employment systems of record, including human resource information systems (HRIS), payroll software, benefits administration platforms, performance management tools, and so on.
The efficiency of HR processes depends on how effectively these tools communicate with each other. As a result, employers are increasingly prioritizing product integrations as a critical criterion before investing in any SaaS product to add to their HR tech stack.
Therefore, if you are a developer, product manager, or owner of a SaaS tool in the employment tech space, your ability to remain competitive and close more deals depends on your ability to offer seamless integrations across multiple HR and payroll systems.
As of 2023, the U.S. has nearly 6,000+ HR and payroll providers. Many of these providers do not have public APIs. And the ones that do have hundreds of variations in their APIs, data formats, documentation, and integration protocols.
Understanding different HRIS or payroll APIs and then planning, building, testing, and implementing dozens or hundreds of integrations can take months or even years and cost millions of dollars—not to mention the ongoing maintenance required for all the connections.
These complexities apply to API integrations across all software categories, not just HR. In the next section, we’lldiscuss in depth what makes scaling API integrations a challenge for SaaS builders.
Note: Meanwhile, if you are building multiple HRIS and payroll integrations, you should check out Finch's unified employment API. With Finch, you can unlock access to data from 200+ HR and payroll providers using just one integration. Learn more.
Building API integrations is a complicated endeavor for several reasons. The primary challenges developers face are:
Developers find it increasingly difficult to build integrations with a diverse set of APIs for several reasons, such as negotiating lengthy partnership contracts, testing integrations across multiple environments, the cost and complexity of scaling product integrations, and much more. Let’s examine these issues in detail.
While APIs make it easier to connect two systems, the diversity of API providers and integration procedures makes it a nightmare for developers to build multiple API integrations.
Each API provider has different systems built into the API. They may use different technologies, error-handling mechanisms, or rate-limiting protocols and can also have unique data formats—making it further challenging to facilitate seamless communication between them.
Not all APIs are open for anyone to use—gated APIs require partnership agreements to access
their API keys, documentation, and sandbox environments. The companies that enter these agreements have to undergo security checks, lengthy negotiation processes, and, in some cases, pay additional fees—rendering partnership agreements extremely time and resource-intensive.
Some providers even require a minimum customer count before entering a partnership agreement, posing additional challenges for resource-limited startups that need product integrations to grow their customer base.
Building API integrations in-house means ensuring each integration runs as intended and is reliable. Testing is crucial to check the stability of each integration and whether it can handle varying data loads under different use cases.
The problem with API testing is twofold:
Neither of these options allows SaaS product teams to move quickly.
It’s important to remember that all of the challenges we’ve mentioned apply to every API integration, and most SaaS companies need to integrate with dozens of systems in their space. Scaling your company’s integration catalog is a challenge. Here’s why:
Note: Finch not only makes it easy to scale HR and payroll integrations quickly but also offers a sandbox environment for select providers to give developers a safe test environment. Visit Scale with Finch.
The complexity of diverse APIs also poses to data mapping and consistency for integration builders.
Normalizing data from multiple systems of record is not an easy task. Here’s why:
Developers can save hundreds of hours when provided with data in a standardized format. This abstracts away the additional complexity of mapping data in different formats from different systems of record each time a sync happens.
Ensuring data quality and integrity is crucial to avoid compliance and security issues as well as to minimize errors in data processing. Data quality in API integration is measured by its accuracy, timeliness, and consistency across multiple systems.
Considering the complexity of data mapping, it is clear that maintaining data quality while building multiple API integrations is a challenge for SaaS product teams.
Establishing clear data standards and validation checks is essential to address this challenge. Also, using a tool to normalize data can bring the dual benefit of ensuring data accuracy and standardization.
For instance, Finch acts as a single source of truth for HR and payroll data, regardless of where the data comes from. As a unified API, Finch normalizes hundreds of variations in employment data into a standard format. Thus, making it easier for developers to read updates and write changes into the employers' primary HR tool—while maintaining data accuracy and completeness.
Security challenges in API integration include unauthorized access, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and excessive data exposure.
Every organization, regardless of its size, is wary of safeguarding and sharing its data. This is especially true for sectors dealing with sensitive information such as financial data, employment data, or health records.
While it may be manageable to establish and monitor security standards for one or two integrations, it’s nearly impossible to continuously monitor security health for a dozen or more integrations without dedicated resources.
Another solution is to use dedicated integration solutions like unified APIs or iPaaS that are compliant with global standards for security practices like CCPA, SOC2, GDPR, ISO27001, HIPAA, and so on.
Another security issue in API integrations is broken authentication or broken function-level authorization. Authentication errors return an HTTP error code 401.
Complications can also arise from different authentication mechanisms like OAuth, API keys, and access tokens used by different API providers. Developers must familiarize themselves with multiple authentication protocols and implement custom processes for each API integration they build.
For example, if you are building multiple HRIS or payroll API integrations, you must carefully build and manage authentication and authorization. Any unauthorized access or erroneous permissions can lead to disastrous consequences for your end users—employers and employees.
To account for this, Finch's unified employment API not only supports different authentication protocols but also makes it easy for end users to authorize access control. With Finch Connect, employers can select their choice of HRIS and payroll providers and authorize permissions in less than 30 seconds. Learn more about Finch's security practices here.
Two of the most common struggles for developers building multiple third-party API integrations are inadequate or incomplete documentation and backward incompatibility.
Documentation discrepancies in API integration are multifold. For example:
APIs are not static—they’re updated over time. API version changes can break the existing integrations or lead to broken endpoints and consistency issues. Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure each API integration has backward compatibility—in other words, they continue to perform even when a new version of the API has been released.
In our experience, developers often find it difficult to contact the API providers when a documentation page returns an HTTP 404 page not found error or a versioning change returns HTTP 301 error code.
To effectively manage API versioning, developers need to create flexible codes for the integrations that can adapt to API version updates and remain functional. They also need to have communication and support plans in place with API providers to stay updated about version changes and preemptively adjust integrations.
Note: Finch makes handling third-party API integrations easier for HR integration developers. For instance:
Maintaining dozens of integration maintenance indefinitely is a monumental task. You need to constantly monitor the health of each integration for performance issues, error resolution, and rate limits. Let’s examine these issues in detail.
API providers sometimes impose API rate limits and throttling to control the number of API calls, prevent over-usage, and maintain integration stability. This returns an HTTP 429 error code.
To avoid being rate-limited, developers must monitor API usage carefully or use webhooks to receive notifications instead of polling the API connection excessively. Adjusting for rate limits is doable for a few integrations but adds to the complexity of scaling.
Building integrations is only one part of the equation. Another hurdle is maintaining them for optimum performance on an ongoing basis. Integration performance depends on the time it takes to sync data, the accuracy of the data synced, frequency of errors, and the time it takes to resolve them.
Ensuring reliable integration performance is tricky. API integrations can fail, break, or malfunction for several reasons, such as incorrect parameters, server errors, and network issues. It can also fail due to third-party provider issues such as API versioning or any incident or outages that impact their APIs.
As a result, developers need to continuously monitor these integrations individually. Diagnosing and solving integration performance issues also requires knowledge of the specific API and its nuances. Monitoring individual integration can be difficult, especially when you have dozens of integrations running simultaneously and a relatively small engineering team.
Given that poor integration performance is one of the leading causes of SaaS customer churn, SaaS companies must identify errors on time and promptly resolve them.
For this reason, SaaS builders are increasingly opting for unified APIs like Finch as a go-to solution for scaling customer-facing integrations. Unified APIs allow developers to build and maintain one integration and unlock access to data from hundreds of applications. It’s always easier to deal with one API integration than the nuances of dozens of APIs.
If you are building three or more HR and payroll integrations, consider checking out Finch unified employment API. Connecting with Finch can unlock integrations with 200+ HRIS and payroll providers—covering 88% of the U.S. employer market.
Throughout this article, we have discussed how Finch solves the common challenges in API integration. With more than five million API calls every day and tens of thousands of employer connections, Finch is the trusted HRIS and payroll API solution for several B2B applications.
You can learn more about Finch by booking a call with one of our experts. We would be happy to discuss your specific integration needs.
We are thrilled to share that GGV Capital U.S., in partnership with Crunchbase, has named Finch in its Fintech Innovation 50—a list highlighting the rising stars in the fintech sector. It is another notable achievement for Finch after last year's recognition in GGV's inaugural Embedded Fintech 50 list.
GGV Capital's Fintech Innovation 50 reflects the continued trust of the investors in the fintech industry—including financial infrastructure, lending, AI, and more. In celebration of the launch, the honorees were invited to ring the opening bell at the Nasdaq Marketsite this morning.
Finch, a unified employment API, is committed to increasing connectivity in the employment data ecosystem and providing fintech firms with greater data access.
"Time and time again, we have seen how data silos across HR, payroll, and benefits systems have stunted organizational growth and technical innovation in fintech. Our goal is to simplify secure access to employment data. GGV Capital's recognition motivates us to continue improving connectivity, innovation, and automation in the employment-fintech ecosystem,” said Jeremy Zhang, CEO and Co-Founder of Finch.
For the 2024 list, 150 companies were nominated by 44 investment firms. The firms submitted an equal number of portfolio and non-portfolio companies and voted on the aggregate list. The nomination criteria included companies with the following:
Here is the complete list of Fintech Innovation 50 honorees, the methodology, and participating investors.
Even amidst the uncertainties looming in the fintech sector in 2023—including decreased valuation and increased interest rates—these emerging and established players ignited possibilities in the eyes of startup investors.
"Despite a rocky 2023, the list celebrates the innovation, perseverance, and the future potential of fintech," said Hans Tung, Managing Partner, GGV Capital U.S. "We believe the long-term tides are in fintech's favor with disruptors and value-added enablers like the Fintech Innovation 50 honorees leading the charge."
Finch is a universal 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, directory). If you are driving innovation with employment data, get in touch with us.
Today, we're excited to announce our second Request for Startups (RFS) — our annual call for innovators in the employment tech space. In last year’s RFS, we focused on workplace connectivity, financial savings, and ancillary benefits. This year, we're expanding our scope to include HR tech, compliance, B2B fintech, and insurance. We will discuss the gaps and potential for innovation we see and invite tech leaders to collaborate in these areas.
No matter which vertical you work in, it is evident that 2023 was a turbulent time for the tech industry. CFOs are still pushing for a reduction in software spending by 10%-30%. If a technology isn't essential or lacks a clear return on investment (ROI), its budget share is at risk. This especially affects HR, fintech, and benefits products. These products often work with fixed budgets that can shrink during team and cost restructuring.
But, amidst the gloom, there’s a silver lining. Generative AI and workflow automation are creating new possibilities for innovators. In fact, AI tops the spending priorities for nearly 50% of top CIOs and CTOs in the coming year.
This increase in the AI budget makes sense when considering the returns. For example, HR teams can use generative AI to automate leave processing, documentation, and report generation. Operations teams can benefit too, with generative AI automating routine tasks like data entry, analysis, and scheduling.
But there's more to explore. As the complexity of operational tech stacks grows, AI-powered workflow automation becomes a significant opportunity. Our survey of over 1,000 HR professionals reveals that companies on average use 6-7 employment systems daily. Building solutions that work across these systems can unlock substantial cost and time savings.
Startups that harness AI in novel, scalable ways can meet the rising demand and enable higher efficiency for HR, finance, and benefits professionals.
If you’re building something related to any of the above (or thinking of doing so), sign up for Finch to build your MVP. We’re always looking to help innovators address crucial problems across the ecosystem and get to market faster! Contact us.
We are excited to announce that Finch is named in the Built In’s 2024 Best Places to Work list. This is Finch’s second win after being ranked #12 for Built In’s 50 Best Startups To Work for in San Francisco 2023.
This time, we are elated to be named alongside the biggest employers in tech for not one but three categories:
Each year, Built In Best Places to Work recognizes top employers across the country—startups and tech enterprises alike. The award is given to companies that offer the best compensation packages, total benefits, and cultural programs.
It is based on the data that reflects what tech candidates are searching for in their future workplaces—from flexible work opportunities to innovative employee benefits.
This award is a testament to our commitment to building a people-first culture that inspires talented professionals to do their best work.
"At Finch, the team comes first. We're proud to have built a workplace that prioritizes culture and fosters individual development in addition to highly competitive total rewards packages. Built In’s recognition is a great reminder to keep setting even higher standards of workplace practices as we grow," says Ansel Parikh, COO & Co-Founder, Finch.
At Finch, all of our decisions and actions are driven by our core values—curiosity, execution, humility, and empathy. We not only strive for team progress but consistently encourage individual growth.
“I’d like to extend our heartfelt congratulations to the 2024 Best Places to Work winners,” says Maria Christopoulos Katris, CEO, Built In. “I am truly inspired by these companies that have risen to the challenge of fostering a positive work environment, maintaining a strong brand, and ensuring employee satisfaction. The future is filled with promise and we are so excited to see what lies ahead.”
Join us to shape the future of employment. Apply to one of our open positions.
HRIS integrations are crucial for streamlining essential HR functions such as employee onboarding, performance management, benefits administration, compliance, etc. They also support broader business operations like accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP).
Integrating operational tools with HRIS systems can eliminate the need for employers to switch between different applications. It also boosts the adoption of new SaaS tools and minimizes manual data entry errors.
In this article, we will explore what HRIS integrations entail, discuss popular use cases, and examine both the challenges and benefits associated with them. We will also touch upon the common methods for building and maintaining these integrations.
Additionally, we'll introduce how Finch allows you to unlock integrations with 200+ HR and payroll systems using just one API. Tools like Finch are especially valuable when dealing with the complexity of building three or more HRIS integrations.
Today, an average-sized organization utilizes 6-8 HR applications. This requires employees to spend significant time keeping their employment tech stacks up-to-date. Based on our research of 1000+ HR professionals, seven in ten HR admins (68%) say they routinely switch between different employment systems throughout the day. Half (51%) admit doing so leaves them feeling overwhelmed, stressed, annoyed, frustrated, or angry.
HRIS integrations facilitate seamless data exchange between the primary HRIS (housing employment records) and other software applications. This means that any changes made in one system will automatically appear in another, and actions in one application can trigger workflows in another. This reduces the need for employees to switch between apps frequently.
HRIS integrations fall into two main categories based on their purpose.
HR and payroll represent one of the most fragmented markets in the United States, boasting nearly 6,000 providers processing around $3 trillion in payroll annually for SMBs alone!
Adding to the complexity, the functionalities of HR systems vary widely among different providers. Some offer only HRIS or employee directories, while others provide a comprehensive suite encompassing HRIS, payroll, benefits, and collaboration tools.
As of 2023, Quickbooks, ADP Run, and Paychex Flex collectively hold over 40% of SMB payroll market share. However, newer tools like Gusto, Zenefits, and BambooHR leverage innovation and integrations to offer diverse HR, payroll, and benefits solutions to SMB employers through a single platform.
Note: Given the abundance of HR and payroll providers, it's essential for any company serving the SMB market to integrate with as many HR providers as possible.
Building a few integrations with the top five or ten HRIS may cover a decent portion of your customer base, but to serve the remaining half or tap into new regions and industries, you would need to build hundreds of other HRIS integrations. Needless to say, this is tremendously time and resource-intensive.
To address this coverage challenge, many employment tech companies seek solutions to streamline the development and management of HRIS integrations. If you're developing a solution that requires access to employment data from multiple sources, Finch’s Unified Employment API can unlock hundreds of HRIS integrations in as little as 3 days. Contact us.
Now, let's explore some common use cases of HRIS integrations.
Integrating an employer's HRIS with a payroll provider is the most efficient approach to handling payroll functions efficiently. Especially when an employer’s HRIS does not include a payroll module. This integration automates tasks such as setting up new employee payroll, tracking tax regulations, and managing benefits deductions based on employee directory data.
Providers of 401(k) plans, record keepers, or third-party administrators can integrate with an employer's HRIS and payroll systems. This integration streamlines auto-enrollment to retirement plans, facilitates seamless deductions management and yearly recordkeeping audits.
If an HRIS lacks benefits administration features, employers can connect with a benefits administration tool to automate employee enrollment, modifications, and cancellations. Learn more.
Recruitment tools, like applicant tracking systems (ATS) or background verification tools, often collaborate with HRIS’s to offer all-in-one talent acquisition solutions. This enables employers to manage recruitment tasks from a single platform. For instance, when a candidate's status changes to "Hired" in the ATS, HRIS integrations can automatically create the employee profile and trigger onboarding functions.
Compliance tools can use employee census details (job title, department, employment status, etc.) to build security training programs, auto-enroll employees, send periodic reminders, and update results directly to the HRIS, ensuring increased participation.
Also read: How Secureframe used HRIS integrations to simplify compliance for thousands of employers.
Tools like compliance, expense management, employee recognition, and identity management must stay updated with the latest employment details for accurate employee access. HR integrations ensure accurate access to employee records, making it easy to grant or remove user access to essential tools. This maintains compliance and reduces the risk of data leaks.
As soon as an employee joins, a series of onboarding workflows ensure that employees have access to all the equipment, software, and documents they need to get started on their first day at work. Effective employee onboarding also includes company orientation, training, and in some cases, specific certification processes. HRIS integrations automate these workflows by swiftly capturing employee details, eliminating the need for manual ticket generation. The same automated efficiency applies to the triggering of offboarding workflows.
Read: How tools like Trainual simplified employee onboarding with HRIS integrations.
Time tracking and leave management applications use HRIS integrations to automate hours worked and time off updates based on employee census data. This reduces HR admin workload by eliminating manual data syncs.
Integrating workforce management solutions with HRIS’s creates a centralized platform for daily tasks and performance management. For instance, HRIS integrations help employee engagement and performance management tools to track employment information like employee roles, organizational structure, manager information and use them to trigger relevant workflows.
Read: How employee rewards tool PerkUp launched HRIS integrations in a sprint.
Integrating learning management systems (LMS’s) with HRIS’s simplifies managing the professional development of employees. Customizing their learning experience based on employee data, such as role, department, and manager details, facilitates skill gap identification and discovery of training needs. Moreover, completion reports are automatically sent back to HRIS, allowing employers to stay informed about employee learning without manual effort. For example, with an LMS-HR integration, employees can be auto-enrolled in role-based learning programs following role changes or promotions.
Read: How accounting software Rillet leveraged HRIS integrations for better employer experience.
The most effective approach to building HRIS integrations depends on the number of integrations needed, the purpose of integration, scalability needs, engineering bandwidth, and budget. Common HRIS integration methods used by SaaS tools include:
Application programming interfaces or APIs serve as connectors for seamlessly exchanging information between different software tools. Custom-built API integrations simplify setting up automated triggers for custom HR workflows. APIs offer greater flexibility, personalization, and customization of the end-user experience. However, each integration requires significant development and partnership efforts, creating scalability issues. Moreover, any API changes require updates to HRIS integrations, adding complexity and fragility to this approach.
In recent years, new solutions like unified APIs have been developed to meet the demand for scalable API integrations. Unified APIs consolidate APIs of applications within a specific software category. This enables developers to connect with multiple platforms simultaneously. Also, these APIs standardize data from different applications into a common format, making it more accessible to developers.
For instance, Finch’s unified employment API simplifies integration with 200+ HRIS and payroll providers through one integration. Managing a single integration with Finch may prove to be the quickest and most cost-effective method for scaling HRIS integrations.
Some HRIS tools form partnerships with vendors to offer native integrations. However, these integrations are often limited in number, and the level of customer service may not be satisfactory. Additionally, accessing these integrations may involve extra fees.
Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solutions help companies integrate HRIS platforms into their applications, streamline workflows, and facilitate data synchronization. iPaaS is a fairly low-code solution suitable for organizations with limited tech resources. But the process can be slow and challenging to scale. Plus, they are often tailored for specific use cases. If your needs do not perfectly match, this approach can be very limiting.
Point-to-point HRIS integrations, while cost-effective, are the least efficient option. They involve connecting an employer's HRIS with operational tools without using APIs or third-party solutions. These integrations are challenging to maintain and scale. Any change in one system requires adjustments to multiple connections. However, if the integration needs are minimal and a high level of personalization is essential, point-to-point integrations may be a viable solution.
Challenges in HRIS integrations involve maintaining data quality, accuracy, completeness, timeliness, and consistency across multiple HR providers. These are crucial to avoid compliance and security issues. To address this challenge, establishing data standards is essential, ensuring compatibility among data from different sources.
Note: If you are building integrations with multiple HR systems, consider using a specific tool to normalize data into a common format to save significant engineering resources.
Many HR platforms lack public APIs, requiring a partnership agreement to access API keys, documentation, and sandboxes. These agreements often involve security checks, lengthy negotiations, and additional fees. Some providers even demand a minimum customer count before partnering, posing a challenge for resource-limited startups seeking essential integrations for their products.
Ongoing maintenance is vital for the accuracy and quality of integrated data, especially for customer-facing integrations. Key maintenance issues include:
Creating and maintaining 1:1 integrations demands a substantial investment of time and resources. The entire process, from planning and testing to development and ongoing updates—can consume hundreds of developer hours and tens of, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for just one integration. Unfortunately, this approach lacks scalability, as resources dedicated to integration maintenance could be better utilized to enhance product features.
Refer to our whitepaper Build vs. Buy for a detailed discussion on the merits of building integrations in-house versus using a commercially available unified API.
When handling in-house HR integrations, scalability becomes a significant hurdle. Developers must delve into various providers' API/developer documentation, decode data intricacies, craft custom codes for each integration, test them, and offer indefinite support. Managing more than three integrations can become a monumental task. Leveraging an integration tool or API aggregator improves scalability, allowing you to concentrate primarily on product development projects
Also read: How equity management tool Carta scaled their integration strategy overnight with Finch.
HRIS integrations offer numerous advantages, reducing time, cost, and resource requirements for app developers while notably enhancing employer experience.
If you need to build multiple HRIS integrations, Finch offers a unified employment API that simplifies the process with a single integration. Finch provides a standardized data model, eliminating the need for developers to handle different data formats, development complexity, and API variations.
Please contact us if you are looking for a comprehensive HRIS integration solution.
If you are looking to automate payroll deductions, Finch can help. Talk to sales.
Payroll deductions refer to the money withheld from an employee's paycheck each pay period to cover taxes, benefit premiums, and other financial obligations. Whether you're a business establishing your payroll, a SaaS tool offering employee benefits, or an employee seeking clarity on paycheck adjustments, it's crucial to grasp the different types of payroll deductions and how they differ.
This article explores common payroll deductions, their legal requirements and addresses some frequently asked questions. Plus, for those involved in employee benefits, retirement, health insurance, and more, we have a bonus section that explains how to seamlessly adjust deductions within the employer's payroll system.
Now, let’s decode different types of payroll deductions one by one.
Payroll deductions involve subtracting money from an employee's total wages each pay cycle to cover both mandatory and voluntary employment expenses, including taxes, benefits, and garnishments.
Each deduction has distinct calculations, regulatory requirements, and is applicable in different scenarios.
The deduction amount depends on multiple factors like federal or state tax laws, withholding information supplied by the employee in their Form W4: Employee’s Withholding Certificate, and the benefits programs the employee is subscribed to. The calculation process can be manual or automated.
Some types of benefits deductions are taken out of a paycheck based on the written approval of the employee. However, statutory deductions and garnishments are withheld by the employer as mandated by law.
Here are the common payroll deductions to keep in mind if you are working for an employee benefits or payroll company that does business in the United States.
Mandatory deductions are commonly called withholdings. Some examples of statutory payroll deductions include state and federal taxes, wage garnishments, and FICA.
Employees can choose from various employer-offered benefits programs and agree to deductions from their paychecks on either a pre-tax or post-tax basis. These programs encompass 401(k) and retirement plans, health insurance, health savings accounts (HSA) and flexible spending accounts (FSA), life and disability insurance, commuter benefits, wellness programs, college savings plans, and other common voluntary payroll deductions.
Note: Employers need written authorization from the employee for the following deductions:
Voluntary and mandatory payroll deductions can be further classified as pre and post-tax deductions.
Pre-tax deductions are subtracted from an employee's gross paycheck before any state or federal taxes are withheld, lowering the taxable income. Common examples include health insurance, commuter benefits, group term life insurance, health savings accounts (HSA), flexible spending accounts (FSA), and retirement benefits plans. While participation is optional, it is generally beneficial for employees. Note that there's an annual limit set by the IRS on how much can be contributed to these pre-tax plans, such as 401(k).
Conversely, post-tax payroll deductions are adjusted from an employee's paycheck after taxes have been withheld. Examples include Roth IRA retirement contributions, charitable donations, disability insurance, and garnishments. These deductions don't reduce an employee's tax burden. Employees can choose not to contribute to these plans, except for wage garnishments.
Employers typically rely on benefits partners to inform them about various deduction details. These deductions are then processed through a payroll provider to determine an employee's net take-home pay. Payroll providers also ensure that necessary payments are made to the appropriate government entities on time.
The payroll deduction process follows a standard sequence:
As you can see, to successfully manage payroll deductions, there’s a lot of information exchange required between the employer, payroll provider, and benefits plan partners. Manual processes can render this experience even more redundant and error-prone. Tools like Finch help automate payroll deductions to ensure a seamless experience end-to-end. Learn more.
With so many deduction types, mistakes can happen. Common errors include:
Automating payroll deductions is highly beneficial as it captures changes and updates employee information, employment status, and contribution details promptly between systems, reducing errors in deduction calculations. Learn how Finch's automated deductions can reduce deduction errors altogether.
If payroll is calculated with incorrect deduction details it can result in employees being enrolled into the wrong tax brackets. This can result in higher taxes, penalties, or lost interest for employees.
If withholding calculations are not compliant with state and federal laws, employers need to compensate for back payments, not the employees.
Core benefits are the primary benefits employees receive for being employed by an organization. This includes retirement benefits, health insurance, etc. Fringe benefits are the extra perks that some employees get like free meals, childcare (up to $5,000), gym memberships, mental health benefits, group term life insurance, employee discounts, etc.
While most core benefits are mandated by federal and tax laws, employers offer fringe benefits to retain talent and infuse a positive work culture. The fringe benefits that are translated into cash form are usually deducted from employee wages.
Finch is committed to making payroll deductions easy and automated for employers. It aims to do this by helping innovative SaaS tools in the retirement, benefits, and insurance sectors build solutions that can be integrated with 200+ HR and payroll systems using a single unified employment API. By allowing benefits providers to fetch data from the employer’s source of truth, Finch ensures data accuracy and timely contribution updates to payroll.
Streamline deductions management: Finch eliminates the need for flat files, SFTP, or manual data entry to fetch employee census data and contribution details. It automates the entire process of payroll deductions by connecting the employer’s payroll systems with the benefit providers' tool.
Enhance accuracy through automation: Today, every employer is looking for automated deductions management. It frees up employer admin time as they don’t have to manually enter data into the provider’s system each time employment status changes.
Similarly, all contribution details can be written back into the payroll system without manual intervention. Automated adjustments increase data accuracy and help employers avoid the common payroll deduction mistakes we discussed earlier.
If you are a SaaS tool looking to automate payroll deductions, reach out to us, we’d be happy to help.
If you’ve ever worked in the retirement benefits space, you know that keeping track of information between systems is one of the most challenging aspects of managing 401(k) plans. Using manual methods makes it even more difficult. For this reason, the popularity of automated 401(k) payroll integrations is on the rise.
In this article, we will cover how 401(k) payroll integrations work, the differences between 180 and 360-degree payroll integrations, the cost and risks of sharing data manually, and some frequently asked questions.
We will also discuss how Finch is powering payroll integrations for top players in the retirement benefits industry such as Human Interest, Betterment, Ubiquity, and more—helping them offer best-in-class 401(k) experiences for employers and individuals.
A 401(k) plan is a defined contribution plan. Employees receive a certain amount at retirement based on their contributions over the years. They defer a part of their wages into a 401(k) account which is processed and managed by plan administrators and recordkeepers.
Employers, or plan sponsors, are in charge of running and overseeing the retirement plan. They:
While employers can offload some of the responsibilities to a recordkeeper, there is often still a surprising amount of manual work involved. Typically, employers manually enter the data and make necessary adjustments in their payroll system or to their recordkeeper’s system.
Some plans allow employees (or participants) to submit modification requests for their deferral options too. This leads to more administrative burden and complexity for employers and recordkeepers.
In the absence of 401(k) payroll integrations, plan sponsors are responsible for ensuring employee deductions and employer contributions are always up-to-date between systems.
But when the employer’s payroll is fully integrated with the plan administrator's system, any changes made to employment status or contribution rates are automatically adjusted.
401(k) payroll integrations are critical to all stakeholders involved in enabling retirement benefits to employees. This includes plan sponsors, payroll providers, 401(k)/retirement plan administrators, and recordkeepers.
401(k) plan sponsors benefit greatly from payroll integrations. They automate employee enrollment as well as contribution and match updates. This boosts operational efficiency, reduces data entry errors, and eliminates the need for manual data reconciliation by sponsors.
According to a recent survey we ran, today’s employers on average use 6-7 employment systems. As a result, they are always on the lookout for integrated experiences. As retirement benefits gain popularity among employers, especially small and medium businesses (SMB), the demand for payroll providers that easily integrate with chosen 401(k) plan administrators will also rise. This makes integrations essential in the payroll tool decision-making process.
Retirement plan administrators can improve data accuracy and process efficiency with payroll integrations. They can also use it to offer customizable and tailored 401(k) solutions. This helps them build trust and loyalty with employers in the competitive retirement benefits market.
Recordkeepers and TPAs can harness bi-directional data synchronization—that is, the ability to pull employment information from payroll systems and push contribution data back —enabled by payroll integrations, to reduce data reconciliation efforts and demonstrate higher responsiveness throughout the retirement plan cycle.
Payroll integrations are automated connections between employers’ payroll systems and 401(k) plan administrators. There are two types of connections available based on the scope of data flow: 180 payroll integrations and 360 payroll integrations.
In a 180 degree payroll integration, data flow is unidirectional—from payroll providers to the 401(k) systems. This means whenever employment data (such as termination, address, promotion, etc.) is changed in payroll systems, a 180 degree integration will automatically update the information in the 401(k) software or the recordkeeper’s system.
However, if an employee modifies their contribution details in the 401(k) tool, it will not be reflected in the payroll system. The employer will have to update the changes on the payroll platform manually. This leaves room for data entry errors.
While it is more advanced than manual data entry, bulk uploads, or SFTP, 180 degree integrations are still limiting in scope.
With 360 degree payroll integrations 401(k) plan providers can bi-directionally sync data with the employer’s payroll system:
This ensures consistent and up-to-date information exchange between all systems of record. Recordkeepers can automate the entire benefits workflow—from enrollment to deductions changes.
For this reason, 360 degree payroll integration is often a favorite by sponsors.
A complete integration between payroll and 401(k) systems is critical. It solves multiple problems for the retirement benefits ecosystem. Payroll integrations can:
Extracting and uploading data manually from one system to another every pay period is inefficient and resource-heavy. Employers can save significant time by using advanced integration technology to automatically track and capture retirement data changes.
401(k) is a heavily regulated industry and the compliance requirements for retirement plan providers are quite strict.
The manual data entry process is prone to data entry errors causing compliance risks. They can also cause delays in updating deferral details leading to late deposits, wrong investments, penalties, and increased tax liability for employees.
401(k) payroll integrations, automate and eliminate compliance risks by directly capturing data from the employers’ source of truth.
Eligibility to 401(k) plans depends on the employment details captured in the employee census report. Employee census data include:
As employee information changes throughout the year, so does their census data.
Typically, organizations conduct yearly census updates and send employment data to their recordkeeper. Each time a new employee joins or leaves the organization, plan sponsors must send their eligibility or distribution details to their recordkeepers. It helps to keep the 401(k) plans up-to-date.
But, doing so involves a lot of back-and-forth data exchange between employers, plan administrators, and recordkeepers. These manual processes can make it more difficult to manage.
180 or 360 degree payroll integrations sync employee census with recordkeepers and ensure that the retirement plan is always compliant and correct.
If you are a 401(k) plan administrator, your ability to attract and retain customers depends on two things:
360 payroll integrations enable you to do both.
Most 401(k) administrators prefer a 360 payroll integration. It enables them to fetch data from the payroll systems and update contribution changes back into the payroll system without having to lift a finger. Plus, it saves their customers, the employers, the headache of ensuring no data is missed.
But, a 180 payroll integration is better than no integration. Plus, only some payroll systems support 360 integrations.
Regardless of the use case, manual data entry is the least preferred method for most sponsors and providers due to its inefficient and outdated mechanisms.
To scale your business as a 401(k) plan administrator or a recordkeeper, you need to provide some level of payroll integration.
But, building integrations in-house is a costly affair. It requires technical expertise, and hundreds of building, testing, deployment, and maintenance hours. As of 2023, building just one payroll integration can cost SaaS businesses in the retirement industry an average of $187,500.
Now, multiply that by 5,700+ payroll providers in the U.S. market today, and you’ll see how unrealistic this method is.
If you have limited engineering bandwidth, look for a unified solution that will make payroll integrations easy and cost effective.
If you are an employer, look for a 401(k) plan partner offering bi-directional data sync capabilities (i.e., a 360 degree integration) with your payroll provider.
If you are a retirement solution company i.e. a 401(k) plan provider, recordkeeper, or TPA, create a shortlist of payroll providers that your customers use most. Then explore what a direct integration might look like for each — or contact Finch.
Finch is a unified employment API that makes payroll integrations quick and easy for retirement benefits solutions. It allows applications to read accurate employment data and write back deduction details back into the payroll system.
No manual data entry, bulk upload, or SFTP setup is needed. Learn more about Finch’s automated deductions here
Finch is powering retirement benefits platforms and 401(k) plan providers like Human Interest, Ubiquity, and Betterment offer employers 360 degree integrations with the payroll provider of their choice. Want to learn more? Set up a call with our sales team here or get started with Finch today for free.
Rillet is modern accounting software made specifically for SaaS companies. Founded in 2021 by Nicolas Kopp, Rillet is on a mission to automate the tedious work that falls on accountants, empowering them to quickly get meaningful insight into the state of their company’s finances.
