Empowering Innovation in Employment Tech: Finch’s 2024 Recap

While other industries have embraced APIs to connect data across systems and institutions, employment infrastructure is still deeply fragmented, creating data silos across thousands of platforms. We created Finch to deliver an open, standardized, and programmable infrastructure that connects these disparate platforms to provide greater visibility and control over employment data. 

As we start our new fiscal year this week, we’re taking a moment to look back at the huge strides we made in 2024 toward realizing our vision of the Open Employment Ecosystem. We established new partnerships, introduced new products, and continued to invest in our existing technology, all with the same end goal in mind: to empower employers and technology providers with connected, standardized access to employment data.

Finch: The #1 trusted API for the employment ecosystem

At Finch, our goal is to unlock innovators in the employment ecosystem by delivering the  #1 trusted API for employment data. This past year, we grew our provider network to more than 220 HRIS and payroll systems, representing 80% of all U.S. employers — the widest coverage on the market.

To date, we’ve connected nearly 52,000 employers through the Finch platform. To break it down further, that equates to:

• 13.9 million unique employee records synced (a 3.6x increase over this time last year)
• $99 billion in payroll earnings synced
• $3.9 billion in payroll deductions and employer contributions managed

We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, but our work is far from done. Over the last 12 months, we worked to further solidify Finch as the industry leader by investing in our partnerships and platform:

30 new partnerships forged in 2024

Partnerships are critical to our success at Finch. Our relationships with HRIS and payroll providers allow us to better understand the industry as we work together to modernize the existing infrastructure underpinning employment technology. We’re proud to have forged 30 new partnerships this year with industry leaders like Rippling, isolved, and Oyster who share our mission of connecting the employment ecosystem. Together, we’re empowering innovative developers to create better, more integrated experiences for employers. Our partnerships go beyond just data connectivity — they promote thought leadership, enable new technology, and open faster paths to revenue.  

• This summer, we celebrated one year of partnership with Gusto. Our CEO Jeremy sat down with Brian Busch of Gusto Embedded for The SMB Tech Innovators podcast to discuss the potential of the Open Employment Ecosystem and the hundreds of use cases that can be built on top of employment data.

• We collaborated with Justworks to launch the company’s new payroll API, enabling applications that share customers with Justworks to integrate with the employers’ primary system of record. 

• Finch customer Awardco launched their own partnership with UKG in record time by leveraging our pre-built integrations — a win for both companies.

Continuous platform investment

At the start of 2024, we were fresh off the launch of our latest product, Deductions. This year, we expanded Deductions support to 24 systems. We also expanded our platform’s capabilities, introduced new products, improved security, and made Finch more accessible than ever.

• Introduction of Finch’s Documents API — In December, we launched the beta of our latest offering, Documents — a new API for extracting critical information from forms, beginning with W-4 federal tax withholding forms. We’re excited to expand to additional sources of information like W-2s and Form 941 later this year.

• Expanded fields and endpoints — This year we added the /register endpoint to Deductions, allowing applications to register deductions that have already been created in the payroll system. We also introduced detailed employment status information (such as onboarding, on leave, terminated, etc.) to help with benefit eligibility determinations.

• New testing tools — In addition to improving our sandbox environment (which we demonstrated with Deel), we rolled out the API Explorer — an interactive tool that allows developers to interact with our API endpoints directly from the Developer Dashboard.

• Additional security — We introduced new role-based access controls, Okta