Payroll is a vital source of truth for accounting. But for accounting platforms like Rillet, collecting this data is no simple task.
In the early days, the Rillet team relied on accountants to manually download files from their customers’ payroll systems and manually map, transform, and sanitize the data before uploading it to Rillet. If an accountant served multiple clients, the process had to be repeated. And if there was an error, they would be forced to manually revert the changes and run the process again. This tedious, repetitive, and error-prone process had to be completed each month.
As Ernesto Medina Delgado, a software engineer at Rillet, points out — this initial experience was not tightly aligned with Rillet’s value proposition.
“Our intention was to make the accountant’s life easier, not more complicated,” said Ernesto. “The initial solution was putting the burden on their shoulders, and we wanted to take that friction away.”
The team quickly agreed that in order to deliver on Rillet’s vision, they would need to build integrations with payroll systems. The problem was that doing so would require a lot of engineering resources, both upfront and on an ongoing basis.
“Building integrations requires a lot of effort from developers, not only to get them set up correctly but also to maintain the integration,” said Ernesto. “These are live systems that evolve over time. It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it type of situation.”
“Building integrations requires a lot of effort from developers, not only to get them set up correctly but also to maintain the integration. "
Making matters worse, the sheer number of payroll systems on the market—5,700 and counting —meant they’d have to build many integrations if they wanted to serve both current and future customers.
After some research, Nicolas asked Ernesto to evaluate Finch, the unified API for the employment ecosystem.
Ernesto soon discovered that, by building a single integration with Finch, Rillet could unlock the data they needed from over 40 payroll systems.
“Finch very quickly jumped to the front of the line,” said Ernesto. “Both the breadth of payroll systems they supported and the data standardization removed a huge burden from our developers’ shoulders. It was clear Finch would save us considerable time and money.”
Finch wasn’t the only provider the Rillet team considered, but it was the one with the best developer experience, according to Ernesto.
For one, the developer documentation was clear and easy to understand, even for non-technical team members.
“Code should read like a newspaper, with the most important information at the top and less important information at the bottom. Finch’s docs followed this best practice,” said Ernesto. “More importantly, the accounting team was able to validate that they would get the data they needed without the engineering team’s assistance.”
Ernesto also received a technical walkthrough from one of Finch’s sales engineers, who helped him understand the options at his disposal for how to build the integration with Finch.
“My experience with the Finch team not only left a positive impression, but also made me confident in my ability to integrate with Finch,” said Ernesto. “It made the decision to move forward with Finch easy.”
When it came time to implement, the process was straightforward. His team built a functional proof of concept within a matter of hours, which they later leveraged to build the final solution. They then spent about one-third of their week mapping the data before they were ready to push to production.
“After a single week, we were able to add all the payroll systems Finch supports to our list of integrations,” said Ernesto. “Compared to integrating with payroll systems one by one, it was really low-effort.”
“After a single week, we were able to add all the payroll systems Finch supports to our list of integrations. Compared to integrating with payroll systems one by one, it was really low-effort.”
Ernesto estimates that the process of integrating with Finch was 7X faster than it would have been to build a 1:1 integration with a single payroll system. More importantly, Rillet unlocked 40 payroll systems for the price of one.
“I can’t imagine having to do the massive amount of work it would have taken to integrate with each individual payroll system,” said Ernesto. “We saved so, so many developer hours.”
“I can’t imagine having to do the massive amount of work it would have taken to integrate with each individual payroll system. We saved so, so many developer hours.”
Rillet’s customers also reaped the benefits of their decision.
“The value our customers received during that timeframe was way higher than it would have been if we had to build the integrations ourselves,” said Ernesto. “Without the burden of building integrations, we were able to significantly improve our product during that period.”
In addition to automating key accounting processes by pulling in and standardizing the customer’s payroll data, the Rillet team has embedded built-in reporting around key SaaS metrics into the product. That makes it possible for customers to get meaningful insight into the state of their finances within minutes of signing up, saving them the time it would typically take to build all those reports from scratch. Moreover, these reports allow accountants to see where the data comes from and how the numbers are calculated—helping eliminate possible errors.
“Most accounting software was designed before the advent of the software-as-a-service industry,” said Ernesto. “We’re reimagining accounting software for the current era.”
Throughout Rillet’s journey with Finch, they’ve been nothing but satisfied.
“We’ve had very few issues throughout our journey with Finch, and the support team has been very responsive. They answer our questions and resolve any issues fast, while maintaining a high bar for quality,” said Ernesto. “We’re really happy to be working with Finch.”
Software sandboxes offer a controlled environment where developers can play, explore, and learn about a product without real-world consequences. While Finch has always had a sandbox for our API, we’re excited to share a brand new sandbox experience that will help developers test our integrations with specific HR and payroll providers. We call it the Provider Sandbox.
The Provider Sandbox is the easiest way to test our integrations with HR and payroll providers. It provides a realistic environment where developers can initiate an external connection with live providers like Gusto and Deel — and receive data from demo and trial accounts.
The beauty of the Provider Sandbox is the ability to test live, external connections with specific providers. It’s as realistic as you can get outside of a live customer scenario. That means you can test everything our API offers – like request forwarding and data syncs – just as you would a production account.
Each HR and payroll provider is unique. They offer different features, specialize in different industries and customer sizes, and even if the data they store is similar – the way that they manage the data is different. Without actually connecting to providers’ systems during the testing phase, it’s difficult to know what data you’ll actually have access to. And that makes it tricky to test your unique use case.
With the Provider Sandbox, you can test for specific field support and understand specific nuances of a provider - for example how contractors are handled in the system. Most importantly, you’ll be able to update your demo company within the provider’s dashboard, resync with Finch, and see those changes reflected in the Finch API response. This is the simplest way to realize the power of Finch without having to worry about using a live customer – or worse, your own payroll account – to test.
In order to use the Provider Sandbox, you’ll need to first set up a demo or trial account with a supported provider. Then, you can modify the data in your account, sync with Finch, and understand how those changes are reflected in the Finch API. Getting comfortable with this back and forth can help you feel more confident that this provider can support your use case.
Currently, the Provider Sandbox supports Gusto, Deel, and Square demo accounts and BambooHR, Bob, Humaans, Personio, Sage, Square, and Zenefits trial accounts.
In the demo below, you can see the process of setting up a demo account and testing your first connection with Gusto.
Connecting to an external provider is only the first step. With the Provider Sandbox, you can use this connection to test many of Finch’s API and Dashboard features.
For example, say you’re building a financial forecasting product, and require weekly working hours from Personio. While this isn’t supported in our standardized data model, it is possible to access it with Finch Request Forwarding. Simply use our /Forward API to request data from Personio in their native API data model. Once the raw data is returned, you can understand exactly how this data can be utilized in your production application. To see how this works, watch our Request Forwarding demo.
This is just one example of how you might use the Finch API to experiment with provider data. Please note that Request Forwarding is only available for active customers on our scale plan.
Together, we hope both our Provider Sandbox and Finch Sandbox can help developers test exciting new applications of Finch without having to worry about the sensitivity of live customer data and PII.
Our Provider Sandbox is free for developers. If you’re already a Finch customer, get started by visiting your Sandbox Application in the Finch Dashboard. If not, sign up for free.
Most people aren’t aware of the huge inefficiencies that plague the benefits and retirement industries. But if you have ever enrolled in a 401k, HSA, FSA or other fringe benefit there is likely a chain of manual processes that have made that benefit available to you.
At Finch, we’re helping retirement and benefits platforms improve not only the administrative experience for HR professionals, but also unlock new products and services that are personalized, easy-to-use, and scalable.
So how are we doing it?
Finch was built to connect the employment ecosystem. In 2020 we launched seamless read access to HR and payroll systems so applications could consume employer and employee details in a standardized format. Then, last year, we launched Deductions (previously Benefits) to help applications write deductions and contributions changes back to their customers’ payroll systems automatically.
This two-way integration is critical to employee benefits platforms, which need to fit seamlessly into their customers’ existing HR tech stacks. Finch is the only unified API offering it today.
“Frankly, there were no other solutions that could support our vision and facilitate writing payroll deductions automatically," says Erika Davison-Aviles, Deductions customer and Co-Founder of TempoPay, "Finch had the technology and functionality that best met our product needs.”
“Frankly, there were no other solutions that could support our vision and facilitate writing payroll deductions automatically. Finch had the technology and functionality that best met our product needs.”
Benefits platforms want to be able to offer seamless experiences for the employers (sponsors) they serve. But, it’s not uncommon for the sponsor onboarding process to require a lot of manual work and coordination across operations, customer success, and technical teams. There is also a significant administrative burden for their core user, the HR admin.
Most payroll providers don’t offer deductions management through their API, this means one-off file transfer processes need to be created for each supported provider. This means a months-long process of discovery, setup, data mapping, and operational change management. It means setting up unique SFTP servers for each provider and paying for implementation or hosting. And it means any subsequent change to the data collected means revisiting the process again. On top of ongoing testing and quality checks.
This administrative overhead not only impacts what these platforms can build and offer, it also has significant downstream effects on the sponsors and employees they intend to serve. It's a big challenge for companies hoping to differentiate with a great user experience.
As Davison-Aviles explains, “SFTP and flat file uploads were out of the question. Manual file uploads are not only time-consuming, they’re wrought with errors. They simply didn’t align with our vision.”
“SFTP and flat file uploads were out of the question. Manual file uploads are not only time-consuming, they’re wrought with errors. They simply didn’t align with our vision.”
In our recent survey of over 1,000 HR professionals, HR teams spent 3-5 hours per payroll cycle to ensure employees had the correct deductions and contributions applied. That may work with a large HR team, but often isn’t feasible for small businesses. As early Finch Deductions customer Chris Ellis, Co-Founder and CEO of Thatch says, “Small businesses want to offer great benefits, but don’t have the bandwidth to deal with complexity.”
Additionally, employers update their payroll systems as they grow, but the lack of integration and standardization across the ecosystem makes it impossible (or unreasonable) to take their benefits with them.
According to Fidelity Investments’ 2023 Small Business Retirement Index, 22% of small business owners said they don’t have time to offer retirement options to their employees, (only 34% currently offer retirement savings plans). But, with new legislation enacted in Secure Act 2.0 and the rise of state-mandated retirement plans like CalSavers, employers may need to find a way. There is an opportunity for benefits platforms to use technology to help these businesses control costs while remaining compliant.
In the past year, we’ve made huge strides in delivering automated deductions management for some of the largest payroll systems on the market. We’ve enabled platforms like Thatch to reliably manage employee deductions and contributions across payroll providers through a standardized experience. And we’ve made it flexible enough to enable brand-new use cases, such as TempoPay’s individualized health benefits that allow employees to control their payments every month.
But there’s still more to do. In the next few months, we’ll more than double our coverage of popular payroll systems to help our customers serve more employers, leverage automation to tackle new industry requirements, and deliver new, innovative benefits that help individuals achieve their mental, physical, and financial goals.
As we scale, our focus is on expanding coverage of payroll systems that we offer in completely automated ways, while simultaneously raising the bar for reliability. Our goal is to build comprehensive tooling to help benefits providers reduce operational overhead and focus on providing first-class services to employers and employees. And we will continue to build deep industry partnerships across different parts of the employment stack.
Employment and benefits industries are at the cusp of monumental change, and payroll integration will be crucial. In the words of Chris from Thatch, “Payroll integration shouldn’t be your core competency. Like Stripe for payments and Plaid for bank accounts, Finch is the best solution in its category. It would take you longer and cost you more to reinvent the wheel."
“Payroll integration shouldn’t be your core competency. Like Stripe for payments and Plaid for bank accounts, Finch is the best solution in its category. It would take you longer and cost you more to reinvent the wheel."
To learn more about how benefits platforms are using Finch, check out our new customer stories from Thatch and TempoPay. Or get started with Finch today for free.
TempoPay is a financial benefits platform that enables employers to remove the financial barriers that prevent their employees from accessing healthcare. The company’s mission is to empower people to access healthcare when they need it, without worrying about affordability concerns. Founded in 2021 by Tim Danison, Erika Davison-Aviles, and Joshua Goldstein, the company was conceptualized, built, and launched from within Redesign Health.
“Financial barriers shouldn’t prevent people from staying healthy,” says Hattie Ninteau, TempoPay’s Marketing Manager. “But they do today.”
Hattie knows what she’s talking about: According to a Kaiser Family Foundation study, more than half of U.S. adults said they delayed getting medical attention in the past year due to an affordability concern. Even those who are insured often cannot afford care due to high deductibles, especially when faced with rising inflation.
For employers, that means more sick days are used, along with a significant loss of productivity.
“Whether or not an employee seeks healthcare impacts their employer,” says Hattie. “It influences both if and how they show up to work.”
TempoPay’s founding team envisioned a solution that would help employees pay for out-of-pocket healthcare expenses—the ones traditional health benefits too often fail to cover. Employees would download a mobile app, register in under two minutes, and instantly get access to a TempoPay card. They could leverage the funds right away to pay for healthcare—unexpected or planned. TempoPay would finance the cost, secured by the individual’s employment.
It quickly became clear that TempoPay would need a way to write after-tax deductions back to each individual's payroll. Traditionally this burden would fall on the HR administrator, but TempoPay knew that wasn’t an option.
“SFTP and flat file uploads were out of the question,” said Erika Davison-Aviles, Co-Founder & Head of Product, TempoPay. “Manual file uploads are not only time-consuming, they’re wrought with errors. They simply didn’t align with our vision.”
Reducing the burden on employers would be key to getting employees fast access to the care they so desperately needed.
TempoPay’s founding team began to search for a solution that would empower them to build an MVP. They needed to find an API product that could both read vital employment data and write deductions back to each employer’s payroll system.
This was the only path forward. After all, they wanted to provide a frictionless user experience for everyone.
“Employers don’t want to jump through hoops to figure out how to deliver benefits to their employees,” said Hattie. “They want simple, set-it-and-forget-it solutions.”
Through thoughtful research and market analysis, the TempoPay team identified Finch, the unified API for the employment ecosystem, as a potential partner.
The TempoPay team did their due diligence: They assessed several unified APIs and iPaaS providers. But only Finch offered the ability to both read the employee’s payroll frequency and write deductions back to their payroll system.
“Frankly, there were no other solutions that could support our vision and facilitate writing payroll deductions automatically,” said Erika. “Finch had the technology and functionality that best met our product needs.”
After becoming a Finch customer, the TempoPay team was thrilled.
“Implementation was straightforward, and the impact was immediate,” said Erika. “Finch's assisted integrations are leagues ahead of the typical batch file process. Instead of waiting a month for new deductions to process, we can make updates every week. That’s lightning speed in our niche.”
In other words, TempoPay can now write payroll deductions over 4X faster.
The end-user experience exceeded Hattie’s expectations.
“Employers literally just press a button. It typically takes 30 seconds to onboard through Finch Connect," said Hattie.
As a result, they were able to achieve industry-leading adoption rates.
For Erika, the experience with Finch’s developer success team also stands out.
“Every time I share product requirements and emphasize the need to move quickly toward a solution, the Finch team delivers. It’s the quintessential case study for agile.”
Together, the TempoPay and Finch teams are testing the limits of how deductions are managed.
“Every time an employee’s card is swiped, a new payment plan is triggered and their deductions change as a result,” said Erika. “For us, that means that every employer, every employee, and every pay period is unique.”
While the initial MVP build took some time, they’ve since enjoyed “months of smooth sailing” while providing healthcare benefit solutions the industry never before thought possible.
Looking forward, the TempoPay team plans to continue innovating. They recently expanded into pet care and veterinary expenses, and are offering more comprehensive employee benefits and financial wellness solutions that give employees access to critical funds when they need it most.
“We’re growing quickly and Finch has been a fantastic partner throughout our journey, helping us realize our vision of providing financial benefits that meet the needs of the modern-day employee.”
Their customers are eager for the TempoPay team to solve new and related problems. With Finch as a partner, they’re able to fulfill most requests.
“I’m confident in our growing platform because I know we have Finch as our partner,” said Erika.
At Finch, we’re excited to partner with game-changing applications like TempoPay. If you’re interested in exploring data integrations, reach out to our sales team or start building with our unified API.
TempoPay is available 24/7/365 and employers can bring TempoPay to their company anytime. There’s no need for employees to wait until an enrollment or onboarding period starts. There is no need for credit checks. Employees pay zero fees and no interest. They can choose to repay via payroll deductions or their personal bank account—providing them with a significant degree of flexibility.
The social impact is profound. Employees can access care when needed, including medications or treatments that their health insurance plan doesn't cover. That’s helpful, for example, when you need to schedule a costly surgery. Or when your doctor prescribes a new medication that costs several hundred dollars to fill.
TempoPay works with each employer to understand their unique employee population. They then make a recommendation regarding an appropriate and responsible spending limit, which usually ranges from $1,500 to $5,000. True to their commitment to flexibility, they can support different benefit configurations such as spending categories and funding options. This enables the team to work creatively with employers seeking a modern financial wellness solution for healthcare expenses and more.
We're excited to share that Finch now supports real-time webhooks for all customers on our scale plan. Finch Webhooks help you monitor connections and sync jobs, and notify you when data has changed. This helps you keep your applications up to date with the freshest employment data available.
Finch offers 3 types of webhooks, account update events, job completion events, and data change events.
We designed Finch Webhooks to empower our developers to build seamless and secure applications. With webhooks, there’s no need to make repeat data requests to find out what data has changed. Easily configure webhooks in the Dashboard, and start receiving notifications in real time.
Check out the demo below to learn how to set up your first webhook.
Easy setup
To set up a new webhook, simply register an endpoint in the Dashboard, and use our documentation to understand the structure of each event type.
Real-time notifications
Webhooks make it easier to get notified of updates instantly. Once you’ve set up your webhooks, you’re ready to receive updates in real time.
Scalable and secure
As your business grows, so do your needs. Fortunately, Finch webhooks are built to scale—so whether you're handling ten employer connections or ten thousand, performance will remain consistent and reliable. Our webhooks are also signed by Finch so you can verify that the data you're receiving is coming from us.
Ready to try? If you’re already a customer of Finch, hop into our webhooks documentation to get started. You can also sign up for Finch today for free.
💡 Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in October 2023 and has been updated to include data change events.
Thatch is a health benefits platform designed for the modern era. The company’s mission is to help startups provide their teams with personalized healthcare in under five minutes. Founded in 2021 by Chris Ellis and Adam Stevenson, the company has raised funding from top investors like a16z, General Catalyst, and Google Ventures.
“The way health benefits work today is very paternalistic,” said Chris Ellis, Co-Founder and CEO of Thatch. “Employers are forced to choose one pair of shoes and hope it fits every member of the team.”
Imagine that, after researching your options and polling your team, you decide to buy Nike runners in a size 10 in bulk. Soon after, someone comes to you and says they need a size 7. Another team member says they’d prefer Reeboks. Yet another employee wants hiking boots.
Picking a one-size-fits-all health benefits plan can be similarly frustrating for HR professionals and the employees they serve. To save money, employers must purchase group health insurance plans with standardized benefits, which often leaves employees with varying needs unsatisfied.
Group plans also don’t make it easy for employers. The onboarding and yearly enrollment processes often require them to manually move data between their HRIS, payroll, and benefits administration systems. When a new employee is hired, an existing employee departs, or another qualifying life event occurs, the employer must also manually make changes to the plan.
From the start, Chris and his team were obsessed with delivering an unparalleled customer experience. To build a health benefits platform that provided employees the control and flexibility they deserved, his team would need to leverage technology to deal with any corresponding complexity. “Choosing and managing health benefits is often a thankless job,” said Chris. “We are determined to remove the administrative burden.” In other words, they refused to burden the HR administrator with the tedious task of manually managing employee deductions. After all, these deductions were bound to vary from employee to employee and pay period to pay period.
“Choosing and managing health benefits is often a thankless job. We are determined to remove the administrative burden.”
For example, say all employees have a $500 monthly budget for healthcare. One employee chooses a $350 health insurance plan, leaving them with $150 each month to spend on out-of-pocket medical expenses. In January, they spend $167.25 leading to a $17.25 deduction. But, in February, the employee has no medical expenses, and so doesn’t pay any deduction.
Without automated deductions management, this data would need to be updated manually—for every employee, every pay period.
Making matters more complicated, every employee is different. Whereas one employee might choose a $350 health insurance plan, another might choose a $700 plan. That individual’s out-of-pocket expenses would be added on top of their monthly $200 deduction.
“Small businesses want to offer great benefits, but don’t have the bandwidth to deal with complexity,” said Chris. “They just want to know that your solution works and it can deliver the end result they’re looking for.”
To deliver on this vision, the Thatch team realized they would need to build integrations to each customer’s source of truth for deductions—their payroll system. Chris knew that wouldn’t be an easy feat.
“With the unbundling of payroll from benefits, we needed to achieve the same level of connectivity, accuracy, fidelity, and timeliness as our customers had become accustomed to,” Chris explained. “And we had to do that without ever being inside the payroll system—and without burdening our customers or their employees.”
Thatch’s founding team was left with two options:
By Chris’s estimation, in-house development would have meant hiring four additional employees across product, engineering, and business development at a cost of approximately $800,000 per year.
It would have taken at least a year to build the minimum number of integrations they would need to launch. Plus, they would probably have had to go to market with fewer integrations than desired. (After all, there are more than 5,700 payroll providers on the U.S. market, and the top 10 only account for 55% of employers.) In other words, if they chose this route, their near-term total addressable market would be limited.
Complicating matters was the fact that many payroll providers exclusively partner with businesses that already have shared customers. That created a chicken-or-egg problem for Thatch, which had yet to launch let alone acquire a sufficient number of customers to qualify.
From Chris’s perspective, the traditional path presented obstacles that were insurmountable for an early-stage startup. So, his team kicked off a search for a more realistic solution that provided plug-and-play employment integrations.
Beyond needing a faster and more cost-effective way to integrate with the industry’s most popular payroll providers, Thatch wanted a solution that could help their team automate the tedious process of writing deductions back to each employer’s payroll system.
They soon heard from another founder that they could leverage Finch’s unified employment API to unlock access to over 200 HRIS and payroll systems.
Chris and his team did their due diligence: They evaluated several competitors, but quickly realized Finch was the only solution that could satisfy their need to both read employee data and write deductions back to each employer’s payroll system. Finch also allowed them to reconcile their ledger, making sure all the dollars and cents added up in a compliant way.
What stood out, though, was the exceptional user experience Finch facilitated. By embedding Finch Connect into their onboarding flow, employers could give Thatch permission to both read and write back to their payroll system in under 30 seconds.
“Finch’s user interface and security standards met our high quality bar. We were confident that, by leveraging Finch, we’d be able to earn the trust of the employers we served.”
When it came time to implement Finch, Chris found the setup process to be seamless. As his team navigated its complex use case, the Finch team not only offered unwavering support but also contributed their unique expertise.
As a result, the Thatch team was also able to provide value-add services its customers never expected. For example, by reading whether an individual was still active within the organization, Thatch was able to notify customers when it came time to offboard employees from its benefits program.
“Finch is truly a strategic partner,” said Chris. “Together, we’re able to push the envelope on what’s possible. In fact, in the short time we’ve been working together, most or all of our product requests have been implemented.”
By leveraging Finch’s unified API, Chris estimates that his team saved $800,000 in payroll costs, got to market 10 months sooner, and captured 10X more revenue.
“The benefits of Finch were immediately obvious. We can easily spin up new payroll integrations and unlock new revenue opportunities without adding engineering headcount or building out a business development team.”
With the time and money the Thatch team saved, they were able to deliver on their commitment to their customers—building a product with a best-in-class user experience.
“We made a great decision by partnering with Finch,” said Chris. “I can’t imagine building our product any other way.”
Today, Thatch empowers small businesses to offer their employees personalized healthcare in just five minutes.
The process is simple for employers: They define a tax-free healthcare budget. Their employees choose a plan that suits their needs and then use any leftover money to pay for out-of-pocket expenses. Individuals can use their Thatch card to purchase anything from therapy sessions to fertility treatments to braces for their children.
By pooling the resources of many businesses together under the Thatch umbrella, they’re able to offer employers better health insurance plans at lower rates—benefits that are increasingly difficult for startups to access. In other words, Thatch helps small businesses offer big-company benefits.
When asked if he has any advice for the product and engineering leaders who are considering using Finch, Chris had this to say:
“Payroll integration shouldn’t be your core competency. Like Stripe for payments and Plaid for bank accounts, Finch is the best solution in its category. It would take you longer and cost you more to reinvent the wheel."
The wait is finally over. Download the 2023 State of Employment Tech Report for free below.
In June 2023, Finch surveyed 1,004 HR pros from a variety of industries and company sizes. Our aim was to uncover emerging trends while exploring the relationships between HR pros, their tech stacks, and the employment data they manage.
Inside, you’ll find powerful insights into the state of employment technology:
Download the report to discover how HR pros are navigating a tumultuous year, and what they want from the businesses that serve them.
The payroll ecosystem in the US is fragmented, with over 5,700 providers serving the country alone. Meanwhile, the employment ecosystem has never been more competitive, with best-of-breed applications catering to employers of all types. While both employers and employees stand to benefit from this trend, it also raises the bar for applications in the space to uplevel their customer experience, or risk losing customers. Connectivity to other apps in the ecosystem, especially critical systems such as payroll systems, is a big piece of this customer experience.
We’re thrilled to share our latest whitepaper, The Emergence of the Unified Employment API, which documents the evolution of popular data sync options, from manual entry to flat file transfers to direct integrations to unified APIs to specialized unified APIs such as the unified employment API.
Inside, you’ll learn:
Download the whitepaper learn more about the emergence of the unified employment API today!
CB Insights today named Finch to its sixth-annual Fintech 100 ranking (previously the Fintech 250) - showcasing the 100 most promising private fintech companies of 2023.
“Representing 24 different countries across the globe, this year’s Fintech 100 is shaping the future of real-time payments, spend management automation, embedded finance, and more,” said Chris Bendtsen, Lead Fintech Analyst, CB Insights. Together, they are not only increasing the pace of innovation, but launching new products and features to revolutionize the industry as a whole. I cannot wait to see what this cohort accomplishes next.”
“We are pleased to be featured in this list alongside other Finch customers. This ranking is further validation of Finch’s vision to make all applications in the employment ecosystem connected, so employers have the data and insights they need without unsecure and manual data transfers,” said Jeremy Zhang, CEO of Finch.
Utilizing the CB Insights platform, the research team selected these 100 winners from a pool of over 19,000 private companies, including applicants and nominees. They were chosen based on factors including - including equity funding, investor profiles, business relationships, R&D activity, news sentiment analysis, competitive landscape, proprietary Mosaic scores, and Yardstiq transcripts - and criteria such as tech novelty and market potential. The research team also reviewed thousands of Analyst Briefings submitted by applicants.
Finch is the #1 unified API for employment systems, with industry-leading coverage across 200+ payroll and HRIS providers. Our technology underpins the employment ecosystem, helping employers share organization, pay, and benefits data securely. Finch powers integrations for hundreds of platforms including Brex, Carta, and Betterment.
Quick facts on the 2023 Fintech 100:
About CB Insights
CB Insights builds software that enables the world's best companies to discover, understand, and make technology decisions with confidence. By marrying data, expert insights, and work management tools, clients manage their end-to-end technology decision-making process on CB Insights. To learn more, please visit www.cbinsights.com.
Contact:
chris.orlando@cbinsights.com
We’re excited to share a new feature in the Finch API, called Request Forwarding.
Request Forwarding enables Finch developers to make direct requests to employment systems, and access any functionality that is natively supported by a provider’s API. Even those outside of the scope of our standardized data models.
With Request Forwarding, you get the benefits of direct integrations with employment systems like Bob, Personio, Gusto, UKG Pro, and more. Data is requested and returned in the provider’s native format, giving you greater flexibility to access unique data in these systems. This also means you can exercise any functionality, read or write, that is supported by their public APIs.
Each of Finch’s 200+ integrations is built to our standardized data model. This data model helps unify the information coming in from each employment system so that developers aren’t required to manage nuances between providers.
When a developer sends a standard request to the Finch API, it goes through two key steps before reaching the data: data transformation and authentication. The data transformation process converts the request from our standardized data model to that of the system where data is stored. The authentication step then confirms that the employer has the correct permissions to access the data requested. Once the data is retrieved, it then moves back through the transformation layer to be returned in the expected format. This whole process ensures developers get a consistent request and response structure to work with, regardless of the system you’re extracting data from.
Now, developers have the option to bypass the data transformation step and retrieve data in the original format of the provider. With the raw data exposed by an integration, the data mapping is completely in your control.
Finch enables this by leveraging an employer’s existing secure connection with the provider that was established via Finch Connect, forwards the request to the provider, and then forwards the provider’s response back to your application.
Abacum, an automated FP&A tool that helps finance teams with revenue forecasting, headcount planning, and OPEX breakdowns uses Request Forwarding to gather expanded data sets from their customers' systems of record. "The ability to perform deep, nuanced analyses on HR and payroll data unlocks a higher level of value for our customers, " said Barbara, Senior Product Manager at Abacum. "Strong performing integrations is one of our main competitive advantages, and we can maintain a great level with Request Forwarding."
“The ability to perform deep, nuanced analyses on HR and payroll data unlocks a higher level of value for our customers. Strong performing integrations is one of Abacum's main competitive advantages, and we can maintain a great level with Request Forwarding."
Ultimately, Request Forwarding gives our developers complete control over the data that matters to them, without building and maintaining one-off integrations. In order to make a request to one of these providers’ public API endpoints, you’ll just need to use our new /forward endpoint.
Request Forwarding is available now for all customers on a Scale plan. Check out our documentation for a complete list of supported providers, and details on how to get started.
We’re excited to announce our partnership with Gusto, one of the nation’s leading payroll, benefits, and HR services providers for SMBs. With this new partnership, approved developers can use Finch to seamlessly read and write data to Gusto — in addition to hundreds of other HRIS and payroll systems. By increasing the total number of developers that can integrate with Gusto, either through a direct partnership or through Finch’s unified employment API, we can empower innovators to build the next generation of HR technology.
As the HR tech landscape has grown, it’s become increasingly important that systems be able to interact with one another. But, building integrations across a wide variety of HR platforms can be costly and time-consuming for developers. Finch makes it easier for a developer to quickly integrate with 200+ HR platforms via their unified API, enabling innovation in the market.
“Developers want to integrate with every HR system their customers use, but with so many players in the space, this can be a real challenge," said Jeremy Zhang, CEO and cofounder at Finch. “In the same way that Plaid created greater interoperability with financial service providers, Finch is emerging as the unified infrastructure underpinning the employment ecosystem. As we enter this new partnership with Gusto, we’re excited to work together to build more deeply integrated experiences for employers.”
As we enter this new partnership with Gusto, we’re excited to work together to build more deeply integrated experiences for employers. (Finch)
Gusto is a well-loved nationwide brand with over 300,000 employers using its platform for payroll, benefits, and HR services. Gusto supports integrations with hundreds of solutions in the SMB space, and launched an embedded payroll solution mid-2021 enabling other companies to offer its payroll services inside their app or service. By partnering with Finch, Gusto can expand their network of developers and accelerate innovation for SMBs.
"Our partnership with Finch creates a new way for developers to integrate with Gusto and will help to accelerate more innovation in the HR space," said Andy Toung, Chief Strategy Officer of Gusto. “By supporting more integrated experiences, we can solve real pain points for our customers allowing them to better care for their teams.”
Our partnership with Finch creates a new way for developers to integrate with Gusto and will help to accelerate more innovation in the HR space. (Gusto)
For existing customers
Finch and Gusto have been working behind the scenes to upgrade your experience. OAuth, SSO, and performance improvements are some of the exciting features of our new integration. In partnership with Gusto, we’ve agreed to migrate users to the new experience by November 30th. Your Developer Support representative will be in touch to support your migration process, which you can start by heading to this migration guide.
For new customers
As the #1 Unified Employment API, Finch makes it possible to access organization, payroll and benefits data across 200+ payroll and HRIS systems — all through a single integration. We are proud to provide Gusto developers with another way to share data between your customers’ Gusto accounts and your application. Want to learn more? Set up time to talk with our sales team here.
Sign up here to be the first to receive the full report once it's published in October 2023:
Recently, Finch commissioned a survey exploring the relationship human resources (HR) professionals have with their tech stacks, specifically the employment systems they use to manage employee data. To get a clear picture of the industry, the survey polled 1,004 HR professionals throughout the United States. The full report will be published in October but, in the meantime, here’s a sneak peek into some of the findings.
Note: Our team defines employment systems as tools that store data centered around the employee lifecycle. Examples of employment systems include but are not limited to Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS), payroll, benefits, business finance, tax, compliance, and insurance applications.
In the survey, we found that 49% of HR professionals say they leverage seven or more employment systems of record, inclusive of their HRIS, ATS, benefits administration, payroll, and time-tracking systems. This becomes more complex with larger organizations: 38% of HR professionals whose organizations have more than 1,000 employees report having ten or more employment systems in their tech stack.
While nearly all respondents (97%) say it's important for their employment systems of record to integrate with other tools in their tech stacks, 84% say this connectivity is very or extremely important. Yet, 55% of HR professionals say that between one and six of their tools automatically sync employment data from their systems of record.
With so many disparate and siloed tools to manage, there’s a strong need for greater connectivity throughout the employment ecosystem. For HR professionals, better system integrations will be the key to boosting efficiency, enabling them to do their jobs more effectively and with more ease.
Our survey found that 58% of HR professionals spend more than seven hours in employment systems each week. 68% say they regularly or constantly switch between different employment systems throughout the day. 51% of those who toggle between different employment systems admit doing so leaves them feeling overwhelmed, stressed, annoyed, frustrated, or angry.
Interestingly, HR executives spend more time in their employment systems than their workers. Whereas 72% of VP- and C-level leaders say they spend seven or more hours logged in, just 46% of individual contributors say the same. Surprisingly, executives also report spending more time manually entering employment data and toggling between different systems than the individual contributors who work for them.
Not as surprising, 64% of HR professionals say they spend between four to nine hours manually entering data per week. This is somewhat expected and unfortunately accepted in the HR industry given the highly-sensitive nature of information that needs to be inserted into these employment systems. However, these manual processes clearly aren’t meeting the mark when it comes to accuracy: 56% of HR professionals say their team finds incorrect or outdated information in employee data at least once a week.
This data tells us that there’s a huge opportunity to improve the many employment systems that HR professionals have to manually enter data into.
On the topic of entering data into employment systems, we decided to see how securely HR professionals gather and manage sensitive employment data. We found that the top two channels HR professionals currently use to communicate sensitive employment data are email (65%) and video conferencing tools, such as Zoom or Google Meet (51%).
Shockingly, 41% of HR professionals admit they communicate sensitive employment data via text message or SMS. Findings further reveal the biggest offenders are those who should know better: 50% of HR professionals with Chief Human Resource Officer, VP of HR or Head of HR titles admit to communicating sensitive employment data through text message or SMS.
While most respondents (68%) admit they’re worried about employment data breaches, a greater percentage (76%) is concerned about complying with data security regulations, with 57% of HR professionals saying they are very or extremely concerned. 70% of those in executive roles such as CHRO, VP or Head of HR say they’re very or extremely concerned about complying with employment data security regulations. In comparison, fewer of those in individual contributor HR roles (39%) express the same high levels of concern about complying with employment data security regulations.
The takeaway is clear: HR professionals need to find a more secure way to share employment data.
With nearly three in five HR professionals already utilizing generative AI technologies, there is a decidedly large awareness of AI’s potential within the human resources field. Yet, notably, there’s a significant disconnect between HR executives and individual contributors when it comes to whether AI technology is actually being used on a regular basis: The vast majority (84%) of HR executives at the VP level or higher (e.g., Head of HR, CHRO, etc.) believe their teams are using generative AI, yet only 34% of individual contributors report doing so.
Meanwhile, views around the impact and implications of AI tools continue to be mixed. While a majority of HR professionals rate artificial intelligence as being both relatively powerful and a competitive advantage, many still perceive AI as being relatively expensive, exclusive, and risky to use. There is also a great deal of fear about the potential of the human resources occupation being outsourced to AI, as indicated in numerous open-ended responses. Yet, where AI takes the HR field going forward remains to be seen.
Finch will be announcing the full results of this survey in October, which will include in-depth breakouts of the above data. Interested in seeing the full report once it’s published? Sign up below to be notified.
This survey was conducted online within the United States from June 21 - 30, 2023 among 1,004 human resources professionals, all of whom were employed full-time.
The vast majority (78%) were team leaders in director, vice president, or c-level executive roles. The other 22% were individual contributors, many of whom specialized in a specific domain within human resources, such as people operations, talent acquisition, or DEI.
Surprisingly, 63% of respondents were neither remote nor hybrid workers, instead being required to come into the office five days per week.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Finch has joined the UKG Partner Network, which currently boasts more than 350 solution and services partners. By fostering a close relationship with UKG, Finch has again advanced its mission to empower innovators by facilitating a more open and connected global employment data ecosystem for the world’s innovators.
As a leading provider of HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions—one that is known for transforming businesses through innovation—UKG receives hundreds of applications from potential partners every year.
But forming partnerships takes a considerable resource investment, both upfront and on an ongoing basis. So UKG set out to find a strategic partner who could help them expand their reach and unlock new growth by supporting the world’s innovators.
When the UKG team discovered Finch, they realized they had found a way to multiply the number of developers they served.
Finch is a unified API built for the employment ecosystem. It not only makes connecting with UKG possible, but also streamlines the integration process for developers. After building an integration with Finch and securing permission from their customers, developers can instantly access the employment data housed in UKG Pro® and UKG Ready®—alongside more than 200 other HRIS and payroll systems.
Now that UKG has forged a partnership with Finch, UKG can continue to work with strategic partners through 1:1 integrations and enable innovative developers to build revolutionary solutions via Finch’s unified API. This new, multi-pronged approach to partnerships gives all companies, both big and small, the ability to access their customers’ employment data.
With multiple ways to integrate, a larger percentage of the developer community can now connect to UKG—a fact that delights the UKG partnerships team.
“Our partnership ecosystem helps us support our customers by providing them with seamless solutions that improve business outcomes and inspire people,” shared Mike May, vice president of technology partnerships at UKG. “Partners like Finch allow us to extend our capabilities with technology that elevates the workplace experience and meets the needs of people throughout their life work journey.”
Ready to build? Sign up today to get access to the API keys you need to innovate. Not quite there yet? Reach out to our sales team to learn more.
Learn more about our partnership with UKG on the UKG Marketplace.
This post was updated on Nov 6, 2023 to reflect support for Finch's integration with UKG Ready®.
Building with Finch just got easier.
Today, Finch announces the release of a set of new backend SDKs that will help developers support integrations faster than ever. We expect this new functionality to help our customers focus more on their application logic and less on boilerplate code.
A software development kit (SDK) is a set of platform-specific building tools for developers. SDKs put everything you might need to develop and run software in one place. They can also contain helpful resources like documentation, APIs, and frameworks that enable faster application development.
While the actual contents of each software development kit will vary, most will include:
Libraries and Frameworks: These are collections of pre-written code that developers can leverage to perform common tasks without having to build from scratch. Libraries simplify the development process by providing reusable, modular components.
Documentation: Comprehensive guides and references that detail the functionalities, classes, methods, and best practices for using the SDK. Good documentation is crucial for developers to understand and effectively utilize the tools provided.
Sample Code: Examples of how to use the SDK's features. Sample code can serve as a starting point for developers, helping them get up to speed quickly and see practical implementations of the SDK's capabilities.
All of these resources help developers control costs, shorten development cycles, and ultimately ship great products faster.
Finch’s SDKs give developers the building blocks and tools needed to build robust, scalable, and efficient applications. Our SDKs are designed to streamline the development process, reducing the time and effort required to integrate with Finch — and by extension, hundreds of payroll and HRIS systems.
With this newest set of SDKs, developers can expect a comprehensive set of built-in functions and methods that allow them to interact with Finch's APIs directly in their language of choice. These backend SDKs include authentication and data retrieval operations, making it easier for developers to perform common tasks.
Let’s walk through an example using our Python SDK: After an employer authorizes through Finch Connect, developers can use the get_access_token function to exchange the authorization code for an access token. Once they have this access token, they can call any of the retrieval functions to retrieve data for that company.
For example, client.hris.company.retrieve() will retrieve data from the /employer/company endpoint of the Finch API.
Developers can use this pattern to pull the same data models available in our API. This includes all data available via the company, directory, employment, individual, payment, pay statement, and benefits endpoints.
Looking to get started? Check out our SDK repositories, which provide extensive documentation and sample code. Start with selecting your preferred coding language:
Curious what other SDKs Finch supports? Check out our frontend SDKs, which can help you embed Finch Connect in your application.
We're excited to see what you build with Finch. Visit our docs for more information on installation and usage. If you have any questions or need help getting started, reach out to developers@tryfinch.com.
Product and engineering leaders who create products that connect to HRIS and payroll providers are faced with an ever-increasing array of options when it comes to their integrations strategy:
Inside, you’ll find answers to the most common questions buyers ask when evaluating whether to invest in a unified API:
Download the guide to get the information you need to make an informed decision, then reach out to our sales team with any follow-up questions.
Have you been paying close attention to the SECURE Act 2.0? If so, you know that Congress has written new laws to expand retirement plan coverage for millions of Americans. While certain sections of SECURE Act 2.0 are already in effect, Section 603—along with many others—will take effect on January 1, 2024.
This means that 401(k) and 403(b) plan providers and product leaders have a tight turnaround to stay compliant. It’s a race against time, but with proper planning, you can beat the clock. In this post, we break down Section 603 of SECURE Act 2.0 and the steps 401(k) and 403(b) plan providers should take to ensure compliance by the fast-approaching deadline.
The United States is facing a retirement crisis. Across all age groups, the average American has only $89,300 set aside for retirement. When you consider that the benchmark set by popular savings strategies like the 4% rule is $1.5 million, there’s due cause for concern.
To curb this trend and help more people prepare for retirement, Congress is updating the catch-up contribution rules in Section 603 of SECURE Act 2.0.
Under current law, retirement plan participants age 50 and older can make catch-up contributions to their 401(k), 403(b), or IRAs—but under Section 603, that’s about to change. According to Section 603, if a retirement plan participant wants to make a catch-up contribution—and they earn more than $145,000 per year—they will be required to make the contribution on a Roth tax basis. In other words, catch-up contributions for these individuals will no longer be eligible for pre-tax treatment in 2024.
The purpose of the provision is to create more opportunities for Americans to accelerate their savings in the years leading up to retirement. By imposing a Roth-based rule, Congress ensures that plan participants will be able to withdraw tax-free dollars when they retire, thereby strengthening their financial security.
While a glitch in Section 603 could inadvertently eliminate the ability for anyone to make catch-up contributions in 2024, Congress has told the U.S. Treasury that corrections are coming, so retirement plan providers should prepare to stay compliant with Section 603 as Congress intended.
Section 603 is effective beginning January 1, 2024, which means that 401(k) and 403(b) providers must be prepared to update policies for every single retirement plan participant age 50 or older who is making catch-up contributions and earns over $145,000. To ensure you are ready for the new requirements, here are some questions you should be asking yourself right now:
If you can’t keep up with Section 603, you risk noncompliance, which could result in harsh penalties, steep fines, or legal fees associated with disputing any penalties in court.
If you determine that you are among the plan providers affected by Section 603, here’s what you can do to stay prepared:
Naturally, updating contributions means you’ll have to exchange large volumes of data between you and plan providers. Since you need to look at every plan participant who is 50 or older and earns more than $145,000 per year, you’ll need to pull in data from HRIS and payroll systems, such as:
While this data can vary based on your current retirement plan, platform, or procedures in place, it should give you an idea of how complex the compliance process can be. Now that you know the different types of data, how will you transfer all of it?
When you’re updating retirement plans to stay compliant with Section 603 of SECURE Act 2.0, there are four ways to transfer data:
Manual data entry is the least expensive option in terms of upfront costs, but it puts undue burden on sponsor administrators and is prone to errors. Improperly tracking data could result in a failure to update retirement plans and expose you to Section 603 compliance regulations. Manual data entry is simply unreliable, time-consuming, and expensive.
Transferring SFTP and flat files could be easier than asking in-house developers to build custom, direct integrations—but transferring all of that sensitive retirement plan data has several drawbacks:
Custom integrations with HRIS and payroll systems offer the advantages of automatic, real-time data syncs, as well as read and write capabilities. However, they are also complex and expensive to build and maintain. Challenges of building custom integrations include:
Unified employment APIs combine the advantages of custom integrations with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of off-the-shelf software. How do they work? A unified employment API aggregates connectivity to hundreds of HRIS and payroll systems—automatically, instantly, and with a single integration. This means that you can get all of the benefits of custom integrations without having to build and maintain them yourself.
Specific to Section 603, unified employment APIs can help you:
What are the detailed pros and cons of buying a unified employment API versus building integrations in-house? Find out here.
Remember, time is a crucial factor. To ensure you have a solution in place to comply with Section 603 by the deadline of January 1, 2024, we recommend:
With this implementation plan in place, you’ll be able to make the necessary adjustments before January 1, 2024.
Finch is a unified employment API that integrates with 200+ HRIS and payroll systems, allowing retirement plan providers to transfer critical data quickly and responsibly. With real-time access to employment data, retirement plan providers can automate contribution management and push changes directly to payroll.
The benefits of using Finch include:
As you keep close tabs on Section 603, understand that time is short and compliance is critical. With a unified employment API like Finch, you can automate all the necessary updates and stay compliant.
Talk to our sales team today to explore ways you can use Finch to ensure compliance with Section 603 of SECURE Act 2.0 and improve your customer experience overall.
In December 2022, Congress passed the SECURE Act 2.0, which builds on retirement savings regulations set forth by the original SECURE Act of 2019. Written to expand coverage and increase retirement savings for millions of Americans, SECURE Act 2.0 introduces some major changes to retirement plans nationwide.
Since certain sections of SECURE Act 2.0 are already in effect—and even more will go into effect soon—retirement plan providers must act swiftly to ensure compliance. In this post, we offer an overview of Section 125, the part-time employees clause, then compare four methods for becoming compliant, and finally recommend a timeline for fulfilling your obligations.
SECURE stands for Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement. Now in its second iteration, SECURE Act 2.0 is designed to help employers provide easier and more affordable retirement plans for their employees.
While some Americans are finding ways to save, the nation’s collective fear of not having enough money to retire is valid: The average retirement savings in the United States is only $65,000.
To address this concern and unburden the American worker, SECURE 2.0 is creating more accessible opportunities to save for retirement.
Signed into law in 2019, the SECURE Act mandates that employers allow long-term, part-time employees to participate in their 401(k) plans. The original legislation dictates that employees must have worked at least 1,000 hours in their first year or accumulated a minimum of 500 hours of service over three consecutive years.
SECURE Act 2.0, which passed in 2022, reduces the three-year rule to two years. It also stipulates that long-term, part-time employees must also be allowed to participate in 403(b) plans that are subject to ERISA.
The new provisions under Section 125 are effective for any plan starting after December 31, 2024, which means that 401(k) and 403(b) providers must soon put in place and test the technology they will need to automatically enroll long-term, part-time workers.
Failure to do so correctly and on time could result in stiff fines as well as the legal fees associated with disputing any penalties in court.
If you’re among the retirement plan providers affected by Section 125, your first step to preparing is to understand the legislation inside and out. Once you are confident that you know what is required of you, you need to determine how you are going to identify part-time employees, track how many hours they’ve worked, over what period, and auto-enroll those who qualify, as stipulated by Section 101.
By nature, this provision necessitates the regular sharing of large volumes of data between you and the employers who sponsor your plans, including sensitive personal identifiable information (PII) and payroll details for every participant. To transfer this data, which is largely stored in employers’ payroll systems and human resources information systems (HRIS), you can implement one of four approaches—some more seamless and effective than others:
Manual data entry has its benefits. It allows plan sponsors to stick with a data collection system that works for them, and it is almost always the least expensive option in terms of hard, upfront costs. That said, the potential downfall from manual data entry cannot be understated:
Secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) and flat files offer another way to transfer retirement plan data.
With SFTP, you can bulk transfer large files of data in tables (in the form of CSV, JSON, and XML files, for example) over a secure network. The benefits of SFTP methods are that they’re generally easier for most in-house developers to build compared to custom, direct integrations (more on those next). But there are also significant drawbacks:
This method is especially cumbersome when data syncs need to happen often, which will be the case for plan providers and plan sponsors who must comply with auto-enrollment and auto-contribution increase requirements.
A more sophisticated approach involves direct integrations with the HRIS and payroll systems that house the data you need to perform auto-enrollment and auto-contribution increase functions.
The beauty of direct integrations is that data syncs happen automatically and in real time, driving efficiencies for all parties, providing your customers with an optimally seamless experience, and giving you the peace of mind that you are always in compliance with Section 101.
Crucially, custom integrations can be built to provide read and write capabilities, which means you can also use them to automatically push changes back to HRIS and payroll systems. This is especially valuable when it comes to contribution management.
Custom integrations also present significant challenges:
To get all of the advantages of custom integrations without the cost or hassle of building them in-house, you can turn to a unified employment API, which aggregates connectivity to many HRIS and payroll systems at once with a single integration. A unified employment API does the hard work of building and maintaining the integrations, and standardizing and abstracting all incoming data, so your team doesn’t have to. They are infinitely more efficient than custom integrations, so you can get to market faster and, ultimately, at less cost.
To ensure you have a solution in place to comply with Section 125 by the deadline, we recommend:
As you prepare for SECURE Act 2.0 to come into effect, don’t lose sight of the fact that it will take time to prepare to be compliant with Section 125. The least risky way to ensure compliance—not to mention the most time- and cost-effective solution—is to integrate with a unified employment API like Finch.
Finch does the hard work of integrating with HRIS and payroll providers to facilitate the secure, permissioned flow of critical business data. Our dynamic, unified employment API offers:
Talk to our sales team today to explore ways you can use Finch to ensure compliance with Section 125 of SECURE 2.0 and improve your customer experience overall.
In December 2022, Congress passed the SECURE Act 2.0, which builds on retirement savings regulations set forth by the original SECURE Act of 2019. Written to expand coverage and increase retirement savings for millions of Americans, SECURE Act 2.0 introduces some major changes to retirement plans nationwide. Since certain sections of SECURE Act 2.0 are already in effect—and even more will go into effect soon—retirement plan providers must act swiftly to ensure compliance.
In this post, we’ll cover what SECURE Act 2.0 is, why it was enacted, and a timeline detailing the provisions that go into effect by the end of 2023.
NEW! Download the Comprehensive How to Prepare for SECURE Act 2.0 whitepaper today
SECURE stands for Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement. Now in its second iteration, SECURE Act 2.0 is designed to help employers provide easier and more affordable retirement plans for their employees.
While there are dozens of new rules and regulations to consider, here is a snapshot of provisions most pertinent to 401(k) and 403(b) plan providers:
According to a 2021 report by the National Institute on Retirement Security,
While some Americans are finding ways to save, the nation’s collective fear of not having enough money to retire is valid: the average retirement savings in the United States is only $65,000.
To address these concerns and unburden the American worker, SECURE 2.0 is creating easier, more accessible opportunities to save for retirement.
Let’s take a look at some of the provisions that go into effect at the end of the year.
While many of the rules and regulations set forth by SECURE 2.0 took effect on the day the legislation was signed, deadlines for others are quickly approaching. It’s a race against time to stay compliant, and retirement plan providers would be smart to start preparing now.
Here’s a complete breakdown of every SECURE 2.0 provision that will take effect by January 1, 2024.
Section 108: Indexing IRA catch-up limit
Section 108 increases the limit on IRA contributions by $1,000 (not indexed) for individuals aged 50 and older. Section 108 is effective for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2023.
Section 110: Treatment of student loan payments as elective deferrals for purposes of matching contributions
Section 110 allows employers to treat qualified student loan payments (QSLPs) as elective deferrals for the purposes of matching contributions. This means that employers can make matching contributions to employees' retirement accounts based on the amount of money that employees pay toward their student loans.
Section 110 is effective for contributions made for plan years beginning after December 31, 2023.
Section 115: Withdrawals for certain emergency expenses
Section 115 allows participants in retirement plans to make penalty-free withdrawals for emergency expenses. To be eligible, the expense must be an unforeseen or immediate financial need relating to necessary personal or family emergency expenses. Participants can withdraw up to $1,000 per year from their retirement plan for a qualified emergency expense. The withdrawal must be repaid within three years. If the withdrawal is not repaid within three years, the participant will be subject to a 10% penalty tax.
Section 115 is effective for distributions made after December 31, 2023.
Section 116: Allow additional nonelective contributions to SIMPLE plans
Section 116 says that employers with SIMPLE plans must contribute 2% of employee compensation or 3% of employee elective deferral contributions. Employers are allowed to make additional contributions up to 10% of compensation or $5,000, whichever is less.
Section 116 is effective for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2023.
Section 117: Contribution limit for SIMPLE plans
Under current law, the annual contribution limit for a SIMPLE IRA is $14,000. For employers with 25 or fewer employees, Section 117 increases the contribution limit by 10% in the first year of implementation. Employers with 26 to 100 employees can offer higher contribution limits if they provide a 4% matching contribution or a 3% employer contribution.
Section 117 is effective for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2023.
Section 121: Starter 401(k) plans for employers with no retirement plan
Section 121 allows employers without a retirement plan to offer a starter 401(k) plan. Employees are automatically enrolled at 3 to 15% of their salary, with a $6,000 annual contribution limit and a $1,000 catch-up contribution for those over 50.
Section 121 is effective for plan years beginning after December 31, 2023.
Section 126: Special rules for certain distributions from long-term qualified tuition programs to Roth IRAs
Section 126 allows 529 plan holders to transfer up to $35,000 to a Roth IRA, tax- and penalty-free, if the 529 account has been open for more than 15 years.
Section 126 is effective with respect to distributions after December 31, 2023.
Section 304: Updating dollar limit for mandatory distributions
Under current law, employers can transfer former employees' retirement accounts from a workplace retirement plan into an IRA if the balance is between $1,000 and $5,000. Section 304 increases this limit to $7,000.
Section 304 is effective for distributions made after December 31, 2023.
Section 310: Application of top-heavy rules to defined contribution plans covering excludable employees
Under current law, qualified retirement plans must pass the top-heavy test. Section 310 allows employers to perform the top-heavy test separately on non-excludable and excludable employees. This removes the financial incentive to exclude employees from the 401(k) plan, increasing retirement plan coverage to more workers.
Section 310 is effective for plan years beginning after December 31, 2023.
Section 314: Penalty-free withdrawal from retirement plans for individual cases of domestic abuse
Section 314 allows domestic abuse survivors to withdraw up to $10,000 from their retirement plans without penalty. Participants can repay the money over three years, and they will be refunded for taxes paid on any repaid amounts.
Section 314 is effective for distributions made after December 31, 2023.
Section 315: Reform of family attribution rule
Section 315 updates two stock attribution rules. The first update removes the inequity between spouses in both community property and separate property states. The second update modifies the attribution of stock between parents and minor children.
Section 315 is effective for plan years beginning after December 31, 2023.
Section 316: Amendments to increase benefit accruals under plan for previous plan year allowed until employer tax return due date
Under current law, employers can amend retirement plans only in the year in which the plan was effected. Section 316 allows employers to amend retirement plans by the due date of their tax return.
Section 316 is effective for plan years beginning after December 31, 2023.
Section 323: Clarification of substantially equal periodic payment rule
Section 323 ensures that the 10% early withdrawal penalty does not apply to substantially equal periodic payments (SEPPs) from retirement accounts, even if the account is rolled over, exchanged, or converted to an annuity.
Section 323 is effective after December 31, 2023.
Section 325: Roth plan distribution rules
Under current law, required minimum distributions (RMDs) are not required for Roth IRAs until after the owner dies. However, RMDs are required for Roth accounts in employer retirement plans, such as 401(k) plans, while the owner is still alive. Section 325 eliminates the RMD requirement for Roth accounts in employer plans. This means that owners of Roth accounts in employer plans will no longer have to take RMDs while they are still alive.
Section 325 is effective for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2023.
Section 327: Surviving spouse election to be treated as employee
Section 327 allows a surviving spouse to elect to be treated as the deceased employee for required minimum distribution (RMD) purposes. This means that the surviving spouse can take RMDs based on the deceased employee's age, rather than their own.
Section 327 is effective for calendar years beginning after December 31, 2023.
Section 332: Employers allowed to replace SIMPLE retirement accounts with safe harbor 401(k) plans during a year
Section 332 allows an employer to replace a SIMPLE IRA plan with a SIMPLE 401(k) plan or other 401(k) plan that requires mandatory employer contributions.
Section 332 is effective for plan years beginning after December 31, 2023.
Section 343: Defined benefit annual funding notices
Section 343 aims to define benefit pension plan funding issues more clearly on a plan’s annual funding notice.
Section 343 is effective for plan years beginning after December 31, 2023.
Section 350: Safe harbor for corrections of employee elective deferral failures
Section 350 extends the safe harbor for correcting errors in automatic enrollment and automatic escalation features in retirement plans. Employers have nine and a half months after the end of the plan year to correct errors without penalty.
Section 350 is effective for errors after December 31, 2023.
Section 602: Hardship withdrawal rules for 403(b) plans
Under current law, 401(k) and 403(b) plans have different hardship distribution rules. 401(k) plans allow for all amounts to be distributed, while 403(b) plans only allow for employee contributions to be distributed. Section 602 conforms the 403(b) rules to the 401(k) rules.
Section 602 is effective for plan years beginning after December 31, 2023.
Section 603: Elective deferrals generally limited to regular contribution limit
Under current law, catch-up contributions can be made on a pre-tax or Roth basis. Section 603 requires all catch-up contributions to be made on a Roth tax basis, except for employees with compensation of $145,000 or less.
Section 603 is effective for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2023.
As you prepare for SECURE Act 2.0 to come into effect, don’t lose sight of the fact that it will take time to prepare to be compliant.
You can get started today by reading our overview of Section 101, the automatic enrollment and increases clause. In this post, you’ll discover four methods for becoming compliant as well as a recommended timeline for fulfilling your obligations.
In the coming days, we’ll dive into Sections 125 and 603 in greater depth, offering insight into what your obligations are and how you can become compliant before the relevant deadlines. Stay tuned!
In December 2022, Congress passed the SECURE Act 2.0, which builds on retirement savings regulations set forth by the original SECURE Act of 2019. Written to expand coverage and increase retirement savings for millions of Americans, SECURE Act 2.0 introduces some major changes to retirement plans nationwide.
Since certain sections of SECURE Act 2.0 are already in effect—and even more will go into effect soon—retirement plan providers must act swiftly to ensure compliance. In this post, we offer an overview of Section 101, the automatic enrollment and increases clause, then compare four methods for becoming compliant, and finally recommend a timeline for fulfilling your obligations.
SECURE stands for Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement. Now in its second iteration, SECURE Act 2.0 is designed to help employers provide easier and more affordable retirement plans for their employees.
While some Americans are finding ways to save, the nation’s collective fear of not having enough money to retire is valid: The average retirement savings in the United States is only $65,000.
To address this concern and unburden the American worker, SECURE 2.0 is creating more accessible opportunities to save for retirement.
One of the primary reasons so few Americans have sufficient retirement savings is because, even when employers do sponsor plans, many employees don't take the steps necessary to enroll. To address this problem, Section 101 of SECURE 2.0 requires all new employer-sponsored 401(k) and 403(b) plans adopted after December 29, 2022, to automatically enroll employees at an amount equal to at least 3% of the employee’s pay but not more than 10%.
Of course, Section 101 stipulates that employees have the right to opt out of participation, but the small friction of doing so is usually enough to keep many employees enrolled. In fact, studies demonstrate that automatic enrollment increases employee participation across the board, particularly among Black, Latinx, and lower-wage employees. Additionally, Fidelity Investments found that, among its clients, 90% of auto-enrolled employees stay enrolled in their plans.
In addition to auto-enrollment, Section 101 requires that each participant's contribution amount be automatically increased by 1% each year until it reaches at least 10%, but not more than 15%. The legislation does allow exceptions to both of these requirements for small businesses with 10 or fewer employees, new businesses that have been operating for less than three years, church plans, and governmental plans, but most 401(k) and 403(b) plan providers should anticipate that most of their new plans will ultimately be affected.
Section 101 is effective beginning January 1, 2025, which means that 401(k) and 403(b) providers must soon put in place and test the technology they will need to automatically enroll and increase the contributions of millions of participants. Failure to do so correctly and on time could result in noncompliance, stiff fines, and legal fees associated with disputing any penalties in court.
If you are among the plan providers affected by Section 101, your first step to preparing is to understand the legislation inside and out. Once you are confident that you know what is required of you, you need to determine how you are going to auto-enroll participants in the years ahead.
By nature, auto-enrollment and contribution increases necessitate the regular sharing of large volumes of data between you and the employers who sponsor your plans, including sensitive personal identifiable information (PII) and payroll details for every participant. To transfer this data, which is largely stored in employers’ payroll systems and human resources information systems (HRIS), you can implement one of four approaches—some more seamless and effective than others:
Manual data entry can have its benefits. It allows plan sponsors to stick with a data collection system that works for them and it is almost always the least expensive option in terms of hard, upfront costs. That said, the potential downfall from manual data entry cannot be understated.
Secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) and flat files offer another way to transfer retirement plan data.
With SFTP, you can bulk transfer large files of data in tables (in the form of CSV, JSON, and XML files, for example) over a secure network. The benefits of SFTP methods are that they’re generally easier for most in-house developers to build compared to custom, direct integrations (more on those next). But there are also significant drawbacks:
This method is especially cumbersome when data syncs need to happen often and regularly, which will be the case for plan providers and plan sponsors who need to comply with auto-enrollment and auto-contribution increase requirements.
A more sophisticated approach involves direct integrations with the HRIS and payroll systems that house the data you need to perform auto-enrollment and auto-contribution increase functions.
The beauty of direct integrations is that data syncs happen automatically and in real time, driving efficiencies for all parties, providing your customers with an optimally seamless experience, and giving you the peace of mind that you are always in compliance with Section 101. Crucially, custom integrations can be built to provide read and write capabilities, which means you can also use them to automatically push changes back to HRIS and payroll systems. This is especially valuable when it comes to contribution management.
Custom integrations also present significant challenges:
To get all of the advantages of custom integrations without the cost or hassle of building them in-house, you can turn to a unified employment API, which aggregates connectivity to many HRIS and payroll systems at once with a single integration. A unified employment API does the hard work of building and maintaining the integrations, and standardizing and abstracting all incoming data, so your team doesn’t have to. They are infinitely more efficient than custom integrations, so you can get to market faster and, ultimately, at less cost.
To ensure you have a solution in place to comply with Section 101 by the deadline, we recommend:
As you prepare for SECURE Act 2.0 to come into effect, don’t lose sight of the fact that it will take time to prepare to be compliant with Section 101. The least risky way to ensure compliance—not to mention the most time- and cost-effective solution—is to integrate with a unified employment API like Finch.
Finch does the hard work of integrating with HRIS and payroll providers to facilitate the secure, permissioned flow of critical business data. Our dynamic, unified employment API offers:
Talk to our sales team today to explore ways you can use Finch to ensure compliance with Section 101 of SECURE 2.0 and improve your customer experience overall.
Hundreds of employees were just denied life insurance benefits. Finch could have prevented it from happening.
In May 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that hundreds of families who had diligently paid life insurance premiums were denied millions of dollars in death benefits. This unfortunate outcome stemmed from paperwork missteps made by both employers and insurance companies.
However, this situation could have been avoided with the assistance of Finch’s unified API, which bridges data silos to connect mission-critical employment data. In this blog post, we’ll delve into what happened and how Finch can help prevent such issues from happening again.
What exactly happened?
The report revealed that a leading life insurer had made errors resulting in over 200 denied claims, amounting to as much as $7 million, in recent years. The denial of these claims left families in a distressing situation, as they were rightfully expecting financial support during a difficult time.
Why were their claims denied?
Despite diligently paying life insurance premiums, employees were denied their life insurance benefits due to "paperwork errors" made by their employers. These errors specifically involved the failure to submit "evidence of good health" questionnaires, which are often required for employees to qualify for supplemental insurance beyond the basic coverage. As a result, the life insurance company did not approve the employees for supplemental life insurance, and their claims were denied.
For background, group life insurance is a common employee benefit, with coverage typically ranging from 1-2 times an employee's salary. Employers often offer supplemental insurance beyond the basic coverage, and employees contribute to it through their paychecks. However, to be eligible for this additional coverage, employees must fulfill certain criteria.
Who's responsible for this outcome?
According to the carrier, the responsibility lies with employers, who must submit the required “Evidence of Good Health” form.
Employers often handle administrative tasks, including the calculation of premiums and ensuring that employees complete the necessary health forms for additional coverage. This allows insurers to offer life insurance to workers at relatively low costs and has been the standard practice for years according to the American Council of Life Insurers.
But doesn’t the carrier also bear some responsibility too? While it may seem logical that the carrier should be accountable for the payouts since they accepted the premiums, the truth is carriers are often encumbered by siloed systems and flawed processes—which lead to clunky and error-prone data exchanges with employers. For example, premiums are often aggregated rather than individually specified in employer-administered programs, making it difficult to link specific premiums to individuals. Furthermore, some carriers only conduct audits when a death claim is filed, rather than beforehand.
The courts say both parties have a role to play in preventing these issues going forward. Carriers must improve communication with employers regarding their responsibilities, and employers must submit the appropriate paperwork on behalf of their employees. In this case, the carrier has agreed to notify its employer clients that they must confirm the approval of health forms for workers' supplemental coverage before deducting premiums from paychecks. At the same time, if employers fail to fulfill their obligations, they may be held liable for payouts to the beneficiaries.
At the end of the day, it’s about miscommunication between the carrier and employers, and inadequate sharing of data between them. And this problem isn’t unique to this case. Insurance carriers everywhere struggle with similar issues when it comes to collecting and managing data on individuals through their employer. In many instances, even leading insurers don’t have access to the technology they need to effectively tackle these challenges.
Moving forward, who will be held accountable?
The responsibility for preventing such issues is increasingly falling on employers and their employees. Employers must be more diligent in filing paperwork, ensuring eligibility criteria are met, and obtaining approval for coverage before collecting premiums from employees and forwarding them to insurance carriers.
Why hasn't this been automated?
Despite the advanced technology we have access to in 2023, the administration of employee benefits still poses challenges. Sharing employee data between systems is still in its infancy and although thousands of apps have been created over the past decade to help employers manage employee data—no underlying infrastructure exists to connect all this data together. In fact, with over 5,700 employment systems in existence today, the market remains highly fragmented, making it nearly impossible for a third-party solution to solve the problem comprehensively.
Consequently, employers are forced to manually enter and transfer employee data between multiple systems. This manual process is time-consuming and prone to error. And to make matters more complicated, each system has its own rules and standards regarding data formats, leading to inconsistencies and compatibility issues when transferring information. As a result, crucial details often fall through the cracks, causing problems such as the denial of life insurance benefits.
Employers need to demand that their HR systems communicate with each other, eliminating the need for manual data entry and ensuring a streamlined process. It's time for the industry to embrace interoperability and leverage its buying power to make automated employee benefit administration a reality.
How can Finch help solve this problem?
Finch provides the vital infrastructure to connect disparate systems, facilitating secure and efficient movement of sensitive employment data between them. By integrating with Finch, third party organizations like insurance carriers gain direct access to relevant employee data from an employer's systems of record, such as HRIS and payroll software. This connectivity is extremely powerful for companies with the fiduciary duty to report on individual employee evidence of insurability—streamlining the exchange of information, and making it easier for carriers and employers to exchange employee data accurately.
For example, after integrating with Finch, carriers can prompt employers to connect their employment systems of record, granting permission for the carrier to access relevant employee data. The carrier can then automatically pull the required information, evaluate eligibility and approve coverage. Employers can proceed to collect and pay premiums, ensuring employees receive the coverage they are entitled to.
However, it’s important to note that no two implementations ever look the same. That’s why, at Finch, we’re here to help advise.
What’s the bottom line?
Simple administrative errors shouldn’t be the reason life insurance benefits are denied. And with employment data that’s connected and programmable, they don’t have to be. In fact, everybody wins with effective data sharing. Carriers and employers can both ensure they’ve done their part, reducing their risk of future litigation, and employees get their rightful benefits, at a time when they need them most.
To learn more about how Finch can help prevent life insurance benefit denials, reach out to our sales team.
Finch is on a mission to empower innovators to access the global employment data ecosystem, so they can create cutting-edge solutions for employers. But we can’t do it alone. Partnerships play a crucial role in our work. That’s why, today, we’re excited to announce that Finch has joined Paycor’s network of more than 200 technology partners.
Paycor is a human capital management (HCM) platform that enables organizations to streamline their HR, payroll, timekeeping, and talent management processes. More than 30,000 businesses trust Paycor to simplify and automate their HR and payroll operations—saving them time, reducing administrative burdens, and ensuring compliance with employment regulations.
Paycor views its customers as its beating heart. In recent years, the company has observed a rise in customers wanting to sync their employment data across the systems they use. Without open connectivity with other applications, their customers wasted time on manual data entry or used risky methods for transferring sensitive information. By developing tight integrations with other tools, the company was confident it could reduce the burden on its customers and improve the user experience.
The Paycor team realized they faced an uphill battle: Building 1:1 integrations with the more than 5,700 tools in the employment ecosystem would take decades, plus new players enter the scene on a daily basis, making it impossible to keep up. The company needed a partner like Finch that could quickly expand the number of integrated experiences it could offer its customers.
“Paycor, like Finch, wants to give employers power over their own data. By helping Paycor integrate with other tools in their customers’ tech stacks, Finch helps make this vision a reality. We’re excited to add support for such a big player this year and work together to drive more integrated experiences for employers.”
—Runae Lee, Head of Partnerships at Finch
Finch is a unified API that offers third-party software providers with programmatic access to 200+ HR and payroll systems via a single integration. Once employers give permission to software providers to access their employment data, Finch Connect performs syncs regularly to keep the data fresh. This serves a multitude of use cases, from automating benefits enrollment to forecasting operational expenditures.
“As the leader in employment data, Finch is an ideal partner. The integration of our platforms unlocks new value for Paycor customers, who can now securely sync their data with other systems within their tech stack. By working together, we’ve made our product stickier and paved the way for an even better customer experience.”
—Paycor’s Partnership Team
To leverage your customers’ employment data from Paycor, and give them a deeply integrated product experience, sign up to get API keys today or reach out to our team with questions.
Today we’re proud to announce additional funding led by Intuit Ventures, the venture capital fund of Intuit. Intuit’s QuickBooks payroll is the #1 payroll provider for small businesses.
The employment data ecosystem was built in an era of data silos. Even today, connectivity remains a challenge with the standard practices to share mission-critical employment data bottlenecked by flat files, emails, and even faxes. We are in the early stages of an industry-wide evolution toward a more connected, secure ecosystem allowing for innovative solutions across fintech, HR tech, compliance, insurance, and benefits to proliferate.
Today marks another step toward that inevitable, connected future. Just four months following our $40M Series B investment announcement, we have raised additional capital from Intuit Ventures. With over 1.6 million businesses utilizing Intuit’s payroll in fiscal 2022, Quickbooks is the leading payroll provider for small businesses. Their deep expertise in business software, combined with their proven track record of building 3rd party application marketplaces made them a natural fit for Finch as we continue to unify the employment data ecosystem.
"We are constantly looking to invest in innovative companies that are solving critical problems our customers face.” said Adam Coccari, Managing Director of Intuit Ventures. “Finch’s unified API currently enables our partners and small business customers to seamlessly connect apps to their data in Intuit QuickBooks payroll so the products that they love work together. We look forward to collaborating with Finch as they build deeper integrations to serve developers and our joint customers.”
We’re particularly excited by what this means for customers and end users — we are well on our way to building a future of employment that’s open, connected, and programmable. Today’s employers are demanding their systems of record speak to one another so they can get the best insights into their operations. By opening up the Employment Data Ecosystem, Finch can unlock the full potential of the suite of solutions that utilize HR, payroll and benefits data. This investment from Intuit, a major player in the employment data ecosystem, further strengthens our position as the leading employment data API.
Join our team to help shape the future of the employment ecosystem! To learn more about Finch’s solutions, talk to our sales team or sign up for free today.
The SHRM Annual Conference & Expo is one of the premiere events for HR professionals. This year, the conference is taking place at the Las Vegas Convention Center from Sunday, June 11 to Wednesday, June 14.
SHRM23 boasts a wide variety of education sessions, so teams can customize their schedules and attend panels that address individual challenges and business goals. With over 15,000 attendees and 650+ solutions providers, we’re excited for the chance to network with all of you and demonstrate Finch’s full capabilities in-person.
We’ll be set up at Booth 2330. Come say hello, and grab some limited-edition, light-up memo boards while you’re there!
Finch focuses on accessing the employment data that's housed in HR, payroll, and benefits systems.
Our universal API integrates with 200+ HR, payroll, and benefits systems to help employers streamline onboarding, optimize employee benefits, and unlock tax savings—amongst many other use cases.
With more than five million API calls every day and tens of thousands of employer connections, Finch is the #1 API for unlocking the vast potential of employment data.
When we’re not at Booth 2330, we’ll be checking out all the conference has to offer. We’ve looked through the SHRM23 content tracks and are happy to share the ones we’re most excited to attend:
Of course, we’re also excited for the recently announced moderated Q&A conversation with 42nd U.S. President Bill Clinton on the Main Stage.
Finch allows you to securely access your customers’ employment data across hundreds of HRIS and payroll systems with a single integration.
Employment data includes:
We recently raised $40 million in our Series B round, co-led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures with additional investments from QED, PruVen, and Altman Capital.
Finch is putting this capital to work by investing in both new and existing products—like our Data Refresh endpoint and recent upgrades to Finch Connect—and expanding our team to support customers and partners across HR, fintech, and benefits verticals.
We were named one of 2023’s Best Places to Work by Built In and recently included on GGV Capital’s API-First Index.
Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for our latest takes on the future of work.
Now in its fourth year, the HR Tech Awards program highlights HR technology companies that serve employers and employees with entries from North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. The program has a rigorous judging component with a panel of independent practitioners, consultants, and educators who assess each submission.
Today, employment data is hosted across thousands of disparate systems and employers increasingly expect the tools they use to service their workforce to talk to each other with little friction. Given the fragmentation and rising expectations, employment applications are faced with the costly dilemma of either building 1:1 integrations in-house or losing business to competitors that offer compatibility. Finch helps solve the fragmentation challenge with a unified employment API, allowing businesses to cut costs and time spent on integrations, freeing them up to focus on value-added services that differentiate these applications instead.
Ben Eubanks, Chief Research Officer, Lighthouse Research & Advisory has this to say about Finch:
"Integration of systems and data is one of the most common complaints for HR software today. Finch is helping to turn complicated and technical into the possible, enabling the seamless passing of employee data among 200+ different systems via a single powerful integration.”
According to Lighthouse Research & Advisory data, more than 5,000 providers exist across the HR technology landscape, with more startups and innovators entering the industry every single day. This year, the HR Tech Awards recognizes approximately 1% of those firms for creating solutions that solve problems their customers care about.
The world is moving towards more standardized, open, and interconnected data systems. However, employment data infrastructure remains complex, closed, and fragmented. Finch is dedicated to bringing forth a connected future of employment and is honored to have its technology recognized.
To get a free consultation regarding what Finch can do for your business, talk to our sales team, or if you’d like to test it out on your own, you can sign up for a free account today.
We’re excited to announce that On Deck ranked Finch #2 on its Top 40 Companies of 2023 list, reinforcing our vision to build a future where employment is connected and programmable.
On Deck launched its first fellowship in 2019. To date, the organization has helped start and accelerate hundreds of companies, which are now worth over $9 billion. What started as a passion project has grown into a worldwide network and community of the most ambitious people around the globe.
In an effort to consistently showcase the best and most promising On Deck companies, every year the organization publishes its list of top performers. On Deck considers a number of factors during the selection process, including funding raised, valuation, and momentum over the last year. The nature and importance of the problems companies are tackling also factors into the team’s decision. This year’s list includes 40 companies that have demonstrated significant traction over the past 12 months.
Being recognized as a high performer by On Deck underscores the market need for an open employment data ecosystem.
The workforce is the backbone of the U.S. economy. From retirement benefits to health insurance to mental health, employers’ responsibilities have significantly increased over the years. Despite the challenges posed by the macro backdrop, U.S. employment has been growing steadily, with the unemployment rate at its lowest in 54 years.
Unfortunately, the employment ecosystem faces significant challenges due to a lack of data accessibility. Over 580 million U.S. employment records and $15 trillion of funds are processed across more than 20,000 employment data systems, including payroll, HRIS, benefits administration, ATS, and others. The ecosystem also lacks connectivity, with sensitive records mostly passed via manual data entry, SFTP, and unsecured emails.
We are here to change that by making it easy to read and write employment data at scale with our unified employment API. With Finch, applications can instantly integrate with over 200 employment systems to provide products and services to employers. To learn more, visit tryfinch.com.
Our goal is to unify the employment data ecosystem by providing access to hundreds of HR and payroll systems with a single, streamlined integration. One way we do that is through partnerships, which allow us to revolutionize how B2B innovators leverage the power of employment data to build next-generation solutions for employers.
Today, we’re excited to announce our new strategic partnership with Personio.
Personio is the people operating system that automates and simplifies HR tasks, from recruiting to offboarding, within a single solution. Personio alleviates employers’ administrative burdens, so they have time for more strategic work and can focus on what really matters: people.
To provide employers with the best possible experience and the widest breadth of choice when it comes to customizing their tech stack, Personio integrates with 150 business systems (and counting), including applicant tracking, time management, benefits, compensation, learning and development, and performance management solutions. In turn, Personio customers can quickly and seamlessly connect the apps they use every day to their Personio account, ensuring their Personio data syncs across systems and giving them back their valuable time.
By partnering with Finch, Personio is taking its commitment to integrated experiences and employer choice to the next level by making it easier than ever for third-party developers to integrate with its API.
“Our new partnership with Finch promises to rapidly expand the number and range of third-party applications that function seamlessly with Personio, which will open up a world of integrative possibilities, particularly for our customers in Europe. In turn, we will be able to better serve our mission to streamline people workflow by further reducing the need for repetitive admin tasks across the employee journey.”
Hugues Vincent, Head of Partnerships at Personio
Together, Finch and Personio aren’t just making people operations better and easier for Personio customers; we’re helping to address a much larger and far-reaching problem: the inaccessibility of business-critical employment data. The reality is, employment data is dispersed and siloed across thousands of payroll and HR systems, and that is impeding efficiency and software functionality across the business landscape.
Meanwhile, business users have grown accustomed to the seamless digital experiences they’ve experienced in consumer apps, and are growing to expect that the business applications they use are also integrated from the start. The Finch-Personio partnership is an important step toward making that a reality for even more innovators.
“We’re thrilled to be working so closely with a developer friendly HR system like Personio that recognizes the importance of innovation and employer choice. Not only will our relationship give Personio customers more options, as we look to expand Finch’s international coverage, Personio will be an important partner in helping us (and, by extension, the developers who build with Finch) gain a better understanding of local markets and the nuances of building a global solution.”
Runae Lee, Head of Partnerships at Finch
Developers who build B2B applications with Finch can make it easy for their users to connect their Personio accounts in seconds. The process is easy: Users simply permission the Personio sync through Finch Connect, and our front-end UI that allows them to safely and securely grant data access through the use of an API token. Finch Connect can be displayed at any point in an application’s customer flow and handles credential validation, multi-factor authentication, and error handling for each system Finch supports.
Once a user has gone through the full authentication process, the application can sync real-time employment data within the user’s Personio account.
If you’re building a B2B application and want to leverage employment data to give your customers a deeply integrated product experience, sign up to get API keys today or reach out to our team with any questions.
Finch is excited to announce that we’ve been included on GGV Capital's API-First Index.
GGV Capital is a global investment firm with $9.2 billion under management. It tracks the activity of VC deals for 120+ private companies to find those with the most promising approaches to API commercialization.
GGV’s API-First Index focuses on API-led startups whose primary goal is developing and delivering scalable APIs, so their clients can build better products and services while improving the agility of their development process.
GGV recently expanded the index to include those that have each raised over $50 million in funding.
The index underscores the critical role APIs play in shaping the future of business and technology by highlighting the increasing importance of APIs as drivers of innovation and growth.
“We are going all-in on API companies because they will fundamentally simplify software development. APIs will allow developers to offload lower-value and time-consuming components of application development so they can focus on higher-value work,” states GGV.
The API-First Index delivers a valuable benchmark for companies that want to keep pace with the rapidly evolving API landscape, and provides insights into emerging API trends to help businesses and investors identify potential partners and investment opportunities.
In 2022, the companies listed on the API-First Index raised approximately $2.1 billion in total funding, a 70% decrease from 2021, but 19% higher than 2020 and 45% higher than 2019.
“2021 was an outlier year for the VC industry broadly, including API-first companies. We believe it’s important to establish that 2021—catalyzed by historically low interest rates and rapid digital adoption spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic—was a once-in-a-decade moment,” said GGV in its 2022 Year in Review.
The context provided around VC activity in 2021 is important. For example, the number of deals in 2022 also decreased, but the average size of deals increased to approximately $60 million—50% higher than deals in 2019 and 2020. It could be that investors are targeting more mature companies and later-stage funding rounds, since these companies require bigger investments to scale their operations.
While the startup ecosystem has continued to see more diminished funding since 2021, the increase from the preceding years is a good sign. VC funding certainly hasn’t dried up and could be poised for a slow rebound as investors focus on making more informed decisions about companies’ potential for revenue growth.
Finch’s inclusion on the API-First Index demonstrates that the demand for employment data portability will continue to shape the future of the API space.
Employment data includes:
An employment data API like Finch provides secure access to sources of employment data—human resource information systems and payroll systems—with a single integration.
Employment data APIs make it possible for B2B applications across a variety of industries to leverage employment data to fuel innovative products and seamless customer experiences. Here are just some of the ways B2B applications are deploying employment data to change the future of workforce management, business operations, commercial finance, tax, and insurance:
Employment data APIs will play an increasingly important role in shaping the future of business as companies of every size, shape, and vertical increasingly demand integrated, data-driven experiences from the B2B applications that serve them.
Finch is a universal API for employment data.
We’re singularly positioned to provide you with mission-critical infrastructure for employment data across a wide range of verticals—including read-and-write compatibility with 200+ employment systems covering more than 88% of U.S. employers—and enable data transfers between employers and applications.
With more than five million API calls every day and tens of thousands of employer connections, Finch is the trusted HRIS and payroll API solution for discerning B2B applications. For more details, visit tryfinch.com.
According to a recent study by Corinium, 65% of insurance executives aren’t fully confident in the data that’s being used for quoting and claims validation. When insurance providers don’t have timely access to accurate data—especially employment data—millions of dollars are left on the table. The problem is, traditional processes to access employment data involve manual, time-consuming tasks and a heavy amount of resources.
That’s where Finch comes in.
On April 4, 2023, Ansel Parikh, co-founder and COO of Finch, led the webinar Insuring a Future: Keep Your Insurance Product Cutting Edge in 2023 to demonstrate how insurance providers can improve operational efficiency, benefits coverage, premium collections, and customer experience through the use of a unified employment data API.
He covered the following topics:
Below, we provide highlights from the webinar. You can also watch the complete recording by filling out the form below.
Employment data is the entire scope of information that sits in different systems of record across the entire employee lifecycle.
Employment data includes:
Finch focuses on the employment data that's housed in HR and payroll systems. And this information—particularly the granular information in payroll records around individual pay statements, specific deductions, past wages, and tips—has the power to streamline the process of insurance workflows and open up new customer segments for different types of insurance lines.
There are three prevalent ways insurance providers can use employment data to innovate their processes:
We go further into the details for each use case below.
1. Streamline quoting
The insurance industry is always looking to improve the quoting process for different lines of insurance such as worker’s compensation, commercial, group life, and group health.
Typically, quoting for these lines includes asking prospects to complete 10+ manual forms that require them to log into different systems or pull detailed information like an EIN to find gross wages per employee for the last month. In total, prospects have to input over 25 lines of data—including location details, company information, and employee salaries—just to generate a quote.
This manual labor slows down the quoting process and prohibits the likelihood of conversion.
“We've talked to many insurance providers who see a considerable drop off…when people have to continually fill out form after form after form. At Finch, our goal is to turn it into a 30-second process, where that prospect syncs their employment data instead, specifically the information needed for quoting, [by pulling] it straight from the source of truth,” said Ansel.
Access to this data allows insurance providers to pre-fill many form fields, so they can deliver quotes faster using real-time data from the prospect’s payroll system. Because employment data from payroll systems goes to the IRS every three months, the information has already been validated, helping to produce more accurate quotes in addition to streamlining their delivery.
2. Validate claims
Similar to the quoting process, data collection for submitting a claim is onerous for the policyholder. Claims forms require dozens of different lines of data that need to be self-reported by the employer and the employee, which then have to be individually verified by insurance providers’ claims processing teams. All of that time adds up.
Alternatively, insurance providers can pull this information directly from payroll systems via API, including fields like date of employment to confirm that a claim is being made by a current employee. Having programmatic access to this data helps insurance providers verify claims eligibility quickly, seamlessly, and accurately by pre-filing forms to save time and reduce self-reporting errors.
In other words, when employment data comes directly from the HR or payroll system—the source of truth—it helps insurance providers determine if the claim is valid right from the start. The insurance provider knows exactly who the person making a claim is, that the date of the claim aligns with their actual employment dates, and if they’re even eligible to file a claim, all within minutes.
3. Unlock pay-as-you-go premium payments
When it comes to workers compensation, insurance providers often leave premiums on the table—especially for highly seasonal businesses—by waiting until the end of a policy to reconcile payments. This also creates surprise bills for customers and reduces customer satisfaction.
Alternatively, when insurance providers check to ensure the right premiums are being charged throughout the course of the policy, as opposed to the year-end audit period, they have the ability to change their customers’ payment structures when appropriate.
For example, if a ski resort’s policy starts in the summer, underwriting is based on the number of employees they have during that time. It takes a full-year cycle and a premium audit to notice the number of employees increased three-fold during the winter months. As a result, risk is mispriced, the ski resort doesn’t pay an accurate premium for their policy, and they receive an unexpected bill after the audit to shore up costs.
When insurance providers have the ability to unlock a pay-as-you-go model, real-time employment data creates more accurate premiums and more efficient cash collection throughout the policy’s term without mispricing risks for a large chunk of the year. Premiums can be adjusted as the risk profile evolves, the policyholder doesn’t receive surprise bills, and customer satisfaction increases. This becomes especially important during the renewal cycle, when insurance providers are looking to retain customers.
A pay-as-you-go program that utilizes automated employment data feeds provides a more efficient, cost-effective, and accurate solution for insurance providers, agents, and policyholders.
“When [employment] data is accessible, and the process is streamlined, it reduces friction for the policyholders’ renewal. The data also is processed in a much more standardized, ingestible format. But what’s most exciting about this pay-as-you-go model is that policyholders love it. It allows them to have more working capital, and that’s incredibly valuable,” said Ansel.
However, as valuable as employment data can be across the policy lifecycle, it’s a major problem to access this information even today.
The main challenge of accessing employment data is market fragmentation. There are over 5,700 HR and payroll systems being used by U.S. businesses today, and the top 10 payroll systems only account for about 55% of the market.
So, even if an insurance provider integrates with all 10 of these systems, the employment data of almost half of businesses in the U.S. would remain inaccessible. Ensuring proper coverage of an insurance provider’s target market means integrating with hundreds of HR and payroll systems. That’s no small feat.
There are three different ways insurance providers try to gather information from HR and payroll systems:
Build individual integrations one by one
The problem is, individual builds take up a lot of engineering resources, costing hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars over the life of the integration.
“We've seen teams spend over a year just to build one integration, but then you still have to maintain that integration for the future. That’s a consistent resource drain,” said Ansel.
Set up a secure file transfer protocol (SFTP)
Other times, insurance providers will get customers’ IT teams involved to set up an SFTP. This means that the systems involved need to exchange flash files, which usually leads to a configuration problem, because every system has a different format.
“You're introducing a ton of friction for every single customer in order for them to share the key information you need to streamline these workflows,” said Ansel.
Manually upload different data sets
Asking customers to manually upload employment data from their HR and payroll systems isn’t just labor intensive. Manual uploads introduce more risk because there’s a chance that the data isn’t up to date. It also increases the chances of people misreporting data, not out of malice, but because the process itself lends itself to human error.
None of these options create seamless experiences for insurance providers or their customers, who expect systems to be able to talk to one another.
APIs allow secure data transfers between two or more systems to happen in real time, and different kinds of APIs exist to serve different datasets. An employment data API provides secure access to sources of employment data: HRIS and payroll systems. And they do it with a single integration, so it’s as easy for customers to transfer data as it is for them to sign into their payroll accounts.
Utilizing an employment data API like Finch for integrations leads to substantial material benefits that can boost return on equity (ROE).
Improve efficiency and reduce operational costs
Integrating with Finch’s standardized API schema unlocks programmatic access to hundreds of HR and payroll systems. Compared to building one-off integrations in-house, the time and cost savings are tremendous.
One Finch client, for example, now has direct employment data connections with more than 3,000 of their customers, and they were able to reduce their development costs by 75% by aggregating that access through Finch instead of building those integrations one by one.
Save on support resources
Without an API, accurately syncing data between systems via SFTP or manual uploads often requires an investment of at least 1.5 hours in support calls and dedicated support team resources to walk customers through the specific syncing instructions for different payroll providers. These approaches don't scale well, and they divert insurance providers’ resources away from core objectives like driving ROE and renewal rates.
In contrast, setting up API-enabled employment data feeds is quick and easy, reducing the number of support inquiries that policyholders make and requiring less support resources.
Unlock new customer segments
By allowing insurance providers to offer more customers seamless quoting, onboarding, and claims experiences, universal employment data APIs like Finch increase insurance providers’ potential to unlock new customer segments.
“There's a halo effect of saying, ‘I'm compatible with your payroll system,’ because customers trust that payroll system for very core pieces of information and operations. Your association and compatibility with that system extends that credibility to your product. Potential customers are more likely to trust your product because it talks to systems they already trust,” said Ansel.
Improved accuracy, transparency, and risk management
Unlike manual data entry, which is prone to human error, automated employment data feeds via API allow for improved data accuracy and visibility, both of which are crucial to the calculation of workers’ compensation premiums and claims payments. In turn, insurance providers can better manage risk and make more informed decisions.
InsurePay is a technology company that offers a cloud-based payment platform for workers' compensation insurance premiums. Their platform integrates with insurance providers, payroll providers, and brokers to automate and simplify the premium calculation and payment process.
Finch’s API ensures data is flowing compliantly and securely from the policyholder's payroll system of record to InsurePay as well as the insurance provider.
“We enjoy partnering with InsurePay, because they understand all the different pieces of the policy lifecycle and where improvements can come from. InsurePay wanted to partner with Finch, because we understand the value of automating payroll connectivity and unlocking a pay-as-you-go model,” said Ansel.
Our goal at Finch is to simplify access to HR and payroll systems with one simple, streamlined integration.
With Finch, insurance providers can map to one unified data structure, capture more edge cases, and expand their integration network anytime we add a new system. We’re singularly positioned to provide insurance providers with mission-critical infrastructure for employment data across a wide range of verticals, including read-and-write compatibility with 200+ HR and payroll systems used by more than 88% of U.S. businesses.
To learn how Finch can serve your insurance product, reach out to our team or have your developers sign up for a free account to begin building Finch today.
To learn more, visit tryfinch.com.
Just a few weeks ago, we announced a new set of Jobs Management endpoints, which make it easy for developers to programmatically view the status of data sync jobs for any employer connection. Now, we’re excited to share a new user interface (UI) in the dashboard that empowers any user to do the same. We call it the Data Syncs UI.
The Data Syncs UI enables any Finch user to view the status of scheduled and requested data syncs through a user-friendly dashboard. This gives developers, support teams, and product managers alike an accessible source of truth for the status of data syncs across all connected customers.
The Data Syncs UI is designed to make it easy for anyone in your organization, regardless of their technical expertise, to view and manage data sync job activity.
For example, product managers can now monitor the health of connections across their applications without the need for engineering support. The intuitive interface gives them visibility into every active and past connection, so they can proactively address syncing issues and provide timely information to customers (or our support team) as needed.
Meanwhile, the Data Syncs UI empowers support representatives to quickly assess the status of customers’ connections and efficiently field questions and requests. This helps them provide a best-in-class experience for your customers.
To access the Data Syncs UI, simply log in to your Finch dashboard and click on any of your individual customers under the 'Employers' tab to see a full list of syncs and their status. If you aren’t already using Finch today, but want to learn how employment data can help power your next product innovation, sign up for a free account, or talk to a member of our team today.
Today, we’re excited to announce two major upgrades to Connect: authentication fallback and improved configurability. These enhancements give you more flexibility and control over how employers authenticate through Connect.
Fallback is an alternative path to authenticate when your customers are having difficulty connecting with the primary authentication method. This enables employers to connect through Finch without the need to contact support.
If an employer attempts to authenticate through Connect and cannot complete the primary authentication method, Connect will display instructions for the employer to connect manually as a fallback option. Once Finch sets up the account, the data for this connection will flow through the Finch API as usual. Check out our docs for a complete list of providers and more implementation details.
Finch may display various authentication methods to employers depending on different providers. Several common examples of authentication include credential auth, OAuth, and API keys. Each authentication method has its pros and cons, some of which include friction to connect, cost to employers, and data refresh frequency.
The new and improved authorization configurability allows you to decide what configurations to enable in Connect across providers, including:
To learn more, read the configuration docs for more details.
Both Connect updates are immediately available. Please reach out to Sales or your Account Manager to enable authentication fallback and config. If you don’t have API keys yet, you can sign up for a free account today!
We are thrilled to announce the launch of our new Data Refresh endpoint, allowing you to request new data whenever you need it.
The Finch API syncs data with providers on a set cadence. This enables Finch to provide developers a reliable, low-latency API. But, we know sometimes you need to refresh your data sooner than Finch's retrieval schedule.
Data Refresh is a new endpoint which lets you enqueue a new job on demand without waiting for the next scheduled sync.
We are excited about enabling use cases where near-real-time data is critical. For example:
First, you’ll need a way to trigger a refresh in your application. This is typically triggered by a refresh button built into the product or through some backend workflow. Then you can use this workflow to send a request to our POST /jobs/automated endpoint and we’ll kick off a new job to fetch any new updates. While the job is running, you can use our GET /jobs/automated endpoint to check on the status of the job. After the data is updated, you can call each individual data endpoint to retrieve the latest data. Check out our docs to learn more.
But that’s not all—we’ve also released new Jobs Management endpoints to give you more visibility and control into jobs run by Finch. With these endpoints, you’ll also be able to view the status of a data sync job, as well as timestamps related to key lifecycle events by sending a request to GET /jobs/automated. Use this endpoint to understand and communicate with your customers the last updated time, status of the current sync, and more.
The /jobs endpoint is available to everyone today. Anyone with API keys, please reach out to Sales or your Account Manager to enable the feature in production. If you don’t have API keys, sign up for a free account!
Transform 2023, the premiere HR conference for business and people leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors, is running from Monday, March 27 to Wednesday, March 29 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Previously known as HR Transform, this year, the conference has expanded the experience to include global leadership, entrepreneurs, and investors. Transform 2023 will offer opportunities to foster more in-depth relationship building, inform modern enterprise policies and programs from a broader perspective, and increase the scale of tech innovation and business transformation. Their goal is to “transform the workforce, workplace, and work of the future.”
We’ll be set up at Booth 501. Come say hello, and grab some limited-edition swag while you’re there!
Our universal API integrates with hundreds of HR, payroll, and benefits systems to help employers streamline onboarding, optimize employee benefits, and unlock tax savings, among many other use cases.
With more than five million API calls every day and tens of thousands of employer connections, Finch is the #1 employment data API.
We’ve browsed through all the inspired offerings on the Transform 2023 Agenda and highlighted events the Finch team is most excited about below:
We recently raised $40 million in our Series B round, co-led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures with additional investments from QED, PruVen, and Altman Capital.
Finch is putting this capital to work by investing in both new and existing products, and expanding our team to support customers and partners across HR, fintech, and benefits verticals. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for our latest takes on the future of work.
We’re excited to announce Built In has named Finch to its 2023 Best Places To Work! Finch earned 12th place among Built In’s 50 Best Startups To Work for in San Francisco 2023.
The annual awards program includes companies of all sizes — from startups to those in enterprise markets — and honors both remote-first employers as well as companies in large tech markets across the U.S.
“At Finch, we put employee wellbeing first because we believe life and work should fit together. That’s what sets us apart and what has earned us this recognition,” said Jeremy Zhang, CEO at Finch. “We’re proud to have built a culture founded on empathy, meaningful work and opportunities for growth, creating a workplace that allows our employees to show up as their best, most authentic selves — inside and outside of the office.”
Being recognized as one of the Best Places to Work in San Francisco is a clear demonstration of Finch’s people-first culture. Here’s how we help our people do their best work:
Built In determines the winners of Best Places to Work based on an algorithm, using company data about compensation and benefits. To reflect the benefits candidates are searching for more frequently on Built In, the program also weighs criteria like remote and flexible work opportunities, programs for DEI and other people-first cultural offerings.
“It’s my honor to congratulate this year’s Best Places to Work winners,” said Sheridan Orr, Chief Marketing Officer at Built In. “These exemplary companies understand their people are their most valuable asset, and they’ve stepped up to meet the modern professional’s new expectations, including the desire to work for companies that deliver purpose, growth and inclusion. These winners set the stage for a human-centered future of work, and we can’t wait to see that future unfold.”
Find out what Finch’s award-winning culture is all about. Apply to one of our open positions!
Today, we're excited to announce that Finch has raised $40M in our Series B round, co-led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures, with additional investments from QED, PruVen, and Altman Capital.
The workforce is the backbone of the U.S. economy. From retirement to health insurance to mental health, the responsibilities of employers have increased significantly over the years. Despite the challenges posed by the macro backdrop, U.S. employment has been growing steadily, with the unemployment rate at its lowest in 54 years.
However, the employment ecosystem faces significant challenges due to a lack of data accessibility. Over 580M+ U.S. employment records and $15T of funds are processed across 20,000+ employment data systems, including payroll, HRIS, benefits administration, and others. Moreover, the ecosystem lacks necessary connectivity, with records mainly passed via manual data entry, SFTP, and emails filled with sensitive information. We are here to change that by making it easy to access data and direct payments across the sector with our unified employment API.
We've made significant progress since announcing our Series A just eight months ago—
With this funding, we will accelerate connectivity across the employment data ecosystem and help employers and employees use the products and services they need to grow and thrive. We're putting this capital to work by investing in new and existing products and expanding our team to support customers and partners across the HR, Fintech, and Benefits verticals.
Our vision is to build a future where employment is connected and programmable. With Finch, applications can instantly gain compatibility with 200+ employment systems to provide products and services to employers.
Join our team to help shape the future of employment!
With the passage of the SECURE Act 2.0, automatically enrolling employees in sponsored retirement plans—and automatically increasing their contributions—is now a legal imperative. In response, retirement plan providers are implementing API technology to quickly and easily auto-enroll 401(k) and 403(b)participants and meet the new requirements.
In December 2022, the Securing a Strong Retirement Act (SECURE Act 2.0) was signed into law. Among the provisions outlined by SECURE 2.0 are new requirements for automatic plan enrollment and contribution escalation. Effective for plan years after December 31, 2024, they compel retirement plan providers to automatically enroll employees upon eligibility in new 401(k) and 403(b) plans and automatically increase the contributions of enrolled employees to that plan every year.
While these updates are exciting from a participation standpoint, the new requirements also come with the potential to create incredible administrative burdens especially in cases where employers are rapidly growing their workforce. In response, innovative retirement plan providers are implementing API solutions that integrate with employers’ HR information systems and payroll systems to ensure seamless SECURE 2.0 compliance. In this article, we explore the SECURE Act 2.0’s auto-enrollment and auto-escalation requirements plus the API technology that retirement plan providers are turning to make true automation a reality.
Building on the work of the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019, SECURE Act 2.0 lays out widespread changes to the U.S. retirement system. The act is intended to make it more affordable for employers to sponsor retirement savings plans, and easier and more attractive for employees to participate.
The provisions of SECURE Act 2.0 include but aren’t limited to:
In total, the plan details dozens of new rules and regulations. Retirement plan providers as well as employers should consult qualified legal counsel to understand the full extent of the impact of the law on their operations.
One of the most broadly impactful provisions of SECURE 2.0 is detailed under Section 101 of the law, which stipulates that new 401(k) and 403(b) plans must now automatically enroll employees upon eligibility. According to a summary issued by the Senate Committee on Finance, the decision to require auto-enrollment a matter of financial equity:
“One of the main reasons many Americans reach retirement age with little or no savings is that too few workers are offered an opportunity to save for retirement through their employers. However, even for those employees who are offered a retirement plan at work, many do not participate. But automatic enrollment in 401(k) plans…significantly increases participation. Since first defined and approved by the Treasury Department in 1998, automatic enrollment has boosted participation by eligible employees generally, and particularly for Black, Latinx, and lower-wage employees.”
Per SECURE 2.0, employees must be initially enrolled at a minimum of 3% of their gross pay but not more than 10%. Plans are also required to increase the distribution of enrolled employees each year by 1% until contribution reaches at least 10%, but not more than 15%.
Exceptions to the provisions include all current 401(k) and 403(b) plans, which are grandfathered into pre-SECURE 2.0 rules, as well as businesses with 10 or fewer employees, businesses under 3 years old, church plans, and government plans. Employees also have the right to opt out of enrollment or distribution escalation at any time.
Automatically enrolling all employees to a retirement plan upon eligibility is a significant undertaking. By SECURE 2.0’s definition, “automated” enrollment simply means enrolling those employees on an opt-out rather than an opt-in basis.
But that definition of automated doesn’t necessarily translate to a simpler, less manual process. A plan still needs to be notified of newly eligible employees and provided with the employee census data and payroll authorization it needs to process enrollment and manage recurring plan deductions. Without the right technology in place, employers and plans are forced to communicate all of this information by email, phone, spreadsheet, or secure file transfer. Not only is the back-and-forth time consuming, it increases the risk of error and noncompliance with SECURE 2.0’s provisions, and the potential of penalties and fine.. The hassle and risk only compounds in cases where employers are rapidly adding new employees.
To avoid this drain of resources and to eliminate the risk of SECURE 2.0 noncompliance, true automation is critical. Retirement plan providers are now turning to API integrations with employers’ HR information and payroll systems to eliminate the manual steps historically needed to enroll employees and manage their deductions on an ongoing basis.
With an API integration, retirement plan providers have a direct, permissioned data connection to employment systems of record. This allows plans and employers to quickly and seamlessly exchange the data needed to enroll employees in 401(k) and 403(b) plans and manage their retirement deductions. What’s more, these data exchanges can be triggered by events without manual intervention, which means no person has to shoulder the responsibility of ensuring newly eligible employees get enrolled. The API integration takes care of it automatically in the truest sense of the word.
Consider this example:
As a result, both the employer and the retirement plan provider save hours of administrative work and avoid delays to plan enrollment.
Retirement plan providers looking to enable HRIS and payroll system connectivity have a couple of options: build one-to-one integrations with all of the HRIS and payroll systems their customers use or partner with a turnkey, universal API that integrates with hundreds of HRIS and payroll systems at once.
Learn more about both approaches to HRIS and payroll integrations in our build vs. buy report.
The first approach offers plan providers ultimate control over their integration strategy but requires niche payroll expertise and a significant, ongoing investment of development resources. The second option turns over some of that control to a integrations partner but also comes with distinct advantages:
Finch makes it easy for retirement plan providers to integrate with 200+ HRIS and payroll systems with a single integration. Not only does our universal API enable the instant retrieval of real-time employee census data needed to automate 401(k) and 403(b) enrollment, it also allows plan providers to push changes directly to payroll. Using Finch’s Benefits endpoint, plan providers can initiate and manage pre-tax, post-tax, recurring, and one-time payroll deductions as a dollar amount or percentage of employees’ gross pay, ensuring easy compliance with the SECURE Act 2.0’s auto-escalation clause.
Meanwhile, the employer sponsoring the plan doesn’t have to lift a finger to upload deduction files or manually enter changes, saving them from hours of ongoing administrative work and avoiding countless potential human errors and potential fines.
Learn more about how retirement plan providers use Finch to build best-in-class customer experiences.
The auto-enrollment and auto-escalation provisions of the SECURE Act 2.0 will drive retirement plan participation, but not without potential challenges and hurdles. Luckily, retirement plan providers who want to stay compliant while avoiding hassles and potential fines can leverage Finch’s universal HRIS and payroll system API to make true auto-enrollment and contributions management simple and secure. Register for a free test account to explore how to leverage Finch’s HRIS and payroll integrations today.
As the world braces for a potential recession, many small and medium-sized businesses are still grappling with the lingering effects of quarantine regulations, pandemic-related shutdowns, and subsequent declines in revenue. Fortunately, some of the relief programs the U.S. government introduced during the pandemic are still in effect, including the Employee Retention Credit (ERC)—and many SMBs are relying on tax credit service providers more than ever to help them make the most of the assistance available.
But as more service providers enter an already crowded space, they are quickly finding that they can’t compete for SMBs’ business if they don’t offer the modern, automated experiences that SMBs have come to expect. Among the most important automations that tax credit service providers can provide is leveraging SMBs’ own accounting and employment data to seamlessly determine eligibility and apply for ERC and other programs. The key—and challenge—is accessing that data.
In this article, we’ll walk you through how high-quality integrations with SMBs’ accounting and employment systems are helping tax credit service providers like yourself retrieve the real-time data needed to make fast, accurate ERC eligibility determinations, auto-fill application forms, and provide a best-in-class experience to SMBs when they need it most.
One of the methods of determining ERC eligibility is demonstrating a significant decline in gross receipts compared to the same quarter of the previous fiscal year. Meanwhile, the ERC application calls for company financial data, including data from profit and loss statements, balance sheets, cash flow documentation, expense reports, and income statements for the period in which the SMB is seeking relief.
In other words, determining eligibility and applying for ERC is highly dependent on providing detailed, accurate accounting data. Without the right technology in place, obtaining said data is a laborious undertaking that requires digging through financial paperwork, exporting and uploading piecemeal datasets, and/or manually entering data field by field. Not only does this put undue strain on resource-strapped SMBs, it comes with a high risk of human error, which may mean having to repeat the application process or worse: being denied the tax credit altogether.
Tax credit service providers can mitigate these pain points by implementing API integrations with SMB accounting systems like QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, and NetSuite. In doing so, you can instantly and automatically retrieve all of the historical and real-time data points needed. In turn, SMBs get faster eligibility determinations, quicker access to funds, and are relieved of the burdens of tracking down the information themselves.
In addition to accounting data, the ERC application requires businesses to provide robust employment data—a catchall term for the employee directory and payroll information stored in SMBs’ HR and payroll systems like ADP, Gusto, Paychex, and more. Like accounting data, manually pulling and uploading employment data into an application is a tedious resource-drain for SMBs.
Through API integrations with SMBs’ employment systems, you can meet the requirements of the ERC application while relieving SMBs of the friction and hassles of manual data retrieval. Built properly, integrations with employment systems can instantly retrieve:
And because this data is coming directly from the system of record, you can rest assured that the data retrieved is accurate.
Tax credit service providers have two choices: you can build integrations to accounting, HRIS, and payroll systems yourself or outsource the integrations to trusted integration partners. Before determining which approach to take, it’s important to consider the following factors:
Market fragmentation
The U.S. alone is home to over 5,700 HRIS and payroll providers, and the top three systems only have a 44% share of the market. That leaves a huge long-tail, with each other provider accounting for no more than 4% of the market. U.S. accounting software is less fragmented but is likewise seeing increased competition and an expanding long-tail. In other words, covering your customer base in a meaningful way will mean building integrations with potentially dozens or hundreds of systems.
Your internal capacity
When integrating with an employment or accounting system, you can expect the project to take a minimum of three months for a basic data pull and anywhere from six to nine months to achieve full read-and-write access. Before you set out to build, you’ll want to make sure you have the capacity to take on the work as well as flexibility in your go-to-market timeline—keeping in mind that time spent on integrations is time you could otherwise devote to perfecting and evolving your core product.
The complexities of data mapping
Every accounting platform runs on a different dataset, each with its own approach to naming and structure. Standardizing this data so that it is usable by your application is one of the more intricate and important aspects of integrations, and it’s easy to get wrong.
The cost of building
Integrations come with a hefty price tag when you consider the average engineer’s salary and the hours they spend establishing data connections. If you assume that three engineers will work on an integration for three months, that puts the soft costs of just your initial buildout in the ballpark of $200,000. Then, there are the ongoing costs to consider, like the fees many employment and accounting systems charge to use their API.
Outsourcing integrations allows you to avoid these barriers and complications. Universal APIs, a type of integration partner, offer a one-to-many solution that can get you to market faster and more cost-effectively. In effect, a single integration with a universal API connects you to a multitude of systems at once, saving you the hassle of building and maintaining each connection yourself.
Implemented together, Codat’s universal Accounting API and Finch’s universal API for employment systems offer tax credit service providers a distinct advantage. Because we are experts in our respective fields, we understand the nuances and complexities of employment and accounting systems like no one else. In turn, we pull, map, and standardize higher quality, more actionable data and offer deeper data coverage that meets all of your data requirements—for the ERC and beyond—without compromise. Perhaps most importantly, Codat and Finch afford you turnkey accounting and employment integration solutions that meet your tax credit data needs in a fraction of the time it would take to build in-house, allowing you to invest more time, money, and focus on your application and the exceptional experiences you’re offering your customers.
In the end, building with Codat and Finch gives you the tools you need to get to market faster, onboard SMBs faster, cover more of the accounting and employment systems your customers use, and, ultimately, help your customers claim the tax credits that are so crucial to their growth.
If you’re interested in learning more about market-leading accounting integrations, contact Codat today. For the most reliable employment system integrations, sign up to retrieve your free sandbox API keys or reach out to Finch with questions.
We’re excited to announce that GGV Capital, in partnership with Crunchbase, has named Finch to its inaugural Embedded Fintech 50, a list recognizing the most promising fintech companies in the eyes of startup investors.
GGV Capital convened 57 other investment firms to nominate and vote on the 50 honorees. Having raised more than $12 billion collectively, the Embedded Fintech 50 demonstrates the enthusiasm of venture capital investors in the growth and innovation of this sector. In celebration, honorees will ring the Closing Bell at Nasdaq MarketSite today.
People are the most important component of an organization, yet the data required to understand a company’s investment in its workforce is siloed across payroll, HR and benefits systems,” said Jeremy Zhang, CEO at Finch. “Our technology is addressing an important challenge in the employment data ecosystem as companies have been unable to easily derive and act on insights from those disparate data sources, until now. We are grateful to be recognized in this inaugural list and look forward to driving the next generation of automation in a space that has been underserved thus far by the technology industry.
For the inaugural list, 175 companies were nominated, and 50 were selected through a voting process that required the nomination of portfolio and non-portfolio companies. Nomination criteria included companies with a primary product focus on fintech, U.S. as a primary market, and Series A stage. Embedded fintech is defined as financial service platforms or financial service providers that integrate into commercial or financial service platforms.
Embedded fintech is a bright spot in today’s market, and it is exciting to see how companies are democratizing access to financial services through technology,” said Hans Tung, managing partner at GGV Capital. “We are excited for the continued development of the embedded fintech landscape and further creative innovations to come. Congratulations to the Embedded Fintech 50 honorees!
To see the complete list of the 50 honorees, visit embeddedfintech50.com.
To get started with our award-winning API platform, sign up for a free account at https://dashboard.tryfinch.com/signup.
Sam (he/him) brings over 10 years of experience building and leading post-sales organizations from customer success to account management. He was most recently a Senior Director of Customer Success at Mezmo where he tripled the team and contributed to a 3x increase in ARR in 3 years. During his tenure he was responsible for unlocking functional value and growth for customers across their journey with Mezmo. He oversaw Customer Success Management, Renewal Operations, and Solutions Architects.
I’ve been lucky to work at stellar companies at various stages that prioritized customer trust, from AdRoll to Segment to Mezmo. Finch fit that pattern and I’m excited to build best-practices and a world-class team so we can scale trust at this key inflection point for the company’s future. I look forward to working with an amazingly dedicated team and pushing the organization to deliver the best customer experience possible.
At Finch, Sam is focused on building and overseeing a world-class technical success and support team. For him, that means cultivating clear processes to handle customer issues and feedback, hiring and retaining people who deeply empathize with developers, and unlocking new insights into how customers use our product so we continue to build for evolving workflows.
Pairing his east coast grit with west coast creativity, Sam is a proud New Jerseyan, who has called San Francisco home for the past 15 years. In his free time, he loves playing and watching basketball, taking to the mountains, and traveling with his wife.
Interested in joining Sam at Finch? We’re hiring! Head over to our careers page to check out our open positions.
Workplace connectivity and digital employee experience (DEX) will be a major focus for organizations in the coming year, as many incorporate learnings from experiments with remote/hybrid budgets and policies since the beginning of the pandemic.
Verticalized intranet
Workplace scenario analysis
Employee resource group enablement
2022 was a historical year for fintech, as the U.S. Fed raised interest rates by 2.36% over just a 6-month span. As we dive into 2023, many businesses are still adjusting to rapidly changing financial conditions, and looking to find savings where possible across major expense categories.
Payroll financing
Billing seats management
Local tax credits
Employees take into account ancillary benefits as part of their decision to join or stay at a company. Depending on the key characteristics of a workforce, expanding offerings beyond traditional retirement and health benefits can go a long way.
Childcare benefits
Pet insurance benefits
Career development benefits
Register for a test account now to see how Finch can help you integrate with more than 180 tools across HR tech, fintech and benefits, so your startup can focus on building product, rather than be bogged down by messy integrations.
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This month’s updates include support for custom fields, which unlocks a multitude of use cases, and ethnicity, which employers can use to track progress on initiatives such as DEIB.
Custom fields has consistently been one of our most requested features with a multitude of use cases, ranging from capturing employee t-shirt sizes, to recording eligibility for fringe benefits, to storing data such as variable compensation targets. Finch defines custom fields as fields created by employers which do not yet exist in the system, and we’re happy to announce that custom field support is now available for the following systems with expanded availability across more platforms later next year:
While the range of data in these fields can vary, we already see multiple use cases leveraging common fields to drive a better employer experience.
Read the developer docs to learn more about the custom fields addition to the “employment” endpoint.
Ethnicity is a valuable datapoint that organizations aim to track to provide leadership and HR teams insights into workplace metrics such as diversity, hiring (recruitment, applications, interviews, and job offers), compensation, performance, and employee engagement. And now, it is also a field that is supported by Finch in the following HRIS systems:
Similar to custom fields, developers use ethnicity data to deliver deeper insights into an organization. Here are a few use cases that benefit from the additional granularity Finch provides:
Learn more about the ethnicity addition to the “individual” endpoint.
That's a wrap for December! If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for free access to put our latest features to work for you.
The payroll landscape is constantly evolving, and staying on top of emerging challenges and budding trends is imperative, if not exactly easy.
Recently, we sat down with Keely Aguayo, a nine-year payroll veteran and Finch’s own payroll and benefits advisor, to talk about what’s new and next in the space. Having worked in payroll leadership positions at some of the most exciting and fast-growing companies, she offered tremendous insights on post-pandemic complexities, reporting shortcomings, and more that we didn’t want to keep to ourselves.
Diana:
Great to chat with you today. As a quick intro to the audience, my name is Diana Liu. I’m the first business hire at Finch and currently work on product and channel partnerships. I am incredibly excited to interview our resident payroll expert, Keely, about all things payroll today. Keely, would you mind giving a quick intro about yourself and your background, as well as what you're doing at Finch?
Keely:
Sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Keely. I've been working with venture-backed startups to manage payroll, benefits, and compliance for about nine years now, and I am currently advising Finch on all payroll and benefits needs in relation to their product.
Diana:
Awesome, thank you so much for that intro. So, you've had a chance to do payroll for some of the most tech-forward companies in HR tech. I'm really curious to know – what are some interesting trends that you're seeing? What are some of the biggest improvements that you've been noticing over time?
Keely:
I remember when I first started doing payroll, you had two options. You either went with basic ADP or you went with Paychex or QuickBooks payroll. There weren’t a ton of options out there, and it has been so interesting, almost mind boggling, to see how many new players have come into the market to do payroll and benefits, or one or the other, or HRIS. There are so many names out there that are doing this really well.
I would say the biggest trend that I'm seeing now is rather than just being a payroll provider, providers are now trying to be an all-in-one solution. They want to manage payroll, they want to manage benefits, they want to manage compliance, they want to be able to do all your state filings, help you with registrations, help you really hire these distributed workforces that are becoming so common these days in the tech industry. And it's been really great to see. Obviously, some companies are doing it better than others, but it's so great to know that there are so many options out there now for people to look at when they're looking for a new payroll benefits and compliance provider.
Diana:
I'm also really curious, do you see any high-level or major differences between providers that service primarily SMBs versus enterprise employers?
Keely:
No, I feel like the provider that works best for a company is very much company-specific. And what that means is, what is their priority? Is their priority a pretty HRIS system that can have all the functionality that they need? Is their priority, "Look, we have a really complex payroll system. We have three different payroll cycles. We have to figure this out. We need a payroll system where the payroll module needs to be super functional." Or maybe it's just, "I don't want to do anything manual, so I want to make sure you are currently integrated with all of my benefits providers, 401(k), health—that it's an all-in-one shop."
And so, it really depends on what the company is looking for, because it's very hard for these payroll providers to do all of it well, right? They're going to concentrate on one section of what they offer. Some of them have an amazing HRIS system, but their payroll's really manual, or it's lacking, or it's not as up to date as some of the other providers on the market. Whereas some others really concentrate on the payroll side of things. Maybe they started out as a payroll provider, and they moved into HRIS, but they weren't able to make their HRIS as functional and as great as their payroll. So, it's really company-specific.
Diana:
That makes a lot of sense. And I'm now thinking about my previous company, where, when the pandemic happened, people were allowed to start working remotely and they moved all over the place. I'm really curious to hear, what was your own experience managing payroll throughout the whole pandemic?
Keely:
It has definitely been a struggle for a lot of companies. I was remote prior to the pandemic and actually worked with a lot of remote companies, so it was a little bit easier for me to jump in. I knew the nuances. I knew how registrations were going to work, how filings were going to work. I knew that organizations would need to put in some kind of formal process for moves and whatnot. A lot of companies struggled in 2020. I worked with one company—they had 400 people in New York in 2020. At the end of 2020, they had 42 left.
Where did these 350 people go? Yes, some talked to their managers, some put in formal requests with HR, but some didn't say anything until they got their W-2 and were like, "Oh, so sorry, we actually moved across state lines. Can you correct us?" That’s a huge burden on not only the company but the payroll provider, and it's a huge cost, because to redo filings and regenerate forms and that kind of thing is both time consuming and very costly. So, it’s important to put a process around what that looks like but also, from a company standpoint, deciding if you’re going to allow it. Is this just something you are allowing for this year? Is this something you’re going to allow going forward? If you don't allow it, what does that look like?
So, it was a big struggle, and a lot of companies did not do well with it, while others did really well with it. It depended on how you approached it, how much you were on top of it, and what kind of information you provided to the employees. If you didn't tell them that they needed to communicate things, or you didn't give them a way to easily communicate things, it definitely caused a lot of struggles.
I would say the most I've ever seen companies struggle was early 2021, and it was really just fixing filings and W-2s and getting things straight and finding out where their workforce actually was. A big one was obviously if they changed countries, that's huge. “What are we going to do? How are we going to support this?” On the international side, there's a lot of players that have come onto the market since the pandemic started—new payroll providers that work in 120 countries and manage your entire workforce. And that is a byproduct of the pandemic and the issues it caused with US-based companies.
Diana:
I'm really curious to get your take on employers of record, or EORs. I feel like a few major players have popped up in the last few years, as you've mentioned.
Keely:
EORs are great, obviously, for companies that have a few employees in a particular country but are not at the point where they are able to open up a legal entity there. The EOR stands in as the legal employer in those cases and takes care of all the regulated aspects of employment like payroll, taxes, and benefits.
As with anything, some EORs are great, some are not so great. You can run into issues. EORs are very costly. At what point does it make sense to create your own entity? And I think that's where a lot of companies are struggling now. Maybe the EOR worked when they had less than five people, but now that they have 20 people in the country, does it make sense to open an entity? Does it make sense to offer benefits? What would that look like, and what would be the cost? So, I think EORs are great for what they do, but having 20 or 30 EORs can be a little too much for a company to manage.
Diana:
I'm wondering, even with all of these changes, what do you think are some current pain points that still exist today?
Keely:
I would say the biggest pain point I see in payroll systems is reporting. I find most payroll systems still lack in their quality of reports, the ability to customize reports, and the ability to have a bank or general report storage that encompasses everything an organization can need.
The way most payroll providers fix this is they do custom reporting, but that can get really confusing and it can be really hard to get the information you need. And then, when auditors come in, insurance providers come in, 401(k) providers come in—maybe you're acquiring a company or you're raising your next round of funding—it can be really difficult to give everyone all the information they ask for.
I would say another thing that comes into play a lot is integrations. My prior company had about a thousand employees. Our payroll system did not integrate with our benefits provider, and that required manual uploads on both ends every month to make changes.
That can be a lot of work for companies but it's one of those things that's like, "Who do we want to partner with? We're not going to integrate with everyone." Maybe you like your benefits and don't want to rock the boat with your employees, but you need a new payroll system and have to decide if you can take on the manual work. And that's where you're seeing a lot of payroll teams within an organization getting very granular—where it's not just enough to have a payroll manager anymore. Now you need the payroll specialist, you need the payroll coordinator, you might even need a director of payroll. And a lot of it has to do with payroll systems not being able to be this true source that they claim to be.
Diana:
Sounds like painful manual work to have to update the deductions from payroll to 401(k) every month. Integrations are exactly what Finch provides and this is the exact problem that we're trying to solve. I'm wondering if that's potentially why you decided to start working and advising at Finch.
Keely:
I really liked what Finch was doing, and in my first conversation with Ansel I thought, “Why aren't more companies using this backend integration to be able to pull the data that they need?" That's really what attracted me to Finch. I like that it's still like a scrappy startup. They're building something that others are not. They're really trying to build a solution that works with payroll providers and benefits providers. It's not just a one-bucket thing. And honestly, the team's great. I am so happy to be here.
Diana:
This might be a bit of a spicy question, but I'm wondering, what are some product improvement opportunities or suggestions that you have for Finch or the Finch product?
Keely:
It's very hard to get in the mind of these benefits and payroll providers and be able to support every single deduction and contribution they have. Another byproduct of the pandemic is that you are seeing so many more fringe benefits offered by companies—that is, all of the perks, benefits, and stipends that, in addition to salary, add up to someone’s total compensation package. Things like wellness benefits and employers paying cell phone bills and offering work-from-home internet stipends are all examples of fringe benefits. Those have been gaining traction over the years, but since the pandemic, it has gotten crazy. These things are expected by employees, and every payroll system and HRIS system does it differently. So, some may word it this way, some may word it that way, some may limit how many you can have. So, it's very hard for any one product to be able to pull every subset of data without being the engineer and the product team on the other side of the table.
On that note, I've had some really great client calls since I've been at Finch, and I do see the product going in that way, and I love the idea that we are able to customize it to an extent. I had a recent client call where they had 180 different deduction codes, and I was like, "There's no way we can pull that many data points." And we did an amazing, eye-opening mapping exercise where it was like, "Yes, the Finch product can pull these data points. This is just what it's going to look like. And then these are the ones we can't do, but let's ask questions and see how we can make it work for you." So, I love that the product's still at that phase where we can really customize it and that we're moving that way. But there are also limitations, as in all systems.
Diana:
That is great feedback for our product. Thank you for that. I know the product operations team, which you're part of, has been working really hard at researching how to make our product more robust. I would love to know, what are some upcoming projects that you're really excited to work on here at Finch?
Keely:
I'm actually going into these payroll and benefit systems, researching the capabilities there, and then going back to the product team and telling them, "Okay, this is what it looks like in this system. This is what we would need to do on the Finch side to be able to pull the data that XYZ company is asking for." So, that's really exciting.
We're also building out playbooks where we are going to have a specific set of instructions and all of these cool videos for each provider that we work with that we will eventually be able to use in our sales pitches. Like, "Hey, we work with another client that uses this system,, and this is what we did for them, and this is the data we can pull.” I'm really excited about that and building out those products that will help Finch grow.
Diana:
That sounds like some really impactful and detailed work. That's amazing to hear. It's been really great chatting with and learning from you, and I deeply appreciate the time.
Keely:
Thank you for having me, Diana.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
This month’s updates include a partnership with exciting implications, an alternative auth protocol, and a host of new supported data points.
In November, we were thrilled to announce our deeper partnership with HiBob. With that partnership, our HiBob integration has gotten a facelift.
Now, employers who want to connect their HiBob account to a third-party can authenticate directly through Finch Connect to generate a long-lasting API token that queries the HiBob API without the user exiting our front-end modal. Alternatively, employers using SSO will be able to walk through a quick set of instructions that lets them directly generate the API token from within the HiBob dashboard. This will then be shared with Finch, completing the authentication process.
The more than 33,000 U.S. employers who use Paylocity to run their payroll and HR functions are the new beneficiaries of an exciting product feature: alternative auth via API token.
In other words, employers looking to link their Paylocity account to another application will have the option to do so directly with API credentials, for an ultra secure and reliable connection.
The new option is presented to employers who select Paylocity as their provider in our front-end modal as an alternative to the default Finch Connect flow. Once they follow the process outlined by Paylocity, employers will receive a set of API keys which can then be securely shared via Finch Connect.
That's a wrap for November! If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for free access to put our latest features to work for you.
Since inception, Finch has been a major proponent of employer choice, giving them the ability to securely and compliantly share their data with trusted third parties. Not only should employers be able to choose who they share data with and what data they share, but also how they do so.
Today, we are extending employer choice to the authentication process for Paylocity customers. Paylocity has over 33,300 employers using their platform across the US leveraging a full suite of HR products from payroll to benefits management. Similar to the TriNet integration update included in our September product post, Paylocity users will now be able to choose to authenticate access via API credentials for a secure, reliable syncing experience. Check out our compatibility docs to confirm which datapoints are accessible via this new authentication method.
How to Connect
Employers who select Paylocity as their provider will see a new authentication option offered as an alternative to default Finch Connect flow. Once they follow the process outlined by Paylocity, employers will receive a set of API keys from Paylocity, which can then be securely shared via Finch Connect.
Want to get your hands on this new feature? Click here to sign up for free and test out Finch's expanded Paylocity auth flow in your application.
This month’s updates include the beta launch of our new ATS API, an updated authorization workflow for our latest HRIS partner, and additional data field coverage for some of our most popular supported systems.
In response to growing customer demand, we’ve officially launched the Finch applicant tracking system (ATS) API, and our first ATS integration, Lever, is live!
Because applicant tracking systems house crucial insights into an organization’s recruiting pipeline, seamless ATS data connectivity is essential to B2B applications that service the candidate lifecycle. To unlock a range of high-value use cases in product categories like candidate sourcing, compensation management, and DEI, our ATS API supports four data models: candidate, applications, jobs, and offers.
Reach out to get early access!
As part of our strategic partnership with BambooHR, Finch customers can now leverage BambooHR’s OpenID Connect to establish data connections with the fast-growing HRIS.
OpenID Connect is a reliable authorization method that acts as a simple identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol. By working through BambooHR’s OpenID Connect flow, we’re making it even more seamless and intuitive for your users to permission a data sync between your application and BambooHR.
Deduction Types
Building on the headway we made in August, Finch now proudly supports Section 125 medical, dental, and vision deduction typing for ADP Run, PrismHR, and UKG Pro. This level of granularity fuels innovative customer use cases related to deduction management, tax credit calculations, and more. You can find them displayed in the employee_deductions[].type field on our /pay-statements endpoint.
Employer Benefits Contributions
For Trinet and Zenefits, you can now view employers’ benefit contributions—like 401(k) matches—in the pay-statements field, which provides essential visibility for retirement benefits providers.
Gender
The gender field is now supported in Rippling, ensuring that developers building products that analyze pay disparities and DEI issues have crucial data access for a significant segment of their customer base.
Class Code
In continued support of workers’ compensation insurance use cases, the class_code field is now available through the employment endpoint in Trinet—adding to the list of systems we previously rolled out support for in September.
This field identifies the type of work an employee performs, enabling insurance companies to more accurately assess risk and calculate premiums for employers. Please note that 14 states operate with a class code system independent of the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) standard. Cross-referencing each employee’s work location with the class_code field is important to properly interpret this datapoint for insurance products.
That's all for October! Stay on the lookout for our next monthly product update. If you want to get your hands on the latest and greatest Finch features sign up for free access here.
In our latest whitepaper, we explore SFTP vs API integrations and discuss which is right for your business.
It’s no secret that data connectivity has changed the way businesses operate. It seems that every week, there is a new app that plugs into the systems businesses use every day. These innovations have changed the game for users, making interoperability between systems a need-to-have. For software providers, flexible and plentiful integrations are more essential than ever.
Employee and HR data has traditionally been one of most challenging use cases for data transfer. Employment data, the bulk of which is usually stored in HRIS and payroll systems, must be handled carefully and securely in order to abide by compliance rules and regulations protecting the collection, storage, and usage of sensitive, personal data.
So what is considered employment data? Employment data is any information about a company and the individuals within it. More specifically information about the company itself (EIN, legal name, HQ address), the company org chart (employee count, managers, departments), or about individuals (preferred name, contact information, employment status, income and pay history, benefits data, etc.).
Businesses rely on employment data to manage their workforce effectively. It’s essential for them to keep this data up-to-date and organized throughout all of the systems they use each day. Any software providers that want to sell to businesses must think strategically about how to collect this employment data from various sources of truth in an organization. While the majority of this data is housed in HRIS and payroll systems, there are thousands of potential systems to consider. There is also no standard way of categorizing or sharing data between systems, which means the transfer of this data is usually (at least partially) manual.
B2B applications looking to leverage the power of this employment data often consider two integration approaches—SFTP vs API. While SFTP has been more ubiquitous historically, an increasing number of platforms are looking to APIs for their scalability, security, and speed.
SFTP and API are two possible methods of integration between systems. Before diving into the benefits of an SFTP integration vs an API integration, let’s quickly define each method.
In order to understand SFTP, you need to understand what FTP is. FTP stands for a file transfer protocol, which supports the transfer of files between a client and a server. SFTP, or Secure File Transfer Protocol, is a process that uses shell encryption to allow businesses to send and receive sensitive information such as employment data in confidence. SFTP emerged in 1997 as a way of transferring data between parties securely. It requires data to be updated manually (via flat file, CSV, JSON, etc.), encoded, then transmitted through a secure channel between two platforms. You receive an email notification when the file is ready to download.
Because an SFTP integration is convenient for processing many files quickly, it’s often used for bulk file transfers. It also allows businesses to send and receive a wide variety of files. SFTP integrations only need a single connection to initiate the file transfer, and an internet connection is unnecessary.
However, SFTP has its downsides. First, it relies on manual data entry, which must be constantly validated to avoid errors. This is a tedious process that wastes time and resources. Additionally, SFTP doesn’t allow for the transfer of data in real time. The moment a file is uploaded to the server, it is theoretically out of date. Depending on the use case, this can limit the usefulness of data sharing altogether. If accuracy, timeliness, and speed are essential, SFTP falls short.
APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are ways for two applications to communicate with each other. APIs standardize a communication pathway between software to exchange data and other information regardless of the underlying programming languages they are built on. APIs make it easy to push and request data instantly, providing real-time visibility into data shared between systems. Once an API is implemented, there is no manual download, restructuring, or error checking that needs to be done. If implemented correctly, the data flows seamlessly between systems.
So why API vs SFTP for the transfer of data? We outline just a few reasons below. For the full explanation, make sure to download our whitepaper.
SFTPs and APIs both make it possible to transfer data between systems securely, however, APIs have a few key strengths over SFTP, especially when used to transfer employment data. Here are 3 reasons to consider API vs SFTP:
Even SFTP lacks security controls to handle today’s cyber threats. Recent research reveals that more than 400 million files from FTP servers are publicly available online, and the average cost per lost or stolen record is $146 USD. When files are exposed, SFTP does not log security violations or authenticate users – basic capabilities you need to help detect and stop breaches. Encryption is also an afterthought requiring extra steps and IT expertise, making it difficult, expensive and time-consuming to send files safely.
With APIs, you can get instant access to all the information you need. A live and continuous connection means that your application can constantly refresh the sync, meaning that you will always be working with the most recent version of your data. This way different teams within your company can collaborate effectively since they have access to the same set of information.
One of the key downsides of SFTP is the need for employees to manage sensitive data manually. When downloading, updating, and re-uploading data files, there are many opportunities for errors to be introduced to the system. SFTP then allows crucial issues to perpetuate. When and if errors are found, they require several calls and emails with multiple parties to correct. This is not only frustrating for customers, it drains your HR administrators time and resources, and introduces errors that can wreak havoc on your systems.
Download our SFTP vs API whitepaper for details on which method is best for you based on your unique business needs.
In it, you’ll find:
If you’re interested in exploring an API integration for your application, Finch’s dynamic, unified API offers read-and-write access and abstracts away inconsistencies across systems for optimal usability no matter the source. We also handle routine maintenance, bug fixes, and the hard work of keeping up to date with the latest HRIS and payroll platforms, allowing your engineering team to focus on developing the differentiating features that set your application apart from the competition.
Finch is the API of choice for employment system integrations because we are:
Register for a test account now to explore innovative ways to leverage employment data with Finch.
Since our inception, Finch has been committed to building the infrastructure to enable tech innovators to leverage employment data and build next-generation solutions for employers. Accomplishing this at scale means collaborating with like-minded disruptors. That’s why we’re excited to announce our latest strategic partnership with HiBob.
HiBob: Streamlining core HR functionality for modern businesses
HiBob is on a mission to transform how organizations operate in the modern world of work with its HR platform ‘Bob’. Leading the way for the future workplace, Bob offers resilient, agile technology that wraps all the complexities of HR processes into a game changing, user-friendly tool that touches every employee across the business.
HiBob innovates through continuous learning loops to produce seismic cultural shifts for companies with dynamic, distributed workforces. From out-of-the-box onboarding, workflows, performance and compensation management to people analytics and more—Bob gives teams everything they need to operate efficiently. But that’s not all. Bob also provides essential engagement features that drive communication, inclusion, and belonging—inspiring a remarkable experience for every employee.
We’re very excited to partner with Finch and drive data accessibility for the high-growth companies that are using HiBob. Today’s digital workplaces require integrated applications. When systems combine, they make it easier for employees to collaborate, share information, and get great work done. The right tech can really make or break a global culture from both a business and a people perspective. We’re thrilled to offer our customers a seamless connection to the HR tech applications of their choice through the Finch integration.
Breanne Murphy, Global Head of Partner Marketing at HiBob
The employment data ecosystem is incredibly fragmented – the average small business has 18 different applications that may or may not work together in a seamless fashion. To perform at the speed of modern business and create the best employee experiences possible, employers need leading-edge technology that addresses their unique pain points. That means being able to push and pull data between individual systems to automate inefficient manual processes like onboarding, PTO approval, and setting IT permissions. But for organizations trying to scale internationally, this requires investing in multiple, siloed HR applications or an all-in-one platform that may be missing functionality or exclude leading applications in a product category.
As one of the top HRIS platforms in Europe and North America, HiBob recognizes the importance of connectivity when it comes to employment data for both customers and third-party developers. HiBob’s modern HR platform provides a flexible infrastructure that allows organizations to build seamless employee experiences around their biggest pain points. By leveraging Finch’s universal API, HiBob can extend that flexibility to developers around the world.
Through the partnership, Finch and HiBob will be able to better support developers and employers while disrupting the HR tech space. By enabling secure access to employment data on behalf of employers, we’re ensuring interoperability between B2B solutions—opening the door to greater innovation, fueling the growth of the HiBob integration marketplace, and building a future-ready workforce.
On a technical level, our integration allows employers to securely share their HiBob data with their favorite third-party applications. Employer admins authenticate directly through Finch Connect to generate a long-lasting API token that queries the HiBob API while keeping the admin within Finch’s front-end modal. Alternatively, employer admins using SSO will be walked through a quick set of instructions that lets them directly generate the API token from within the HiBob dashboard. This will then be shared with Finch, completing the authentication process.
Once the employer admin has been fully authenticated, they’ll automatically connect real-time, org-wide employment data from HiBob with the desired third-party application and begin supporting robust, integrated HR experiences—putting HiBob customers at the forefront of a growing market.
The companies that use HiBob today are typically tech-forward and highly efficient operations. They don’t have time to spend on manual processes. They want and expect integrated experiences, in addition to flexibility in how those experiences are built and maintained across apps. HiBob and Finch are enabling employer choice and supporting developers and HiBob customers by powering the automated solutions they are looking for.
Runae Lee, Head of Partnerships at Finch
Support your customers using HiBob and sign up to get your free sandbox API keys today.
At Finch, we believe in a connected future where employers can seamlessly synchronize their data across applications and providers can enable the next wave of HR and fintech innovation.
Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re one step closer to achieving that goal through our strategic partnership with BambooHR.
BambooHR helps employers enter, track, view, and manage HR and business data in one centralized system, freeing employers to focus on what matters most to a growing organization – people.
We're dedicated to partnering with top rated solutions that save our customers time, streamline their management process, and set them free to do great work. We love that Finch helps us delight customers by allowing their data to sync quickly and effortlessly across applications.
Natalie Bigney, Marketplace Manager at BambooHR
The collaboration between Finch and BambooHR exemplifies our shared commitment to empowering innovators. Together, we’re working together to ensure employers can share employment data securely with third-party applications—and changing the status quo in the process.
At issue is the stifling lack of data connectivity that has long held back the employment data ecosystem. Without reliable programmatic integrations, employers have had to rely on highly manual processes like flat-file sharing to access their own data. Despite the challenges and cost of manual work, employers invest thousands of hours to pull this data and drive important business processes, from headcount planning to expense management and practically everything in between.
Finch first took on the challenge of solving this issue when we built a universal API to integrate with HR information systems and payroll providers. We now provide mission-critical infrastructure for applications across B2B fintech, benefits, HR, and enterprise verticals.
Customers are growing to expect that their applications will work together out of the box. BambooHR is partnering with Finch to support employer choice and ensure broad compatibility with leading and emerging technologies in this space. In short, Finch and BambooHR are working to ensure interoperability between platforms to enable innovation and exceptional efficiencies fueled by employment data.
Our partnership makes accessing the employee data in BambooHR a seamless process. Employer administrators simply permission the data sync through Finch Connect by way of BambooHR’s OpenID Connect flow—a streamlined, reliable method of authorization that builds on the OAuth framework.
To log in, admins enter their BambooHR subdomain into Finch Connect, which will redirect them to BambooHR, where they can then authenticate using either single sign-on or their BambooHR account credentials. Once complete, the authorized third-party provider has immediate, streaming access to the real-time, organization-wide employee census data stored and managed by BambooHR.
It’s that simple.
By partnering with BambooHR, we’re solidifying our commitment to build a more connected ecosystem centered around employer choice. Not all SMBs are alike and BambooHR understands this. Through this integration, we’re enabling tens of thousands of employers to connect with the third-party applications they trust to help them run their organizations.
Ansel Parikh, co-founder of Finch
Want to see our partnership in action? Sign up to get your free sandbox API keys here and check out our listing on the BambooHR Marketplace.
Problem: Corporate Merch knew integrating with HR and payroll systems was mission-critical, but they needed to get to market quickly while also ensuring their customer base was fully covered. Before the company could commit to partnering with Finch, they needed us to add two key integrations to our 180+ list of supported systems—fast.
Solution: With a proven process in place to build integrations quickly, we successfully added both providers within weeks, and Corporate Merch was able to go live with automated integrations as large customers started onboarding.
Corporate Merch is a new breed of swag company. Not only do they create quality branded gift items for their customers to send to employees, clients, and partners, Corporate Merch also provides state-of-the-art storage and packages and ships swag item-by-item to intended recipients. The linchpin of their operation is a proprietary software system that lets customers easily view, manage—and automate—their inventory, orders, and shipments.
Early on, it became clear to Corporate Merch that the employee swag space, in particular, needed disrupting. The reason? People operations professionals typically have to use antiquated and ad hoc solutions like spreadsheets and Google Forms to collect and track employee data and manually distribute merchandise.
Corporate Merch knew that automating these tasks would be a gamechanger—and that the key to automation would be integrating with the HR and payroll systems customers use every day to house employee data. The problem was, building all of the integrations they required to cover their customer base would take two years and a lot of patience. For Corporate Merch, that was a non-starter.
Corporate Merch needed a partner that could help them get integrated quickly, so they could go live with automations just as fast. Finch emerged at the top of the pack for its employment system expertise, ease of use, overall support, and technical responsiveness.
Working with the Finch team has been a breeze, and they know this space through and through—that's why we chose them.
Daniel Spirgel, Corporate Merch's President
But the partnership came with a stipulation: Finch first had to integrate with two new SMB and enterprise systems essential to Corporate Merch’s customers that were missing from Finch’s coverage network.
With a proven, proprietary system for building integrations in place, our development team was able to successfully build and test the both complex integrations in a matter of weeks, enabling Corporate Merch to get unblocked with larger customer implementations.
Finch held our hand through the whole process. They showed us the endpoints that we would want to focus on and what to stay away from. They answered all of our questions. We wouldn't have gone live so quickly if it wasn't for their help and their concern about us building it the right way.
Daniel Spirgel, Corporate Merch's President
What’s more, the support didn’t stop at implementation. Spirgel says he values the guidance Finch continues to offer the Corporate Merch team as they plot out their product roadmap, including how responsive Finch is to their questions over Slack.
The effect on Corporate Merch’s user experience has been remarkable. Now, customers have the option to securely connect their HR or payroll system at onboarding, all in a matter of moments:
This connection allows customers to set up triggers that automate the swag process, like sending out gifts for employees’ birthdays or work anniversaries or distributing onboarding kits when new hires join the team. Most importantly, the connection is continuous, so that as employees come and go from customers’ organizations, Corporate Merch’s system is kept up to date.
As for coverage, Corporate Merch hasn’t run into a customer yet who hasn’t been able to integrate via Finch.
Now, we are confident that when we walk into a demo meeting, the integration that a prospective client needs is already built. I’d say 95% of our clients’ HR and payroll systems are covered through Finch.
Daniel Spirgel, Corporate Merch's President
At Finch, we're committed to enabling innovative platforms like Corporate Merch create the best experience for their customers. If you’re interested in getting hands-on with org-wide employment data, sign up for a free Finch developer account today!
This month's updates include further expansion of coverage with two additional API integrations, greater availability of a key field for insurance providers, and a new way to connect with TriNet customers. Check out what’s new!
Wave
Wave offers payroll as part of an all-in-one suite of financial products that serve over 2 million SMBs across the US and Canada. Acquired by H&R Block in 2019, the company offers a set of free services including invoicing, accounting, and banking, and adds additional paid services such as payroll, payments, and bookkeeping. We're excited to support Wave and allow developers to connect with hundreds of thousands of their payroll clients.
Quickbooks Canada
While we have compatibility with Quickbooks Payroll in the US we've now added support for Quickbooks Payroll as part of our broader international expansion efforts. Now developers can connect directly all 1.4 million Quickbooks Payroll customers across North America.
We continue to roll out new fields for essential use cases and have made the worker's comp class_code field available in both Quickbooks and Paylocity alongside Gusto, ADP RUN, and others.
This field within the employment endpoint exposes the specific 3-4 digit code that identifies the types of work an employee performs so that insurance companies can estimate risk and calculate accurate premiums for employers.
While many of them will follow the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) code system, 14 states operate with independent class code systems. Cross-referencing the work location state for each employee with the class_code field is important to properly interpret this datapoint for your insurance product.
With over 23,000 employers supported in the US, TriNet is one of our longest-standing and most popular integrations, and we’ve given it a fresh new update! Our TriNet integration now supports the option to connect via TriNet’s API directly. This new integration option is both a smoother and more secure experience, providing significant latency and reliability improvements to the connection.
How to Connect
Employers who select TriNet as their provider will see a new authentication page displayed by default in Finch Connect. Once they follow the process outlined by TriNet, employers will receive a set of API keys from TriNet, which can then be securely shared via Finch Connect.
That's all for this monthly update! Stay on the lookout for our next monthly product update. If you want to get your hands on the latest and greatest Finch features sign up for free access here.
Today we’re announcing support for connecting Canadian versions of Quickbooks Online via Finch Connect. This integration expands our Canadian 🇨🇦 coverage alongside Wave! Quickbooks joins Personio and Humaans integrations - both recently launched European-focused HRIS - that represent our continued efforts to support international systems.
Access to Quickbooks Canada is available today via Finch Connect. Canadian accounts connect seamlessly; employers can connect using the existing Quickbooks integration page in Finch Connect. Finch will automatically detect whether the account being connected is Canadian and handle any integration differences.
If you’re not yet a customer and are interested in gaining access to Finch, sign up for a free sandbox account, and get your API keys today.
With our universal API, you’ll gain access to 180+ HRIS and payroll integrations and counting, from ADP RUN to Zenefits. Our team also handles all ongoing maintenance and updates so you can spend your time focusing on building out your platform, creating exceptional user experiences, and fostering stickier customer relationships.
Problem: To be the best-in-class employee rewards platform customers want and expect, PerkUp needed seamless, reliable access to employee data that could power time-saving automation.
Solution: With Finch, PerkUp was able get up and running with HRIS integrations in a sprint and offer their customers a seamless syncing experience. After using Finch for over a year, PerkUp was able to lower support costs, create stickier customer relationships, and expand their TAM, all without having to dedicate resources to maintaining the Finch integration.
PerkUp helps businesses drive employee engagement by making it easy for them to manage and scale their employee rewards program. Through PerkUp’s comprehensive but simple-to-use platform, customers can send incredible, curated gifts to employees worldwide.
PerkUp’s primary users are busy HR and people operations professionals who are increasingly protective of their time. PerkUp knew that to be a vital solution, they would need to deliver on ease of use and reliability through automation.
But automating employee gift-giving requires employee data—fields like name, start date, birthday, location, and manager. That gave PerkUp a choice: build a sophisticated CSV uploader or find an integration solution that connects directly to customers’ HR information systems (HRIS).
PerkUp knew that a CSV uploader would not only be a heavy lift, it would also only transfer static data that would need to be regularly refreshed by the platform’s users—a friction PerkUp wanted to avoid.
Next, PerkUp considered an iPaaS provider, but ultimately didn’t want to take on the burden of managing the workflows in-house. They needed an integration solution that would enhance the performance of their product without taxing their internal resources.
That’s when PerkUp turned to Finch.
In less than a single engineering sprint, PerkUp was up and running with Finch, creating a truly best-in-class data syncing experience.
The mechanism by which Finch works is easy, secure, and intuitive. PerkUp customers simply connect their HRIS at onboarding in two steps:
Instantly, PerkUp has data access, and customers can create the rules they need to automate their gift-giving workflows—like sending employees rewards on their birthday or company swag on their first day on the job.
What’s more, the data connection is continuous and refreshes every 24 hours, ensuring PerkUp is always working from the most up-to-date employee information. Compared to flat-file transfers and manual data syncs, the efficiencies are enormous.
Finch saves our customers time and headaches, which means they require less customer support from us. We've had 400-person companies connect their system in minutes. When that happens, it's amazing.
Thomas Mirmotahari, PerkUp's Co-Founder & CEO
Finch is designed to create a seamless "set-it-and-forget-it" experience for both PerkUp's engineers and customers.
In the year that PerkUp has been using Finch the engineering team was able to shift virtually all resources away from managing the Finch integration, only having to make updates for new data fields. Moreover, PerkUp's customers were able to establish long-lived connections to their HRIS without having to check if data was stale, creating a smooth, consistent experience.
Finch is like the Plaid of HRIS. We love that they’re going deeper, both in terms of the providers they’re adding and the data they’re retrieving. That's the type of partner that we want.
Thomas Mirmotahari, PerkUp's Co-Founder & CEO
Finch’s ever-growing coverage of the long-tail also expands PerkUp’s target addressable market and helps the sales team make inroads with innovative employers using next-generation HRIS.
When Finch released the HiBob integration, for instance, PerkUp was able to go back to leads who had been asking for it. PerkUp says that made their team look great to prospective customers—like they had done the work to cater to their request—when, really, it was their Finch partnership that made it possible.
Beyond sales, Finch also supports one of the platform’s primary revenue streams. For PerkUp, the business case is clear:
Finch makes our product much stickier. As our customers grow, Finch reduces the admin burden for them, embeds us more deeply in their operations, and generates additional per-employee-per-month fees for us. It supports our business on multiple levels.
Thomas Mirmotahari, PerkUp's Co-Founder & CEO
In fact, there are a surprising range of business outcomes that Finch's integrations can impact. Learn more about the eight key business KPIs that we can improve at your company here.
At Finch, we’ve made it our mission to enable innovative platforms like PerkUp create the best experience for their customers. If you’re interested in getting hands-on with employment data, sign up for a free Finch developer account today!
As developers ourselves, we know that while APIs are a great first step to increasing business efficiency, when it comes to implementation, SDKs create a superior experience.
We recognized this early on at Finch, which is why we focused on developing our React SDK for Finch Connect. This SDK offers an easier alternative for embedding Connect into applications versus using the Finch API directly. However, it also constrained developers to using React if they wanted to embed our product.
For this reason, we’ve gone back to the basics and developed a vanilla Javascript SDK for Finch Connect. This framework-agnostic SDK offers more flexibility when embedding Finch Connect into your frontend applications. Any web app running Javascript can now take advantage of the improved developer experience that SDKs offer.
To embed Connect via our JS SDK, simply load the SDK via a script tag and add some simple initialization code to your application:
<script src="https://prod-cdn.tryfinch.com/v1/connect.js"></script>
The returned FinchConnect object exposes open, close, and destroy lifecycle methods, which you can utilize to seamlessly get Connect up and running in your application.
Read our docs to learn more about our JS SDK and view the open source repository here!
Our newest integration, Wave Payroll, is now live, further extending our Canadian provider coverage. Finch can now connect you to over 170 HRIS and payroll systems, giving you access to the employment data necessary to create the integrated experiences your customers are looking for.
Founded in 2010, Wave began its journey as an accounting solution with a simple mission: helping small businesses easily manage their finances. Since then, the Canadian company has expanded its initial accounting offering into a suite of products that services more than 1 million customers.
With Wave Payroll, small businesses can quickly manage employee onboarding, tax profiles, employment records, and more while providing access to critical aspects of their business from its all-in-one platform.
For Finch customers, the Wave Payroll integration is already available. If you’re not a Finch customer, and you’re interested in leveraging employment data, sign up for free access to our sandbox and get your API keys today.
Once you’ve signed up, you’ll gain access to all 170+ HR and payroll providers we’re integrated with through our unified API, including QuickBooks and ADP RUN. Our team of experts handles all technical requirements for each integration, so you don’t have to worry about updates or maintenance.
Finch now syncs data with providers on a 24 hour cadence, and Finch API requests now return data from the most recent sync. This will result in major improvements to response latency, as well as a more smooth and consistent experience using Finch — any provider-specific issues related to their own infrastructure will be smoothed over by our most recent sync data. In the future, we’ll be adding even more rich functionality to our data syncs, including faster refresh times and the ability to force a data sync on-demand.
In addition to our ReactJS SDK, Finch now offers a vanilla Javascript SDK for embedding Finch Connect into your application. Simply load the SDK via a script tag and add some simple initialization code to your application to embed connect.
Developers are no longer limited by choosing React to embed Connect with our supported SDKs. Any web app running Javascript can now take advantage of this superior developer experience.
From calculating tax credits to identifying when deductions have been applied, many customer use cases rely on being able to consistently discern benefit deduction types in employee pay statements. We have now added support for Section 125 Medical deduction typing in Paychex Flex, ADP Workforce Now, and Rippling. You can see these s125_medical types showing in the form employee_deductions[].type field on Finch’s /pay-statements endpoint. More providers to follow soon!
That's all for this monthly update! Stay on the lookout for our next monthly product update. If you want to get your hands on the latest and greatest Finch features sign up for free access here.
If you’re a B2B application selling to employers—an employee training platform or employee engagement platform, for instance—then you know that creating additional value for your customers is critical to building a stickier product and, ultimately, ensuring your success. One way to create this value is to offer your customers deeper insights into their employee lifecycle by tracking the metrics customers care most about.
In this post, we’ve collaborated with ChartHop to dive into three employee lifecycle KPIs you can derive from employment data housed in your customers’ HRIS and payroll systems. Read how they are transforming their customers’ employee lifecycles here.
By surfacing similar metrics for your customers, you can help them create a better employment experience.
Let’s get started!
As employees move up the ranks or across positions, the path they take can be tracked. Known as career mobility, this movement encompasses both the standard promotional structure (i.e., when employees earn greater responsibility and more senior titles) as well as lateral movement between teams and departments. So, why is this data important?
Tracking employee movement across positions and departments allows you to provide your customers with a detailed summary of their organization’s propensity to create growth and development opportunities for their employees. They can then use this data to give new hires a better understanding of the long-term career paths available to them from their first-day onwards—which can aid in cultivating a workplace culture that’s conducive to employee retention.
This metric also allows you to provide your customers with more granular insights into the flow of employees between departments. By divvying up the data by team, you can weigh how certain sectors of the organization are performing in regard to developing growth opportunities against others and reveal areas in need of improvement.
Calculating internal mobility is simple: take the total number of internal movements and divide it by the average number of employees during the same time period. Once you have this number, multiply it by 100 to turn it into a percentage.
Because many systems don’t show historical organizational structure changes, you will need to record this data over time across the organization before you can calculate internal mobility rate. Here’s how:
Learn how to ensure equitable promotions for your customers’ employees.
Any income an employee earns in the course of their regular employment is considered part of their compensation history. This can include their salary, bonuses they’ve received, commissions they’ve earned, and tips.
Knowing this information is important because it gives you a deeper understanding of your customers’ compensation distribution. This helps you flag potential areas of inequity or inconsistency across different teams, demographics, and positions, allowing your customers to improve employee retention in the long run and offer competitive compensation packages that draw top-quality talent.
To calculate compensation history, simply add an employee’s salary, bonuses, commissions, tips/wages, and any other sources of income together for the time period you want to track.
To gain the most visibility into employee earnings, you’ll want to leverage both Payment and Pay Statement endpoints as well as the Employment endpoint, which contains data like base income and pay frequency.
Alternatively, many providers can also provide access to historical compensation changes which Finch surfaces in the Employment endpoint under the income history array. This array will include the unit, amount, currency, and effective date of previous income changes.
Read more about how companies can build responsible compensation plans.
Employee turnover rate is the percentage of employees that leave an organization within a given period. You can use this data to drill down into more specific subsets of your customers’ organizations like individual departments or demographic groups.
If your product is centered around increasing engagement or employee retention, this data is crucial, as it allows you to spot potential issues that can save your customers money and improve employee morale and retention over the long term.
To calculate an organization’s turnover rate, you’ll want to divide the employees that left over a particular span of time by the average number of employees for that same period.
Pulling the data you need to calculate turnover rate from Finch is a simple process:
Find out what turnover rate can tell you about your customers’ business.
By leveraging the above insights, you’ll be able to better add value to your customers’ organizations—helping them streamline employee development, increase employee engagement, and boost team cohesion. This creates a better work experience that makes them more likely to retain their workers—and retain your platform’s services.
Discover how Finch helps you harness the power of employment data to provide your customers with key insights in real time. Click here to sign up for free.
Want to get in touch with our friends at Charthop to unlock people insights for your organization? Click here to learn more about what you can do when all your people data is in one place.
If we had to describe last month in one word, it would be expansive, with several integration launches, extended field support, and an alternative integration auth method. Check out what’s new!
Humaans
Humaans is a modern HR system focused on modularity and compatibility with other HR platforms. While support for Humaans is part of our larger strategy to grow our coverage in European markets, Humaans has also begun to expand globally, unlocking myriad new employers internationally.
SageHR
SageHR has grown to support businesses of up to 125 employees in 1,200 cities worldwide. As the company enters the next stage of its evolution, adding new modules and features specifically designed to scale, we’re even more excited to support integrations with SageHR accounts.
Sapling
A relatively young player in the HR space, Sapling was founded in 2016 and expanded market share quickly, eventually being acquired by Kallidus in 2020. With offices in the U.S. and Canada, Sapling services hundreds of employers around the world, and is a welcome addition to our coverage network.
Another significant development in our ever-deepening field support, preferredName is a crucial field for many players on the Finch platform.
Rather than relying on legal names only, using an employee’s configured preferred name allows applications to make employees feel more comfortable and, in sensitive circumstances, can have a significant impact on belonging and trust. Preferred name is now available via the individual endpoint for all of Finch’s automated API integrations!
Finch has expanded support for deduction types in our pay-statement endpoint for Paychex Flex. Many new deduction types are available, including 401k, Roth 401k, 401k Loan, FSA Dependent Care, Section 125 Medical, and more.
This is of notable importance for retirement and benefits applications, which rely on this information to validate that deductions have been run, as well as tax credit companies, who use deduction information to determine tax credit eligibility.
Finch is constantly making improvements to our existing integrations, and Zenefits is one of Finch’s most-used and longest-standing examples. Zenefits recently introduced their own API, which allows Zenefits customers to create an API token in their dashboard for development use. This provides a faster and more secure way to access Zenefits data.
Employers can now enter their API information directly via Finch Connect. To do this, they simply select Zenefits as their provider, and select the “Using SSO? Enter an API Token Instead” button at the bottom of the login page. This will direct them to enter their API information.
That's all for this monthly update! Stay on the lookout for our next monthly product update. If you want to get your hands on the latest and greatest Finch features sign up for free access here.
Our latest HRIS integration, SageHR, is up and running, adding yet another data source to our overall data coverage network of 150+ HR and payroll systems. For Finch customers, that means even more opportunities to create seamless, interconnected digital experiences.
SageHR: a modular HR platform
What started as a leave management solution has since expanded to include a range of modular HR solutions that flex with the unique and changing needs of modern employers. One of the unique aspects of SageHR is its built-in connectivity with the Sage family of accounting and payroll solutions. This is part of the reason why the platform has grown to support customers in 1,200 cities worldwide for small businesses that have up to 125 employees. Now, in the latest stage of its evolution, the company is adding new modules and features specifically designed to scale—ensuring a seamless HR experience regardless of company size.
How do I get access to the SageHR integration?
For Finch customers, the SageHR integration is automatically accessible. If you’re not a Finch customer but are interested in becoming one, enter your email address here and get your API keys today.
Once you’ve signed up, you’ll gain access to all 150+ HR and payroll providers we’re integrated with through our universal API, including QuickBooks and ADP RUN. Our team also handles all technical requirements for each integration, so you don’t have to worry about updates or maintenance.
We’re excited to announce our latest whitepaper, Build vs. Buy to address the question:
Should I build employment integrations in-house or outsource them?
If you’re asking yourself this question, you already know that data connectivity has the power to transform every industry in the world—and few businesses are in the dark when it comes to understanding the importance of breaking down the data silos currently impeding their productivity and innovation. In turn, B2B applications are hurrying to bridge the chasms between the systems in their customers’ tech stack. Their goal? To create superior user experiences and unlock automation and insights that set them apart from their competitors.
Increasingly, the basis of those bridges is API integrations, and one of the most important datasets to access is housed in employment systems like HRIS and payroll. Determining how to approach employment system integrations is a critical decision for any business, and different business scenarios dictate different considerations as you explore your integration options.
In Finch’s latest whitepaper, Build vs. Buy we explore all of the considerations at each stage and more to help you arrive at the best integration approach for your B2B application.
Finch does the hard work of integrating with HRIS and payroll providers to facilitate the secure, permissioned flow of critical business data. Our dynamic, unified API offers read-and-write access and abstracts away inconsistencies across systems for optimal usability no matter the source.
Finch is quickly becoming the API of choice for employment system integrations because we are:
Reach out to our team to explore ways to access employment data with our unified API by contacting us here.
Employment system integrations—that is, integrations with HR information systems and payroll systems—typically fall under the purview of product teams, but that doesn’t mean that they are strictly a product concern. In fact, a well executed employment system integration strategy has the potential to affect a myriad of aspects of your organization for the better, including your growth trajectory, opportunities for expansion, and expenses.
In other words, the decision to integrate with employment systems is a business one. As you weigh your options, consider these eight KPIs that employment system integrations often impact:
Employment system integrations enlarge the field of customers you can work with by enabling instant compatibility with the employment systems they use, allowing you to close more deals with a wider range of organizations.
This is especially true if your strategy entails partnering with a broad-coverage employment system API like Finch that enables connectivity with many systems from a single integration. In turn, your sales team is empowered to pursue segments of the market that would otherwise be uneconomic due to lack of connectivity. With Finch’s 150+ integrations, you can service 88% of U.S. employers—and many international ones—in one fell swoop.
Learn how Green Spaces was able to address 90% of potential customers by expanding its integration coverage with Finch.
With Finch’s single, universal API, Green Places gained real-time connectivity to more than 90% of its customers’ HR platforms. Just as critically, Finch affords Green Places more time and bandwidth to allocate to other areas of product development.
Increasingly, the availability of employment system integrations is an important purchase criterion. Having integrations in place at the outset of your engagement meets a key expectation of potential customers, which can help fast-track them through the sales pipeline to a signed contract.
On the other hand, if you’re following a bottom-up sales model, you’ll appreciate that employment system integrations enable a seamless data sync process that supports self-serve onboarding and product-led growth. In other words, leads can start using your product without having to speak to a sales rep, bypassing an extended sales pipeline altogether.
See how Mosaic was able to accelerate their sales pipeline and go live with integrations 94% faster than doing it in-house by working with Finch.
Many applications realize a boost in ACV when they offer integrations as part of a premium tier of service or product access. Because employment system integrations can save your customers hours of work at onboarding and fuel deluxe features and product enhancements, you can leverage integrations to persuade customers to sign larger deals.
If your product offers a self-serve motion accompanied by a free trial, data syncing via employment system integrations indicates a lead’s high intent to pay for your product. By granting access to their employment data, they’ve signified that they trust your value proposition and want to see your product drive ROI for their business.
Learn how MainStreet saved $65M+ for small business clients using a self-serve flow powered by Finch.
Acquiring new customers is helpful, but keeping them around for the long-term is how you build a sustainable business. Data connectivity via employment system integrations supports retention in multiple ways:
If your product relies on a usage-based business model driven by seats or per-employee-per-month (PEPM) growth, access to customers’ employment data gives you a direct line of sight into the potential size of their contract. It also streamlines the process of expanding usage by giving your customers the ability to track new employees and automate user invites.
Additionally, if your product has multiple buyers across an organization—say, finance and HR—you can leverage your access to real-time organizational structure data to cross-sell your product into other teams.
If you build employment system integrations in-house, the initiative will likely be a drain on your development resources. Assuming that three engineers will work on an integration for three months (or more, if your needs go beyond basic census data), that puts the engineering costs of just your initial build-out in the ballpark of $200,000. Multiply that by the number of integrations you need to adequately cover your customer base plus maintenance costs, and you are looking at a steep, ongoing investment.
Outsourcing employment system integrations to a third-party API like Finch saves you money by eliminating the need for multiple build-outs and drastically reducing the number of hours your engineering team has to dedicate to the project. Our team does the heavy lifting, including maintenance, so your internal talent can focus on your product’s core technology and UX.
Find out how Trainual reduced development costs by 75% by using Finch.
During onboarding and implementation, customers often require hand-holding—and one of the biggest hurdles they cross is data syncing. That means that your support team needs to be trained in the specific data syncing processes, formats, and idiosyncrasies of each system you integrate with—a monumental and costly training initiative. Even then, it often requires three to four calls with a customer to confirm connectivity. These are costs that don’t scale and can balloon as your customer base expands. Employment system integrations reduce the data syncing process from days to seconds and remove the friction that necessitates hand-holding in the first place, allowing you to save support resources for initiatives that increase customer loyalty.
Learn how Lane Health reduced support costs and eliminated 8-12 hours a month of manual data entry for their customers with Finch.
Integrating with employment systems isn’t just a slick product enhancement; it’s a strategic business initiative that drives measurable impact across your organization. Much of the ROI, however, depends on prudent execution—namely, partnering with a universal employment system API like Finch that can optimize coverage, performance, and cost efficiencies.
In short, Finch does the hard work of integrating with HRIS and payroll systems for you, so you can optimize the return. Our dynamic, unified API offers read-and-write access and abstracts away inconsistencies across systems for exceptional usability no matter the source.
Talk to one of our experts today to learn how Finch’s employment integrations can drive business outcomes for you.
Finch’s newest integration, Humaans, is open for access. Our coverage network now stands at 150+ HRIS and payroll systems, ensuring our customers stay connected to the global employment ecosystem.
Founded in 2020, Humaans is a human resources information system (HRIS) that acts as a single source of truth for all staffing operations. The platform provides users with a holistic interface for employee onboarding and ongoing people management—giving them access to powerful insights like company growth metrics and payroll information. The platform initially catered to European companies but has rapidly expanded to help global organizations with their people operations.
Eschewing the all-in-one model of HR software for a more dynamic approach, Humaans integrates with leading HR SaaS platforms, allowing employers to mix and match services based on their needs. This adaptability is part of the reason Humaans is growing quickly.
For existing Finch customers, access to Humaans is already available. If you’re not yet a customer and are interested in gaining access, enter your email address on our homepage here, and get your API keys today.
With our universal API, you’ll gain access to 150+ HRIS and payroll integrations and counting, including Quickbooks and ADP RUN. Our team also handles all ongoing maintenance and updates so you can spend your time focusing on building out your platform, creating exceptional user experiences, and fostering stickier customer relationships.
Sapling, an HRIS platform, is now accessible via Finch’s automated API. That brings our coverage to 150+ HRIS and payroll systems—each one helping your app better connect with your customers.
Sapling was founded in 2016 to fulfill a simple goal: amplify connectivity for people operations teams around the globe. The platform does this by utilizing AI-powered automation and predictive insights that provide HR teams with a powerful, data-driven experience that helps them foster workplace culture and drive impact. In January 2020, the platform was acquired by Kallidus to complement a full suite of human capital management (HCM) software.
A best-in-class employee onboarding platform, Sapling streamlines complicated HR processes, allowing employers to visualize relationships between people, teams, and departments; manage time-off policies; and unify global data effortlessly—all from within a single system.
Current Finch customers can enjoy immediate access to the Sapling integration. For those interested in becoming a customer and gaining access, simply enter your email address on our homepage here, and get your API keys today.
Our universal API provides access to 150+ HR and payroll integrations and counting, including Quickbooks and ADP Run. As for ongoing maintenance, updates, and dealing with edge cases, there’s no need to worry; our dedicated development team handles everything, so you can spend your time on your core product.
Our newest integration, Personio, is now open for access. This latest offering increases our data coverage to over 150 HR and payroll systems, ensuring developers can continue to provide their customers with innovative and seamless digital experiences.
Founded in 2015, Personio is a comprehensive platform dedicated to helping businesses automate and optimize their core HR processes in order to save time. That means making HR as transparent and efficient as possible. So far, Personio has done just that for over 6,000 customers across Europe.
In 2021, the company launched its latest offering: People Workflow Automation. This new product helps companies drive productivity across all aspects of their business by connecting tools and teams outside of a traditional HR scope and consolidating all employee information in one place. Innovations like this have helped Personio build a leading HR platform, valued today at $8.5 billion
Finch customers automatically have access to the Personio integration. If you’re not yet a customer and want to gain access, enter your email address on our homepage here, and get your API keys today.
Our universal API provides access to 150+ payroll integrations and counting, including Quickbooks and ADP RUN. Maintenance, updates, and edge cases are all handled by our first-rate team, so your team can focus on building exceptional experiences.
Eugenie Ma always knew she wanted to pursue a career in recruiting. After working as a tech recruiter in a variety of sectors, from IoT to public safety, she found herself at Finch helping to build a world-class team. Read on to discover what Eugenie looks for in a job candidate, why she makes diversity, equity, and inclusion a top priority in her work, and where she prefers to spend her free time.
I was hired as Finch’s first internal recruiter to build the foundational pieces of our talent function. Besides building processes, I review resumes, screen applicants, and provide candidate support. One important element of my work is ensuring that candidates fully understand our company goals and how they would fit into the puzzle as part of Finch’s team. I want them to be fully comfortable with their decision to build with us.
Like all my colleagues, I wear multiple hats. I’ve been fortunate enough to work both in people operations and on employer branding projects.
It really depends on the role. They probably already embody our core values—execution, curiosity, humility, and empathy. Our organization is quite unique because we all come from different walks of life. Our range of experiences enables us to come up with creative solutions together.
However, at the end of the day, it’s all about being organized and being willing to navigate ambiguous situations, so I look for those qualities in an applicant as well.
First impressions have a lasting impact. That means submitting an error-free and reader-friendly resume. Then, let your authentic self shine through during the interview process. We want to celebrate your track record and learn how you’ve conquered challenges. It’s also okay to ask clarifying questions after conducting your initial research.
Actually, if someone had told me I was going to work in tech, I wouldn’t have believed them. My undergraduate degree was in business administration. I was lucky enough to find a mentor who took a chance on me. She offered a recruiting internship at an internet of things (IoT) company, and the rest was history. After that, I moved into the machine learning and computer vision space, then into public safety.
Jeremy, one of Finch’s co-founders, reached out when I was an executive recruiter at Amazon. I missed working with technical populations and building meaningful processes, so I tried my hand at consulting. I could tell Finch was going to be a great fit because of how friendly everyone was. They would go out of their way to check in with me, even though I wasn’t a full-time member of their team. That’s rare—especially in a remote work environment.
Initially, I did top-of-funnel projects like generating lists of prospects, but that quickly evolved into more strategic work like crafting messaging and fine-tuning interview structures.
I want to leave the world a better place, and the possibility that I’ll change even one life makes everything worth it. We spend a majority of our adult lives working, so we should operate in engaging spaces. As a career matchmaker, I help people navigate the job market and align them with roles that energize them.
Finch is the youngest startup I’ve been a part of, and I’m excited to apply the lessons I’ve learned in previous positions as we grow. Plus, working with brilliant people goes a long way. Everyone at Finch is driven and process-oriented, which is a welcome change from some larger companies.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion. Diversity goes beyond meeting checkbox requirements; it’s the diversity of thought and expressions that unlocks success. Someone once told me that it’s pointless to extend party invitations if attendees aren’t given the opportunity to dance and mingle. When it comes to recruiting, we’re striving to cultivate spaces where team members can be bold and know that their thoughts are being heard.
I’m an introverted extrovert, so I appreciate having a high level of autonomy, ownership, and impact while bringing my authentic self to the table. It’s important to me that others feel that same sense of trust and worth.
When I first started, I was very impressed with our doc center and standard operating procedures. Things were very well organized for a team of our size and stage. I’ve learned how to fine-tune my project management skills and how to create detailed documents with clear goals. Diana Liu is especially talented when it comes to project management, and she has really shown me the ropes.
We’re a remote-first team, so all communication is very intentional. Unlike collaborating in a physical office space, we can’t just hang out at the water cooler to have spontaneous conversations. But we’ve been using Gather Town as a virtual office space to build meaningful relationships, so the ability to verbally brainstorm, whiteboard, and play games with one another is only a click away.
We also have a strong one-to-one peer-manager culture; we’re constantly adjusting our communication methods as we continue to scale.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions and ask for help. Curiosity is one of our core values, and everybody at Finch is exceedingly gracious and thoughtful. Leverage the resources you have, and meet proactively with your manager as much as possible. Those early conversations are crucial for setting the expectations both for yourself and for your team.
I’m a yogi in the making—but if I’m not at my local studio, I’m probably at the gym or reading in Central Park. I’ve also started bouldering.
Exhilarating. Things change all the time! There’s always something going on, and there’s always something to do. There’s never a moment of boredom.
Interested in joining Eugenie at Finch? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions.
We built Finch to unlock access to employment data and are committed to creating a best-in-class developer experience. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of our self-serve sign-up, which makes it easy for innovative developers to get API keys and start evaluating the benefits of employment data for their product.
For many developers looking to leverage employment data, it takes months to gain access and build integrations one by one. Even when those integrations are built, the process can still involve flat files, complex authentication, and mismatched data scopes. Finch condenses that entire process into a few days by unifying all employment systems through a single API with normalized data and permissions. In the end, your customers can sync their employment system with your product in minutes (though we’ve seen it happen in as little as 30 seconds).
Now, instead of having to go through our sales team to access our API keys, we’ve overhauled our onboarding process, so you can start building in minutes. Getting up and running is easy and only takes three steps:
In only a few minutes, you’ll have everything you need to start testing with Finch’s sandbox.
Once you’ve created an account, you’ll get access to our sandbox, which includes multiple test instances representing varying employer sizes, a dashboard with connections monitoring and audit logs, and documentation that sets you up for success.
Once you’re done testing out the platform and are ready to go to production with live customers, reach out to our team. We’ll make sure you have production keys and check all the boxes related to production readiness and compliance so that you can offer the best data-syncing experience to your customers.
Gain access to Finch today and supercharge your application experience with employment data.
Time in the startup world moves fast—something Sean Breen knows from experience. After getting his start as an intern at a venture capital firm in Washington D.C., he quickly immersed himself in the ecosystem of enterprise companies and their founders, eventually making his mark as the territory account executive for Mapbox, a billion-dollar mapping platform. After hitting the job market a few years later in search of a new challenge, Sean met his match with Finch. Read on to hear Sean talk about the road that led him to our team and how he has been able to succeed.
I was referred to Finch by a company they use for placements called Candidate Labs. It was at the point in my career where I was ready for change and looking for a fresh challenge to energize me. When I met Ansel and Jeremy, Finch’s co-founders, I immediately understood what they were trying to build. I understood their business model and had prior experience selling technical products to developers. But meeting the team and feeling the chemistry was what sealed the deal for me.
In the beginning, it was all about building processes. Since then, it has evolved into generating new business and growing sales. Getting new customers to join Finch is my main job, but because we’re a startup, I also work with the engineering and product teams to understand what the market is telling us and communicate that internally.
It's very bidirectional. We're building our roadmap based on what we think the market needs and, at the same time, the market is telling us what it actually needs.
Not at all. I was a chemistry and economics major in school. Going into the workforce, I wanted to figure out what my abilities were and what I might be more naturally inclined at than others. A few of my mentors suggested sales. The first thing I pictured was the stereotype that everybody associates with sales, but I was intrigued by how consultative the field can be. It’s more than just selling. I’m thankful for my mentors and the conversations we had that led me here.
Along with being naturally curious, I’d say it’s the ability to hear what someone is saying at face value and then deduce what will best solve their problem. Oftentimes, the real value that people are looking for is one or two layers deeper than what they might communicate. For me, it presents a fun puzzle to solve.
I love that it's so dynamic. I’m a naturally curious person, and I like to get into the weeds. Working at a startup, some days are harder than others for a variety of reasons. You don’t know what you’re going to get. At the same time, you exercise a real impact on the company, the team, and your own career. Outside of fulfilling my own needs, it’s important to me to help other people fulfill theirs.
I’ve found that simplicity is key. There are three things that I need to do to have a good day: drink water, work out, and get outside. I structure my day around these very clear objectives to ensure I can be the best version of myself both professionally and personally.
I like being outside and moving around. Last year I did a couple of endurance races, but my biggest passion outside of work is helping to organize the D.C. Bike Party. It’s a once-a-month social ride that attracts 600 to 1,000 people. We tow around a large sound system and have a DJ play music, but it’s more than just a party on wheels. We’re bringing music, the arts, and joy to the city.
The people. Every company is going to have its customers and its product, but it’s the people that you’re working with and going through challenges with that make a major difference. The longer I’ve been at Finch, the more I realize how great my teammates are.
Zoom. It sounds weird, but having conversations where you can see someone’s face gets you 70% of the way there. And then, because we’re a remote-first company, there’s greater emphasis on building relationships at any time, not just during office hours. For example, I was skiing in Utah and arranged to meet up with my co-worker, Sam. We skied a full day together. It was like we’d been friends for decades.
The importance of process. Passion can get you a long way when it comes to certain endeavors, but process helps you scale. That’s a lesson I’ve learned in my time here, and I already feel like I can apply it to future projects.
Interested in joining Sean’s team at Finch? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions.
Finch and EHIR are partnering to help innovative companies empower employers with health, wellness, and productivity solutions for their workforces. We’re excited to announce that we’ll be supporting their academy, innovator, and alumni communities with our employment data platform.
EHIR is a coalition of more than 75 of the world’s leading employers, including Apple, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, Target, and Disney, that find and accelerate solutions to help employees attain their best health. The objective support and valuable insight EHIR provides helps member organizations navigate the shifting employer landscape and stay ahead of the curve.
Over the past six years, EHIR has worked diligently to identify and evaluate the most promising emerging health and wellness solutions in HR tech. Now, after undergoing a thorough vetting process, we’re proud to announce that EHIR has recognized Finch as a trusted partner in its exclusive network.
The pandemic has changed the way many people think about health and telehealth services. Meanwhile, the Great Resignation has afforded employees greater bargaining power, putting pressure on employers to provide more and increasingly progressive benefits.
Due to the growing demand for technology that addresses these challenges, many HR tech startups are entering the market. With so many products to choose from, it can be difficult for employers to understand which best suit the needs of their employees.
As an independent organization, EHIR provides employers with recommendations they can trust—saving them time and money.
By unifying data access to multiple HRIS and payroll systems through a single integration, Finch meets EHIR’s criteria as an innovative platform their community members can rely on to help them tackle data syncing challenges. We’re honored by the distinction and excited for the opportunity to support EHIR’s change-making mission.
Join the growing fleet of providers leveraging APIs to improve processes, automate workflows, and build better user experiences. Contact EHIR's team and get API keys from Finch today!
Problem: Green Places relies on customers’ HR data to perform key carbon footprint calculations. To get what it needs, Green Places had to ask customers to upload the data via spreadsheets and CSV files—a high-friction, time-consuming, and low-fidelity process.
Solution: By integrating with Finch, Green Places has direct, secure, and permissioned data connectivity to 90% of the HR platforms its customers use every day—saving customers 5 to 7 hours at onboarding and unlocking new possibilities for Green Places’ product roadmap.
It has never been more critical for businesses to minimize their environmental impact, but traditional pathways to assessing and reducing a business’ carbon footprint are, for many businesses, prohibitively expensive.
Green Places is changing that. Through its tech-first, science-backed approach to calculating, reducing, and offsetting emissions, Green Places is making sustainability attainable, so that businesses of all sizes have the power and opportunity to make a difference.
To arrive at accurate emissions calculations, Green Places taps into many different kinds of data sources, including utility companies, databases managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, Google Maps, business accounting systems, and more.
One of Green Places’ most important data sources is the HR platforms its customers use to manage their human capital. HR platforms house many of the keystone data attributes Green Places depends on, including the number of employees a customer has, where each employee is based, and the location of their workspace. When combined with data from other sources, Green Places can determine important markers like how much clean energy versus fossil fuels a customer expends to power its physical operations and the total environmental impact of its employees’ commute.
But without direct connectivity to HR platforms, Green Places had to ask its customers to upload their HR data manually via spreadsheets and CSV files. It was tedious, time-consuming, and compromised Green Places’ mission to put seamless sustainability within reach.
Green Places knew it had to automate the data retrieval process and set a goal of pulling 80% of emissions data across all source types. But when it came to HR data, Green Places found that most integration providers lacked breadth and depth of coverage. The sustainability platform was about to embark on a piecemeal initiative to cobble together multiple partial solutions, when it learned about Finch.
Above all, Green Places was impressed with Finch’s comprehensive coverage. With Finch’s single, universal API, Green Places gained real-time connectivity to more than 90% of its customers’ HR platforms. Just as critically, Finch affords Green Places more time and bandwidth to allocate to other areas of product development.
"We’ve always had the goal of making our product as straightforward as possible through integrations. So, now that we have a universal integration into HR platforms through Finch, we can devote our time to focusing on unlocking commerce data and other data silos."
Alex Lassiter, Green Places’ Founder and CEO
Since partnering with Finch, customers have the option to securely connect their HR platform directly to Green Places’ system. From start to finish, the connection takes moments:
Instantly, via a single API integration, Green Places has access to the data it needs to perform 40% of a customer’s emissions calculations. Meanwhile, customers are spared anywhere from 5 to 7 hours they would otherwise spend manually collecting and uploading HR data.
Finch also opens up a world of potential for the sustainability platform.
Traditionally, carbon accounting is based on historical data, but with Finch’s live data connection, Green Places is uniquely positioned to upend the status quo and build carbon accounting services that are based on real-time computations.
Green Places is also planning to leverage Finch’s comprehensive HR endpoints, including employee email addresses, to fuel a higher degree of employee interaction. The goal is to foster authentic sustainability cultures within workplaces that influence systemic change.
"With Finch, we have the opportunity to make sustainability and green policies core to employees’ work experience, so that change doesn’t just happen at the top; it comes from all directions."
Alex Lassiter, Green Places’ Founder and CEO
At Finch, we’ve made it our mission to support innovative platforms like Green Places access the global employment ecosystem. If you’re interested in learning more about the potential and power of workforce data, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.
While working in quality assurance at Checkr, Lauren Wan discovered her passion for product optimization. Her willingness to confront new challenges head-on and her knack for quickly getting to the root of a problem has made her a valuable addition to Finch. Read on to see what Lauren has learned on the job and the helpful advice she’d offer others starting out in product operations.
I’m part of a team that’s responsible for operationalizing and optimizing our product. A big part of it is being a subject matter expert on the many payroll systems we integrate with so we can help inform engineering decisions and provide insights when our customers reach out with questions.
If I were to break down my day-to-day, the big categories would be researching different payroll systems, building and iterating on processes and SOPs, investigating issues our customers have surfaced, and providing hands-on support. While I’m not a highly technical person, I love learning how a product functions and translating that to non-technical and operations folks.
I graduated from UC Davis with a degree in managerial economics and had various internships throughout college. One of my main projects was at the university research office, where I performed data quality assurance for a new website launch.
That’s what led me to Checkr, which was one of my first jobs out of college. I started there as a quality assurance associate in operations, which meant ensuring the accuracy of background check reports by investigating criminal records, researching court documents, and analyzing compliance laws. I was in that department for three and a half years, ultimately getting promoted to manager. Eventually, I realized that, while I loved helping the people on my team grow, I was mostly passionate about optimizing our product by rooting out inefficiencies and reducing manual workloads.
That’s what drove me to product operations, which was my final role at Checkr. I was in that position for nine or ten months before making the transition to Finch.
I heard about the position through Diana, who I worked with at Checkr. She posted on Instagram that Finch was hiring, and I reached out to learn more. I wanted to understand what product ops meant in a broader context and where my skill set might fit in. That led to conversations with Finch’s co-founders, Jeremy and Ansel, which really got the ball rolling.
I loved my team and role at Checkr, but I was ready for a new challenge. The idea of learning about a brand new product and industry was exciting, and Finch felt like a great fit. I’d known for a while that I wanted to join a smaller startup and truly contribute to its growth, and I appreciated the thoughtfulness that Jeremy and Ansel brought to the interview process. They made a point of going through all the reasons that I stood out as a candidate, and that was a defining moment for me. It really demonstrated the fantastic culture at Finch.
Of course, I’ve learned a lot about our product and how it works, but one thing that’s emphasized at Finch is running toward problems, not away from them. Even if you’re not the person who can solve a specific problem, that doesn’t mean that it won’t impact you in some way. I’ve learned the importance of finding the right people to help you tackle an issue and collaborating with them to find a way forward.
In product ops, you’re often operating in ambiguity. There are thousands of payroll systems out there. If a customer makes a detailed request, or if we’re exploring new integrations, I may have to explore payroll systems I’ve never worked with before. It can be challenging, but it’s very rewarding when I’m able to find the right solution.
One of my larger projects is studying different payroll systems to understand the specific set of permissions a user needs to implement to successfully call each of our API endpoints—allowing us to provide more granular error messaging to our customers. It requires a lot of up-front research and testing across payroll systems, and it’s been super exciting to work on. The impact to our customers is going to be huge.
Be flexible, and understand that what your role looks like this month may not necessarily be what it looks like next month. That’s certainly been the case for me. Product ops is a unique team, in that we’re interacting with payroll systems day in and day out—probably more than any other team at Finch. So, the requests we see from customers and internal teams can take many forms.
I’ve recently rediscovered my love of reading. I have a goal to read 52 books in 52 weeks, and I try to read a little each night before going to bed. Right now, I’m just two books behind schedule.
I also travel a lot. I moved to Denver three years ago, but I probably only spend 40% of my time here. My partner lives in Miami, and my family lives in San Francisco, so I get to split my time between these very different cities. It’s great just biking around, exploring new neighborhoods, and trying out new restaurants.
The people here are incredible. Everyone is so hardworking and always willing to help. They’re also genuine and kind, which speaks volumes to the culture we’re building at Finch. The company as a whole has done a great job of creating a space where people feel comfortable being themselves, and there are many different personalities in the mix.
Scrappy. The team has doubled in size since I joined six months ago, but we’re still small, and everyone still wears multiple hats. I love that no one’s afraid to roll up their sleeves and get in the weeds to solve problems.
Interested in joining Lauren at Finch? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions.
At Finch, our mission is to empower innovators to access the global employment ecosystem. Since starting the company in late 2020, we’ve been excited about building a future in which the employment sector is both connected and programmable.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Finch has raised a $15 million Series A, led by Menlo Ventures, alongside General Catalyst, Bedrock, Y Combinator, and Sempervirens. We also brought on founders and executives from Gusto, ADP, Namely, Justworks, Workday, and other employment providers. Additionally, we are excited to have Matt Murphy, Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, join our board of directors, and Croom Beatty, Partner at Menlo Ventures, and Alex Tran, Managing Director at General Catalyst, join as Board Observers.
The employment sector has undergone an important transformation over the past two years. Employers, financial technology, benefit providers, and HR applications have had to meet the rising expectations of today’s workforce. Adapting to these expectations requires robust connectivity to employment systems (HR, payroll, and benefits). Given the industry’s fragmentation (there are 6,000+ employment providers in the U.S.) and the complexity of the underlying data and functions, such an infrastructure did not exist prior to Finch.
Without that infrastructure, many companies have been forced to resort to CSV uploads and FTP. Other companies have opted to spend millions in development costs, alongside years of business development efforts, to build one-off integrations. For example, the co-founder and CTO of Human Interest, a prominent 401(k) provider, said that building payroll and HR connectivity was one of the most time-consuming parts of their engineering effort, but it was essential to their success.
What they needed was pre-built, universal connectivity that would allow them to reallocate their focus to their core product. Over the past year, Finch took on that responsibility, integrating with employment systems across HR, payroll, and benefits. We now provide mission-critical infrastructure powering applications across hundreds of B2B fintech, benefits, HR, and enterprise verticals. After a little over a year since our public launch, Finch has achieved multiple major milestones:
Finch will continue expanding our connectivity and building blocks to enable our customers to create more innovation for employers and employees. With this new financing, we are focusing on three critical components of our infrastructure:
We are grateful to our team members, customers, and investors who have supported us through this journey. While we are incredibly proud of how far we have come, we are still in the early innings of the employment sector’s digital transformation. As we look to support the massive growth and change that will entail, we’ll accelerate our investments in building infrastructure that enables an open, friendly, and secure data ecosystem.
If you want to have an incredible impact and the opportunity to change an industry, join our team. We’re hiring for all roles!
Oz (he/him) has over 16 years of experience as a software engineer across different roles and responsibilities. Before joining Finch, he helped a subscription platform, Recharge Payments, grow their engineering team from 14 to 170+ people. He also created and ran departments for R&D, platform engineering, infrastructure, DevOps, analytics, and compliance. With his leadership skills, the company reached $2.1 billion in valuation and secured a $227 million Series B, surging 10x in size and revenue in the course of just four years.
I’m excited to do it all again—and better—with Finch. Everyone, from the founders to the engineers, are heavily invested in our organization’s success, and that gives us a solid foundation for growth. I’m looking forward to pushing Finch to the level I know it can achieve, and doing so with fantastic, highly motivated people will make it that much more satisfying.
At Finch, Oz is focused on building and overseeing a world-class engineering team. For him, that means cultivating high-velocity product teams, hiring and retaining people who care about their customers and coworkers, implementing and scaling repeatable processes, and instilling operational excellence as a core value.
A fluent Spanish speaker, Oz was born in Puerto Rico, grew up in Florida, and spent his early professional years in Denver. Recently, he moved back to the Tampa Bay area with his wife and three children to be closer to family (and prime fishing spots). If you ever see him out and about, buy him a bourbon—it’s his drink of choice.
Interested in joining Oz at Finch? We’re hiring! Head over to our careers page to check out our open positions.
To best serve their SMB customers, technology-first companies are looking to leverage the power of payroll and HR data—but with nearly 6K payroll systems on the market, that can mean building out many tedious integrations. Fortunately, there’s a better way.
After the unprecedented challenges wrought by the global pandemic, many SMBs are bouncing back—and many others are first opening their doors—to a dramatically different landscape.
Most notable is the seismic shift in focus from productivity to people as employers look to recruit and retain talent amid the Great Resignation, strengthen their work culture and benefits, and foster better relationships with their employees. For innovative companies serving SMBs, meeting these needs requires careful analysis and considerable support from the data tied up in SMBs’ payroll systems.
Unfortunately, comprehensive payroll data is getting harder and harder to access. There are almost 6,000 payroll providers in the U.S. alone, and recent trends are causing that number to grow.
For SMB-focused companies to keep up, they need to understand what the current payroll market looks like, which factors are driving diversification, and how using APIs that span multiple systems can help them access more data, build smarter and faster solutions for SMB customers, and ultimately boost their business. In this post, we break it all down.
The latest data indicates there are approximately 5,700 payroll providers in the U.S., with a combined annual revenue of around $48 billion.
The top three payroll providers—Intuit Quickbooks, ADP Run, and Paycheck Flex—cover almost half (45%) of SMB employers nationwide. But extending to the top 10 only increases that coverage to 55%. For comparison, the top 10 accounting systems collectively cover 95% of the SMB market.
What’s more, beyond the top three, all other payroll providers each have less than 4% of the total market share, with coverage quickly tapering off. A number of these are newer platforms—like Gusto, Zenefits, and Rippling—that have appeared over the last decade to satisfy evolving SMB needs and a growing demand for self-serve products with transparent pricing.
That means we can expect the industry to grow even more fractured in the coming years, as innovators continue to emerge and respond to changing market conditions.
In particular, there are three trends to watch that are spurring fragmentation in the U.S. payroll market. Let’s take a closer look at each.
A business’s payroll system plays a critical role in its operations, and switching platforms comes at a high cost—so picking the right provider is essential. Still, SMBs often select a payroll provider based solely on demographics, including factors like:
Only secondarily will SMBs look to the core capabilities and key features of the platform itself—such as options for customization, time tracking, benefits, insurance, and customer support. That means SMBs may not look for the best provider overall, but the best fit for their business.
External circumstances—above all, the lingering effects of the pandemic—also impact how SMBs think about payroll and the support they need from their payroll providers.
Some of the most pressing considerations include:
Industries that have their own regulatory bodies and in-person staffing needs—like food service, hospitality, construction, and agriculture—are particularly vulnerable to shifting conditions and face an even more complex decision when choosing a provider to accom modate them.
White-labeled and embedded solutions allow other companies to build payroll capabilities into their existing systems—essentially enabling any platform to become a payroll provider.
As this technology advances, it’s becoming easier for new companies to add payroll to their list of services and capabilities—and harder for a single provider to win a market majority.
Market fragmentation means businesses serving SMBs have to integrate and coordinate with multiple payroll providers to cover a sufficient swath of their customers. It’s hard enough to build and maintain an integration with one platform—let alone hundreds or thousands.
Integrating with the top one, three, or ten payroll providers might allow a company to cover half of their customer base. But to efficiently serve the other half—or tap into new regions and industries—would require many incremental builds, draining time and resources.
To tackle this coverage issue, many fintechs, benefits platforms, and other B2B companies are turning to digital solutions that take a more comprehensive approach to payroll data and roll hundreds of payroll integrations into a single platform. That’s where Finch comes in.
Finch’s universal API connects to an extensive network of payroll systems, and we are continually adding new integrations. Right now, we have compatibility with over 150 systems, and that number is always growing.
That means, with Finch, product teams designing solutions for SMBs don’t have to worry about building any integrations in house or reconciling inconsistent data outputs from different systems—they get secure, standardized, and effortlessly scalable access to the fragmented payroll market right out of the box.
To start building with Finch, click or tap “Get API keys” on our homepage.
Since 2020, the pace of experiences going virtual has snowballed – corporate learning and development (L&D) is no exception. Coupled with pressing talent concerns, L&D leaders across industries and verticals are poised to invest in learning management systems (LMS) that meet their need to remotely onboard, train, reskill, and upskill while also solving for their pain points around administration, organization, and analytics. Learning management systems that prioritize exceptional experiences for LMS admins and learners stand to come out on top.
One element of creating a best-in-class LMS experience is payroll and HR integrations. By connecting to the software employers use to manage their workforce, learning management systems can unlock product functions and features that set new bars in the LMS category.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss the L&D pain points HR and payroll integrations alleviate and how you can leverage them to optimize your own LMS platform in ways that meet or exceed your customers’ expectations.
Before we do, let’s dig into the mindset of your customers with a brief overview of the corporate L&D landscape, which is taking on new importance in the wake of COVID-19 and the social and economic forces defining our current reality.
For one, companies are struggling—both to keep employees motivated and to close skill gaps internally without resorting to expensive (and often unfruitful) talent recruitment initiatives. They’re also responding to demands to improve the DEI fluency of their teams and foster an authentically inclusive workplace culture. Then, there’s the growth of remote work and the need for virtual onboarding and training solutions to replace in-person experiences.
At many companies, L&D has been expected to bear the brunt of these challenges and more, earning L&D a place among c-suite priorities. The numbers bear this out:
Unsurprisingly, L&D teams are feeling more pressure to deliver on performance as well as more demands on their time. A recent survey found that the number of different L&D initiatives being deployed in 2022 has increased across the board, stretching L&D professionals thin.
To cope with their growing pains, L&D teams are looking to technology. Perhaps more than ever, they expect LMS solutions to save them time, drive learner engagement, and offer analytics that help them deliver the results they’ve been tasked with achieving.
Specifically, L&D professionals are concerned about three key areas of LMS functionality and performance:
An important element of solving these pain points for your customers is HR and payroll system integrations.
When you integrate with your customers’ HR and payroll systems, your LMS has access to their full trove of employee census data like name, job title, department, location, and much more. In turn, you unlock numerous opportunities to make your product more effective and efficient in ways that meet and exceed your customers’ expectations.
Here are just some of the ways HR and payroll integrations help you build a best-in-class LMS experience for your customers:
Assuming you’re sold on the value of HR and payroll system integrations, you have a couple of options. You can either build and maintain the integrations in-house—a complicated, resource-draining undertaking—or you can outsource integrations to a specialist like Finch.
With Finch, you get all the benefits of integrations without sacrificing your internal bandwidth. Our single, universal API makes it possible to access comprehensive data sets from an ever-growing number of HR and payroll providers (142 at the time of publication) with minimal coding and zero maintenance responsibilities.
Compare that to building in-house, which can cost companies in the vicinity of $300,000, including upfront development and ongoing upkeep.
Aside from cost savings, Finch standardizes data from disparate sources, so it’s immediately and optimally usable without intervention from your team or your customers—allowing you to focus on what you do best without having to worry about which of the many, many HR systems or payroll providers your customers use (check out our whitepaper on the fragmented US payroll landscape here).
Perhaps the most tangible benefit of Finch, though, is its effect on onboarding. What once took 30 days worth of file uploads, hand-holding, and back-and-forth correspondence with your customers is reduced to a quick and easy 30 seconds and completed entirely within your LMS. The process is simple:
We do all the legwork. For you and your customers, there’s nothing more to it.
Then there’s the matter of upkeep. When you go with Finch, integration maintenance is entirely in our court. So, instead of spending an average of 27 minutes on the phone with an HR or payroll provider trying to connect to their infrastructure so you can troubleshoot any inevitable issues that arise, you shoot us a support ticket, and we take care of it, reducing your effort to something closer to 27 seconds.
In essence, Finch ensures you can take advantage of everything HR and payroll integrations offer without any of the internal hassles or capacity issues you’d run into by keeping the work in-house. Consequently, you’ll have more internal resources to dedicate to your core product, allowing you to get to market sooner and accelerate your roadmap.
To start building with Finch, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.
Developers using Finch now have access to our latest integration, Sequoia One, putting our total data coverage at 150+ HR and payroll systems (and counting). With this latest addition, Finch customers have even more opportunity to offer seamless digital experiences to their customers.
Founded in 2001, Sequoia has long been committed to helping businesses foster supportive work environments and benefit packages for their employees. In 2014, the company doubled down on its commitment by launching Sequoia One—a professional employer organization (PEO) dedicated to serving the needs of innovative startups looking to outsource HR, payroll, and benefits.
Today, Sequoia One takes care of HR-related functions so its clients can focus on their mission. But Sequoia One doesn’t just alleviate administrative and regulatory burdens—it helps its employers optimize their benefits packages, expertly manage their hybrid workforce, and uncover automations to build a winning, seamless, and wholly scalable HR experience that attracts and retains superlative talent. At last count, Sequoia One boasts more than 800 fast-growing companies as clients.
If you’re already a Finch customer, you automatically have access to the Sequoia One integration. If you’re not, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.
With Finch, you get access to all 150+ major North American payroll providers we’re integrated with, including QuickBooks and ADP RUN. And because our team owns all technical requirements for each integration and provides you with one universal API, you don’t have to worry about updates, maintenance, or issues.
Although we’re fully remote at Finch, we host bi-annual in-person offsites!
We had approximately 20 team members gathered at our last offsite (April 2022) in Lake Tahoe. We celebrated our recent growth, bonded over a variety of team activities, and had a blast snowshoeing, skiing, and relaxing at the spa.
Sharing some photos below – huge thanks to the team for being so engaged throughout the whole offsite, and can’t wait for the next one!
Finch is a remote-first company; our team members are located across the United States and Canada. Visit our BuiltIn page to learn more about our culture and how you can make an impact (We were just featured in a BuiltIn article, check us out here!) We’re passionate about our company values of execution, curiosity, humility, and empathy.
Interested in joining Finch? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions.
Runae (he/him) most recently worked at Checkr as Director of Business Development, where he helped build the channel program and worked closely with leading players in HR tech along the way.
From my days at Checkr, and before that, at Ernst & Young, I saw firsthand how fragmented the HR tech ecosystem is,” said Runae. “Unifying the HR tech space with modern and thoughtful APIs represents the future in terms of how new products are built and how employers expect their payroll, HR, and other solutions to ‘just work’ together. Finch’s vision is an exciting piece of that puzzle, and the opportunity to work with such a talented and humble team to bring this vision to life was too compelling not to say yes to.
At Finch, Runae is applying his business development experience to crafting our partner strategy and securing partnerships with the most innovative companies in the employment data ecosystem. He will also be hiring for roles dedicated to new partner acquisition and partner management.
Runae is based in the Bay Area with his partner and 15-month-old daughter, who recently discovered how to run (which is an exciting but also scary milestone!). When he’s not chasing after toddlers, you can find him hiking around Northern California or hosting Dungeons & Dragons games for friends and coworkers.
Joshua (he/him) comes to Finch from Focus Lab—an agency focused on rebranding high-growth tech companies—where he most recently served as design director. In his seven years at Focus Lab, Joshua led brand strategy and visual identity projects for companies that have collectively gone on to raise billions of dollars. In his new role at Finch, Joshua will apply that experience to lead on all things design for our brand, including our product and website.
I’ve been branding and designing for software companies for over seven years, but it’s always been on the outside as a design agency partner,” said Joshua. “I’ve consistently been intrigued by what it takes to solve design challenges from the inside. At Finch, I get to do just that. Finch is also working on some deep problems in the employment sector, and helping solve those problems is exciting. Combine that with great founders and a world-class team, and it was an easy decision to join.
Joshua is based in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, where he balances his passion for design with running, chess, writing music, and playing any and all manners of games with his family.
Interested in joining Runae and Joshua at Finch? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions.
In under a decade, Erik Demaree went from working at the Bloomberg Help Desk to being solely responsible for Auth0's North American corporate, mid-market and small business sales teams—firmly cementing his success as a leader in B2B tech sales. That drive, coupled with his proven track record for selling APIs and his interest in identifying and unlocking economic opportunities, made him a natural fit for Finch. Read on to hear from Erik himself about his move to our team and the leadership principles he’s bringing with him.
You’ve been at Finch for about three months now. What were you doing previously?
After college, I worked at Bloomberg in New York before moving back to Seattle. I took a job at Auth0, which was a relatively small company at the time, and stayed with them for almost six years. Over the course of my time there, I moved my way up from a business development representative role to running commercial sales. After Okta acquired Auth0, I started my job search.
How did your job search lead you to Finch?
I had a list of things that I wanted in a new company, and I found it in Finch. I wanted to move into a role that would allow me to apply the learnings I had accumulated while offering me more focused ownership over the go-to-market process. I wanted a company with a blue-chip investment team, a product that is the core of application-building and primarily sold to developers and product managers. I wanted to sell an API that can unlock economic opportunities. In terms of leadership, I was looking for founders that are very, very, very hungry.
What does it mean, on a practical level, to be VP of sales?
My mandate is to operationalize our entire go-to-market function. That includes building out the sales team, creating a sales playbook, and working with marketing to coalesce everything into a brand and a pitch that we can sell.
What does success look like in your role?
The thing we've been focusing on, within the sales team, is that a good today is better than a perfect tomorrow. We prioritize pushing stuff out, moving forward, and then learning from that. If we need to augment or iterate, that's completely okay.
We’ll never be “done” with building out the sales process. We're always looking for ways to improve ourselves, increase conversions, and close larger deals. Therefore, what success looks like now is very different from what it will look like six months from now when we have a larger team and different customers.
How do you approach work-life balance as a leader at Finch?
Finch is cognizant that building culture can also mean giving people space to have lives outside of their job. Of course, as a 30-person company, we have to be invested in building the company from the ground up. But we are still respectful of each other’s personal commitments. Giving people the space to be flexible and to work the way they want to work is super important.
What makes Finch a great company to work for?
We are building the infrastructure that will power the future of employment data. The use cases and applicability of what we are doing are limitless and, as a result, we are addressing both tactical and massive issues for our customers. On top of that, Finch is growing at a rate where every single employee is sharing ideas and iterating to improve processes, plans, and approach. We are constantly collaborating in a way where different functional areas can improve others. One of the hallmarks of Finch is our hiring practices. We have folks from all walks of life with completely different backgrounds. By bringing this team together and focusing on how we build together, we are able to share new ideas and perspectives to turn Finch into the best company it can be.
What’s challenging about your job?
We're a startup, so there are nuances and gaps that we still have to define. This makes every day different and fresh. You don't always know where the next challenge is going to come from. We can be prescriptive and try to anticipate that, but there's always going to be an element of surprise.
What excites you about your work?
Right now we are focused on a few specific use cases – these get our foot in the door – but they only scratch the surface in terms of what our product can do. Being an integration layer between applications and payroll and HR platforms may not sound incredibly exciting, but companies in the employment space are handling extremely sensitive data in very porous ways. If we can solve this piece of the puzzle, these organizations can build better products that can help people both at work and home.
All of this is pretty exciting, especially since employers are thinking more progressively about promoting holistic workplace wellness. Employees want to feel that their company is supportive, transparent, and respectful of their values and personal priorities. We can be leaders in this space and help refine the relationship between workers and their employers.
Interested in joining Erik’s team at Finch? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions.
Problem: Trainual, a B2B SaaS platform that helps SMBs scale their operational processes and employee training protocols, needed a way to seamlessly onboard new customers and users without endlessly building point-to-point integrations with all the HR systems in its target market’s tech stack.
Solution: With Finch, Trainual has experienced a 3,620% increase in its integration setup completion rate, making it easier for customers to invite more users to Trainual—all while reducing development costs by 75%.
When businesses come to Trainual for help, they’re usually small but growing fast, and their operational processes—scattered across Google docs and PDFs—can’t keep pace. What they’re looking for is a system to document, organize, distribute, and scale the policies, roles, how-tos, hierarchies, and responsibilities that make everything run.
Trainual serves as that single source of truth. With a Trainual account, customers have access to easy-to-follow, pre-built templates and tutorials for creating their business’s unique playbook, as well as the interface they need to share that information with their staff and ensure its consumption. Trainual’s goal? To make more businesses successful and help all the people within their customers’ organization love their job and do it effectively every day.
When a business signs up for Trainual, every employee in that organization needs to be entered into the system in order to properly map the roles, responsibilities, and SOPs that make Trainual’s playbooks so effective. Every employee is also granted access to the system so that the materials developed are always at their disposal.
In order to deliver a seamless experience, Trainual knew it had to integrate with the HR and payroll systems its customers use to manage their employee records. The alternative—asking customers to manually enter or upload individual employee data—was a nonstarter.
So, Trainual began building point-to-point integrations with individual systems as the need arose. As its tech team added more integrations, the undertaking became increasingly complicated and time-consuming, leaving them with a decision to make: Should they continue their course of building one-off integrations? Should they build an API? Or should they outsource integrations to a third-party provider?
For the fast-moving startup, the decision was clear. Trainual knew that partnering with an integrations provider would allow it to meet customers' expectations in a much shorter time frame. Finch was the solution.
With Finch’s single, universal API, Trainual immediately grew its integration coverage by 137% but only had to build to one centralized point instead of many, disparate systems, saving weeks of developer time and effort. Combined with the effects of outsourcing integration maintenance to Finch, Trainual has realized a 75% reduction in development costs.
Now, Trainual has greater alignment than ever with HR and payroll systems in the SMB space, meaning more of its customers use the systems Finch connects to. In turn, Trainual has experienced a 3,620% increase in its integration setup completion rate.
Trainual customers feel the impact of Finch in the seamlessness of their customer journey. When they’re prompted to invite additional users into the system, they’re presented with a banner of all the different integrations Trainual supports. With Finch behind the scenes providing the rails the data travels on, Trainual customers can securely transfer their company’s employee data in two simple steps:
In moments, Finch authenticates the connection and Trainual can begin importing employee data—fields like name, title, role, start date, and supervisor—to set up new user accounts.
Because the data connection is continuous, Trainual can instantly onboard and offboard new and former employees as necessary, without asking customers to update their user data. It’s critical automation for a platform that prides itself on being built to scale with customers. The ease with which new user accounts can be added has also resulted in more user accounts across the board—an important metric for Trainual.
Finch removes friction and streamlines the process of onboarding our customers and setting up new employees down to a matter of seconds. We push Finch early in our customer journey, because we know that customers who take advantage of those integrations turn into our most successful accounts.
Taylor Sell, Director of Product
In addition to seamless onboarding, Finch empowers Trainual with the data-driven visibility to make more insightful recommendations for its customers.
Based on the data we’re able to glean from integrations—industry, company size, reporting structure, titles, tenure, etc.—we can tell customers what they should be documenting and the policies and processes they should be following. It opens up a more nuanced recommendation engine for us.
Taylor Sell, Director of Product
One of the most exciting and reassuring aspects of Trainual’s relationship with Finch is the proven knowledge that Finch’s coverage is ever-expanding and won’t constrain Trainual’s own growth or ability to make a sale.
As a new request for an integration comes in from one of our customers or we see a new provider that's coming up, we've had a great experience going to the Finch team and asking, “Is this something that you have on your roadmap?” And so far, every single one we've recommended has been added within about a week. As people request it, Finch is adding integrations quickly.
Taylor Sell, Director of Product
Without the worry of building or maintaining its integrations, Trainual’s tech team has been able to move its focus away from how to get more users into the system toward the things that matter most: the training and documentation functions that constitute the core of Trainual’s product.
At Finch, we’re excited to support innovative platforms like Trainual. If you’re interested in exploring workforce data, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.
At Finch, we know that your success depends on the information and tools you have at your disposal. As part of our commitment to supporting that success, we’re thrilled to bring searchable API requests to the Finch dashboard.
The log is a record of every API request made by your application. Some requests may be batched with associated status codes for every individual ID or payment ID, and we expand these into their own log. We record requests with singular responses as their own.
You’ll find the event log in your Finch dashboard under the Activity tab. From there, you can search by company ID, company name, request ID, individual ID, payment ID, or Finch endpoint (e.g., directory, company, payment) and filter by payroll provider, status, and time.
In the future, the piping we’ve built will make many more features possible — like a metrics or issues center — that offer even more reliable data capture and deeper search mechanisms.
Our goal is to empower the developers building on top of Finch. With visibility into your API usage, you’ll be equipped to troubleshoot errors, keep your team apprised of their status, properly communicate issues to your external users, and provide better service.
To start building with Finch, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.
In this joint blog post with vehicle API provider, Smartcar, learn how information retrieval with APIs help increase revenue, quality of services, and productivity for commercial auto insurance providers.
Over the past 10 years, commercial auto underwriters have cited more than $22 billion in underwriting losses. To achieve long-term profitability, a 2020 report calls on providers to strengthen their collective focus on pricing, underwriting, and claims handling.
The industry is already responding.
Companies are taking advantage of stronger data ecosystems to withstand post-pandemic insurance prices, restrictive policies, and anxious drivers. Auto insurance rates have increased 3% in the United States from 2020 to 2021—but the rise in emerging telematics-based solutions has saved policyholders 4% on their insurance.
APIs can help commercial auto insurance providers improve underwriting models and customer experiences, whether that’s by streamlining broker communication or automating the retrieval of policyholder information.
In this blog post, learn how APIs can contribute to your goals and why the opportunity cost of implementation has never been lower.
For the commercial auto insurance industry, the potential advantages of API integrations—particularly integrations with vehicle data systems and HR and payroll systems—bolster customer satisfaction, retention, and profit margins. Here’s how:
API integrations help you stream data straight from the source, ensuring your underwriting model is informed by the most complete and up-to-date information available. For vehicle integrations, that includes commonly misreported data attributes like odometer readings, VINs, and garaging locations, while HR and payroll system integrations enable you to collect your customers’ employee census records in seconds.
In the United States and Europe, companies spend an average of 5 hours each week on the duplication of responsibilities—time that you could otherwise spend delivering higher quality services and products. Without automation, you lose significant time sorting, extracting, and analyzing large sets of data on drivers, vehicles, and driving records.
An API helps your business speed up claims management by seamlessly communicating data across claimants, carriers, and brokers. By automating what data is retrieved from vehicles and when, businesses can avoid repetitive manual processes, hefty spreadsheets, and missing information. In short, your operational productivity increases as you reduce in-house costs for data management and quality assurance.
Amidst shifting workplace expectations and added economic anxiety, employers are more confident working with insurance carriers that are responsive, accurate, and easy to use. That’s how APIs give you a competitive edge—by allowing quick access to customer data for efficient broker communication and higher-quality risk assessment processes. The stream of rich, real-time data APIs helps your business evolve beyond just insurance. The data visibility that APIs enable can position your app as a forward-thinking partner that guides customers to make better decisions. All of this starts with the standardization of data retrieval processes and the elimination of cumbersome CSV file uploads, reducing friction for all parties involved.
Tracking devices on policyholders’ vehicles can provide useful information on their driving habits—but they are expensive, vulnerable to tampering, and prone to loss, damage, and labor-intensive installation. In contrast, an API integration can communicate directly with the embedded cellular modems built into most new vehicles. They’re easy to set up, don’t require any hardware or installation, and reduce the risk of fraud.
Enrollment for telematics-based insurance saw significant growth during the pandemic and is used by the most popular auto insurers today. Nearly half of drivers who were given a telematics option for car insurance in 2021 opted into the program.
Connected car API platforms like Smartcar communicate directly with 4G and 5G telematics modems that are built into vehicles. In a few steps, Smartcar’s API can retrieve vehicle data such as odometer readings, location, VIN, and vehicle attributes.
For usage-based insurance (UBI) analytics provider True Mileage, odometer readings are automatically retrieved by clients at regular intervals. “I was completely awestruck when I learned that Smarcar enables insurers to connect to over 112 million vehicles,” said Ryan Morrison, founder and CEO at True Mileage.
Here’s how that works:
With a single integration across multiple vehicle brands, you can improve data aggregation and extraction, present better quotes to customers, and expand risk management efforts with predictive analytics and pattern recognition.
Vehicle integrations are just the beginning. For commercial auto insurance providers, retrieving employee information is just as critical. Fortunately, Finch’s API makes it easy and intuitive. In just a few clicks, your customers can grant you access to their HR or payroll system, enabling a direct data stream and all of the insights that come with it.
The process is simple:
From there, you can begin pulling the data you need to process a customer’s policy and enroll employees in coverage. Finch’s API endpoints offer remarkable depth, including:
In effect, Finch turns what was once a 30-day process, marked by clumsy document uploads and (seemingly) endless email back-and-forth, into a 30-second one—complete with richer, reliably accurate data.
There are many components to launching a software-driven auto insurance product for customers. You might consider custom integrations with vehicles and employer software, but the cost of building and maintaining all of those connections can impede product development and go-to-market plans.
Of course, reaping the benefits of providers like Smartcar and Finch requires outsourcing your API integrations, as opposed to building them in-house.
You may be asking yourself “do we build or do we buy?” While it’s natural to assume you can take on the work yourself (you do have a team of engineers, after all), there are a number of considerations you should weigh before taking that leap:
How much faster would you execute your roadmap if your team’s attention wasn’t split between your product and integrations? Integrations come with a heavy price tag when you consider the hours your team would spend building and maintaining connections. In fact, one Finch customer estimates it saved up to $100,000 by opting not to build in-house.
It takes a dedicated team to consistently monitor and troubleshoot APIs while providing technical support for both customers and internal teams building new features around the integration infrastructure. Partnering with an API platform can save your technical team weeks of engineering work that could otherwise be spent on core projects for customer acquisition and growth.
Building one integration in-house might seem doable, but a single integration will only cover a fraction of your customer base. Your APIs need to scale as your audience does, but instead of getting easier, integrations only become more complex as you add to them. Disparate data sources have different data models, and the lack of standardization would force your developers to sort through heaps of unformatted data that your product does not need. When not done correctly, it can end up requiring a lot of manual intervention to make right.
A pre-built API ecosystem gives you the agility to expand existing offerings without the cost of developing new systems from scratch or upending existing ones. When smart charging app, Optiwatt, expanded its product compatibility to five new vehicle brands, they used Smartcar to ensure in-house developers could focus on upcoming new features instead.
Although APIs have become a common solution for businesses, these integrations are still vulnerable to cybersecurity risks if the right measures aren’t taken. Companies building their own API connections will need to stay on top of compliance processes and certifications at all times to build user confidence and meet industry standards. If you’re integrating your solution with vehicles, you will need to build out authentication, permissions, and token management systems to securely transfer mobility data with an API token. This increases the complexities of your integration development, especially when multiple OEMs don’t have their own tokens process in place.
As a matter of course, integrations eventually break or malfunction due to system updates on your end or changes to the format of your data sources. Monitoring and troubleshooting these changes is a full-time job that will rob your team of valuable time and energy they could be spending on your core product. By having a dedicated team of experts to monitor and troubleshoot API errors, your business reduces the risk of technical backlogs and inconsistencies.
Not only does this help you manage your maintenance costs, but it also increases the reliability of your product and boosts customer confidence. If you don’t have the in-house resources to maintain your integrations, working with an API partner keeps your systems in order even when your business is scaling and your product is evolving.
Join the growing fleet of providers leveraging APIs to improve processes, automate workflows, and build better user experiences. Contact Smartcar's sales team and get API keys from Finch today!
Two years ago, Craig Cohen left his position as general manager at ADP Marketplace for the world of e-commerce. Despite the leap, he’s still very much invested in HCM, both as a financial backer and an impassioned thought leader. He’s also a valuable member of Finch’s advisory board, who has been instrumental in helping us identify our priorities.
We recently caught up with Craig to talk about the state of HCM, including a requisite pandemic analysis and the industry change he’d most like to see.
You left ADP for WooCommerce just before the pandemic hit. Looking back, where do you think HCM was headed and how did the pandemic affect that trajectory?
It was like an asteroid hit and pushed everything in another direction. I think the big focus before the pandemic was, how do I find the best people? What incentives and wellness programs can I offer? Then the world changed. People became entrepreneurs. They realized they can work from home and start their own businesses. I think that people also lost their attachment to their employer. They really started to ask, is this the right company for me?
What's happening now is that the HCM tech base has changed. It's become much more about, how do I evolve to support and keep my people that are amazing? What can I do to make sure that they're productive and successful in the world we live in? And the last piece of that is about providing connectedness. How do we build relationships when we're not in the office together? It’s a huge shift, and the HCM ecosystem is getting bigger as a result.
It sounds like HCM has stepped up to meet the challenge. In what areas, though, is there still room for improvement?
There’s a need to make systems talk together. You don't want a situation where a user has to log in to seven different accounts to enter the same piece of information. So, I think data and data communication is the number one thing.
Do you think the need for connectivity is a given at this point, or are there players that still need to be convinced?
I think the HR people within the organization get it, and I think that the data people in the organization get it. At the same time, the C-level is worried about the top and bottom line. They haven’t seen the benefit yet. So, I think that the HR and the data information people need to have a bigger seat at the table to talk about the Great Resignation and how to get the tools and data they need to create positive experiences for employees. I think leadership needs to better understand that there is a trickle down effect that happens when you have an employee who is not satisfied with their overall experience within the organization.
What will it take to get to a place of widespread acceptance?
It’s interesting, because single sign-on has been around for a while, and everybody appreciates the instant gratification of it. We need to arm HR teams with information that shows what that impact is to the organization. The more tools and resources we can give to them, the quicker change can happen.
As you look to the future of HCM tech, what do you see?
What's happening today is you have big HCM companies—the ones that everybody knows—that took their technology from premise based to cloud based. And as their APIs continue to evolve, it allows more fields and more information to be transmitted, which creates new use cases and new opportunities for growth. So, I think it's a combination of education, like I mentioned earlier, but I also think API technology transformation needs to happen to a certain degree—to allow for new use cases that people are looking for.
You’ve talked about API maturity in the past. Why should HCM stakeholders care about API maturity?
If you think of an API as a pipe with a lot of different cords going through it, then what I mean by API maturity is that someone is making that pipe, but they're only putting 20 cords in it, when it could be 45. And if you want to go in and build out those additional cords, there are implications at various points in the pipe. That's the reason people are scared to make a lot of changes to their APIs, because it could have a significant impact on employee records. You have to be really careful. It could break an area you don't even know about. It takes a lot of testing, there's security layers on top of it, and there's a lot of things that could happen illegally, too. The result is that you have smaller companies that are more willing to take the chance to do something innovative. Then you have enterprise companies that have been around for 50 or 60 years, and they're susceptible to lawsuits, so they're a lot less willing to take the risk that comes with change.
What excites you about HCM’s future?
I believe in the HCM ecosystem; that is my biggest passion. I truly believe that companies are going to go to one HCM company less and less. At one point, the stats showed that an enterprise company touches something like 80 different sources, a mid-market company touches 40, and a small business touches 13. I believe that is going to shift up, especially as you add in wellness apps. Small businesses will touch 20 to 30. Mid-market will go to 80. As that happens, you need the data to flow. Otherwise, you're going to have to hire more people—data pushers—in the HCM space. Something like 56% of HR's manual tasks can still be automated. I think that's where Finch comes in. How do I make everything work together seamlessly, safely, and securely?
What’s your wishlist for the HCM ecosystem?
I would love to see better reporting on the back end. I know there's Tableau and others, but every one of those companies has their own reporting. As you build the ecosystem, you've got to go to this one for a report, and you have to go to that one for a report. I really think that there ought to be one place where you can grab all that data and figure out the overall impact of benefits to your company—how it impacts your turnover and hiring.
Why do you think you developed such an affinity for HCM?
As a sales leader, I spend 50% of my time hiring, onboarding and training, and the other 50% of my time retaining, which is all about motivation, inspiration, leadership, and coaching. These things impact me every day, and the HCM space touches all of that.
Which begs the questions, why did you decide to go into e-commerce?
My career in HCM was about the employee experience and how it impacted people's everyday lives. I saw a correlation between that and my work now, which is about impacting the buyer's life. If I can create a great experience for a mom-and-pop shop, a mid-market shop, or even an enterprise shop to give a great customer experience, so that people aren’t always buying through Amazon, then I have succeeded.
Learn more about HCM connectivity solutions.
To start building with Finch, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.
Job searches and exploratory calls are daunting, and we get it! All of us have been there at some point—and trust us, it’s not any easier on our side. From filling out the application to conducting research and negotiation, it’s a delicate balance between art and science.
To reduce the uncertainty that only adds to the stress, Finch is committed to a policy of hiring transparency. Here's what you can expect from us:
All we ask is that you come prepared to share your experiences, express your thoughts, and just be yourself! At the end of the process, you'll have a good sense of life at Finch. Ready to build with us?
Finch’s API helps refine the relationship between employers and employees by unlocking access to employment data across many closed systems: payroll, benefits administration, equity management, and more. Starting with payroll and HRIS (5,700+ systems) we’re already powering applications that help thousands of employers improve pay equity, provide access to mental health benefits, measure the ecological impact of their organization, and much more.
Finch is a remote-first company. Our team members are located across the United States and Canada. We stay connected as a team by collaborating in our virtual office and gathering for local meet-ups and company offsites. Visit our BuiltIn page to learn more about our culture and how you can make an impact. We’re passionate about our company values of execution, curiosity, humility, and empathy.
We care about every individual’s well-being and work-life balance Benefits and perks matter! Some of our benefits include health insurance, paid family leave, flexible vacation time, wellness stipend, and more.
Finch follows a standardized interview process and evaluation system to reduce the impact of unconscious bias.
Browse through our open roles and submit your resume. If you don’t see a role that’s a fit for you, email us at recruiting@tryfinch.com. We’ll reply shortly.
Pro Tip: First impressions matter! Double-check for accuracy and grammatical errors. Saving documents as PDFs help preserve your original formatting. We want to hear about your career growth and how you’ve led changes in your previous roles. Uploading supporting documents is helpful but not required.
You’ve made it to the intro call! We’ll take this time to learn more about each other and review logistics. Please ask questions about Finch! If there’s a mutual fit, we’ll reach out to schedule a second-round interview.
Our hiring manager will dig into your professional history, the high and low points of your roles, and your motivations. They’ll ask you to talk about the specifics of your last few roles in depth.
Pro Tip: Come prepared to talk about a complex project you’ve worked on. It should be related to the role you’re applying for. You will be asked to break down the project in detail, your responsibilities, challenges you faced, and lessons you learned for future improvement.
You’ve made it to the final interviews, and all of us are rooting for you! Our onsite process usually has three to four interviews. You’ll be speaking with peers and managers across the company. We’ll share additional details over the phone beforehand.
After the onsite, we’ll reflect on your journey. Our offers are contingent on successful reference checks. Please have three professional references ready (peer + managers) who have worked with you in the past. We’ll discuss their experiences working with you, your ability to collaborate, and your ability to navigate through ambiguous situations.
Congratulations, we are excited to grow with you! The Finch team is open to providing additional advice and insight. Ultimately, we hope that you’ll make the decision that’s right for you.
Your recruiter and hiring manager will be key partners. Leverage them to set yourself up for success. Email recruiting@tryfinch.com if you have questions!
Next up in our Employee Spotlight series is developer success lead Eddie Hou, who’s always ready with a creative solution.
Eddie Hou likes people. He likes talking to them, getting them to open up, and figuring out what makes them tick. He’s also an engineer by trade and a problem-solver by passion. That combination of skills makes him perfectly suited for his role at Finch, which requires thoughtful communication, technical trouble-shooting, and reading between the lines to get to the core of any issues that arise. We recently spoke with Eddie to learn more.
To start, can you tell us about your role?
I lead the Developer Success function here at Finch. It’s a technical client-facing, post-sales role that requires being quick on my feet and having in-depth knowledge of the product. To put it simply, I'm a technical resource for our customers. It’s my job to set them up for success right from the start. This actually entails a complicated set of responsibilities, because the challenges that we’re tackling are unknown-unknown types of problems. We are constantly trying to define success and answer tough questions: How do we get customers to continue using our product? What type of problems are they facing? We're working with so many different verticals and personalities, the answers vary from customer to customer, and how we prioritize those wants into our roadmap is very complex.
That sounds like it requires a unique skill set. What did you study in school?
I majored in Electrical and Computer Engineering and added an engineering business minor. I’ve always been interested in commerce and business but my dad encouraged me to study something technical. He would say, "You'll always have a job [as an engineer], and you can always transition to business, but you can't become an engineer if you only have a business degree." I thought that made sense.
What did you do prior to Finch?
I worked at another startup called Moveworks as the first customer success engineer and I helped build the team there. Over the course of that process, we went from a series A company with one or two customers to a series C company with more than 150 customers. Moveworks was valued at $2.1 billion when I left. Once I was done building out processes, my day-to-day became slightly redundant and a bit too structured for me.
What did you take away from that experience?
I think my experience at Moveworks shaped who I am today. It showed me what it took for a startup to succeed and the people that I worked with side by side really made the 12-hour days feel worth it. The group of people that were part of the original cohort were extremely talented and dedicated people, especially my mentors, Gwen and Ahmed. I learned from them every single day - both the skills and the mindset to persevere and push through difficult times and problems. I’ll cherish those memories for the rest of my life.
How did you hear about the opportunity at Finch?
A recruiter reached out to me and that led to a couple of informal conversations with Jeremy and Ansel [Finch’s co-founders]. We spoke about the types of problems that they’re facing and how they’re thinking about the future of this particular space. I was instantly interested in learning more about the team. I think the team determines whether a company's going to succeed more so than the idea itself and I really liked the team.
What was your impression of the team?
I’m a people person yet very analytical so the conversations were interesting, to say the least. It was clear that others at Finch were mission-driven and passionate. They also demonstrated a high level of ownership over whatever they're working on. The reality at Finch is what I expected during my initial interactions: everyone's committed, passionate to create a change, and they're able to push through when things feel challenging.
When do things feel challenging?
Things feel challenging when you’re in the thick of everything. It’s easy to get caught in the weeds of problem solving and lose track of the impact that we’re creating. However, when you zoom out and look at our progress over a month or a year, for instance, it’s significant. It’s rewarding when we acknowledge, "Wow, we increased our customer base by 40% in the last quarter." Those numbers are only reserved for the best-in-class companies and we’re already seeing these results as a 20 people startup.
What do you like most about your job?
I like creating solutions for complex problems. It’s really satisfying when my engineering background comes in handy! I also love building relationships with customers throughout their entire journey. Internally, my co-workers are great to work with and I enjoy watching the company grow. We’ll share stories and learn from one another. These moments will be the ones that we reminisce about a year or two from now.
What do you like best about working at Finch?
Finch has a lot of great qualities; I’ll share three. First is the ability to lean in and contribute to business decisions. Every start-up would say that individual team members have the opportunity to make a huge impact within the company. In my experience, that isn’t always true. Second, there’s a constant feedback loop. Everyone is open to it and we take it very seriously. We have healthy and constructive debates where folks don't get defensive. Lastly, there’s a much better work/life balance compared to my other experiences — by far. Ansel and Jeremy care about people, and they want them to stay for the long haul.
Interested in joining Finch? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions.
Growing up in the small town of Rosseau, Ontario, Aren Patel never imagined he’d wind up in California working at some of the most innovative companies in the world. His college internship turned into a full-time gig at Google, and now he’s a full-fledged Bay Area engineer working to unlock access to the global employment ecosystem. Recently, we caught up with Aren to talk about his experience.
You returned to the startup world after a long hiatus. What’s the story there?
I graduated from the University of Waterloo with an electrical engineering degree. During my final semester, I joined BufferBox, a four-person startup founded by a hockey friend of mine. The concept was like Amazon Locker, but any e-retailer could ship to their kiosks, which were located in stations throughout Toronto’s GO Transit system. I was responsible for the design and development of all of BufferBox’s web services and APIs, which was an exciting amount of responsibility for someone fresh out of college. And then, while I was working there, the company got acquired by Google.
Your career at Google lasted for nearly a decade. What projects did you work on?
I worked at Google Shopping for a bit before transferring to Nest. There, I led the team responsible for building the Nest to Google account migration on Nest's login pages, and I served as the technology lead on the team that built Nest’s MyAccount data export tool. After five years with Nest, I took a position on the Orion Wi-Fi team at Google's R&D incubator, Area 120, where I developed Angular (Dart and TypeScript) web apps. After two years at Area 120, I got my green card, giving me permanent residency in the States. At that point, I was ready to join a smaller company, so I took the opportunity to reenter the startup ecosystem.
Why did you want to go back to a startup?
I like small teams and making genuine connections. Like most people, I spend a good chunk of my life at work, so building relationships while I’m there is important to me. To put things in perspective, when I started at Google, there were around 30,000 or 40,000 employees. By the time I left, there were 200,000+ employees worldwide. The dynamics are very different when you’re working with a lean team of 16, like I currently am at Finch, versus a global population of 200,000.
What made you decide that Finch was the right move?
I engaged with hundreds of companies during my search. Finch stood out to me for two reasons. The first one is the types of problems that Finch is tackling. It was a natural fit between my prior experiences at Google and BufferBox and what the team at Finch was looking for. The second is the people. After meeting Jeremy and Ansel [Finch’s founders], I was impressed with the environment they had cultivated. Throughout the interview process, they were open, honest, and willing to share. It’s safe to say that these qualities are embodied by everyone at Finch.
How was your work at Google similar to your work at Finch?
When I was at Nest, we focused on making the thermostat, smoke alarm, and camera products more open, so developers can build complementary products on top of them. Finch is doing something similar but for employer data. Our API makes it easy and secure to read and write data to any employee system, so forward-thinking companies can build innovative products on top of those systems.
Describe your role at Finch.
My title is founding engineer. Day-to-day, I am responsible for a lot of software engineering-related activities: figuring out what we're building, reviewing design docs, scoping projects. I'm a full-stack engineer, so I work on the front-end, the back-end, and everything in between. Any piece of code we have, I'm touching or changing. Just like a lot of traditional software engineering roles, I cover a wide range of responsibilities.
What excites you about your job?
The employment sector is old and stagnant, which only means that the opportunities to improve and automate processes are countless. Unlocking employee data is definitely going to be a game-changer for all industries. As a software engineer, it’s always exciting to see growth in the product that you’re working on and the impact of all of your efforts.
You also take an active role in the hiring process at Finch. What do you look for in a potential new hire?
I am always on the lookout for genuine enthusiasm for our product and our mission. Creativity is key as well. Thinking outside the box and coming up with novel ideas and solutions is essential to success at a startup like Finch. I am also interested in people who are willing to learn. They don’t have to be an expert in every subject, but they do need to catch on to new skills and information quickly and then be able to apply those learnings proactively.
How do you feel about Finch’s asynchronous work model?
It has been super helpful for me. My fiancée is a nurse, and she works crazy hours in the ER, so I tend to work around her schedule. Finch is really accommodating to that. There are no set hours; as long as you’re getting your tasks done and attending the meetings you agreed to, you’re good.
How do you get to know your colleagues if you are all working remotely and asynchronously?
At Finch, we all find ways to connect with each other–inside and outside of our remote setting. But on a day-to-day basis, one of our most effective tools is Gather, a virtual office space that we use to collaborate and stay engaged. It has been instrumental in helping me get to know everyone at Finch.
The layout of Gather is similar to the Sims game. We customize our office space, personalize our avatars, choose a desk, and chat with each other in real time. I can walk up to anyone at their desk and start a conversation like I would in a physical office, only it’s video. It has made approaching people much easier.
Here is my desk and our conference room!
Interested in joining Finch? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions.
You might say Sam Toffler is a puzzle fanatic. Give him a riddle to solve or a logic problem to work through, and his mind won’t rest until he does (just ask his girlfriend). It’s an affinity that led him to study computer science, then to a job at Amazon Web Services, and, ultimately, to Finch. Recently, we caught up with Sam to talk about his engineering career, his next road trip, and the satisfaction that comes when something finally “clicks.”
Where are you from and how did it lead you here?
I was born and raised in South Florida and went to a really competitive high school. I think that shaped my work ethic, honestly. And it brought me to Duke, where I majored in computer science.
How did you choose your major?
I took comp-sci 101 in my first semester and it was instantaneous love. The course was basically solving puzzles and riddles, which I’ve always been obsessed with.
What did you do after college?
I took a summer off, and then I started working at Amazon Web Services on a team called Fargate. I was a software engineer there for two and a half years.
Tell us about Fargate.
Fargate is in the serverless space. I worked primarily on what we called region builds–so, expanding the service to different Amazon data centers throughout the world. For context, Amazon is present in approximately 20 locations. When Fargate launched, it was only in one location. When I joined, it was in eight, and by the time I left, it was deployed to all AWS regions.
Why did you decide to look for another opportunity?
One of the big reasons I left Amazon is because of how little coding I was doing–which some people find surprising. It was also extremely slow paced. Even a single line change could take a full week to deploy. That gets frustrating after a while. So, I was looking for an opportunity to code more, move faster, and have a larger impact on the team. That’s when I started thinking about startups.
What was it about Finch, in particular, that appealed to you?
I really liked what Finch is doing. It's a really valuable product that’s ripe for explosion. Coming from Amazon, I was a little nervous about going somewhere small, but I realized that I am at a point in my life where I can afford to take a chance and do something outside my comfort zone. And I am really happy that I did.
What does the day in the life of a Finch founding engineer look like?
Thankfully, it’s a lot of coding. I would say 60 to 70% of my time is coding–maybe not hands-on-keyboard, but I am at least thinking about my own code that often. The rest of my time is spent reviewing other people's code, conducting technical interviews for job applicants, and attending assorted meetings like sprint planning sessions and sprint retrospectives.
What is it about coding that you’re so fond of?
I think it’s the balancing act between form and function. There are a million ways you can code something, but, at the end of the day, you want to make your code as clear and concise as possible. To me, there's a lot of enjoyment in trying to make it perfect, so that people who read my code understand exactly what it is I was trying to do. The same thing happens to me when I’m writing an email or, in the past, when I took creative writing classes. It’s like trying to figure out the ideal way to craft a sentence or a paragraph. When I find the best way to say what’s in my head, it’s very satisfying.
What have you learned since starting at Finch?
I’ve learned to take more ownership. There's a lot of opportunity at Finch for my voice to be heard, and having strong convictions goes a long way because if I can make a case for what I want, people will give me the room to do it. But it’s also more than that. If I start something in one area of the company, it might spread. That’s what I find really fulfilling: when I can see the impact of what I’m contributing, and I get positive feedback that what I’m doing is beneficial.
What do you like most about working at Finch?
The people. Everybody is super friendly, smart, and respectful. When we had our in-person offsite last year in October, it was the first time I had met any of my coworkers in real life, and it felt like a weekend with close friends. We all stayed in a house in L.A., and we got along so well. I am really excited for our next one just because of how good of a time we had.
Describe Finch in one word.
Fast-paced. We're getting so many new customers, and all of our new customers want new things, and we're always getting new team members. The nature of everything is really quick, which I like.
How do you spend your time outside of work?
My girlfriend and I got a puppy over the summer. So, that's been taking up a lot of our time. I also enjoy skiing. We're actually taking a month-long skiing road trip to Salt Lake City, Park City, Alta, Snowbird, Aspen, Beaver Creek, and maybe Sun Valley. I would say golfing, reading, chess, and video games round out my downtime interests.
What are you passionate about?
The feeling of learning something and having it click. I'll give you an example. Recently, I changed my keyboard from a standard Qwerty layout, because I had read that you can make your keyboard more ergonomic and efficient by putting more popular letters closer to your pointer and middle fingers. That required relearning where all the keys are, which took practice–about 20 minutes a day for two weeks. When I got to the point that I could type 40 words per minute, I made the switch full time. Now, I type just as fast as I did on a Qwerty. The whole thing was really rewarding for me, because it was an opportunity to scratch that itch of getting good at something new.
Interested in joining Finch? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions.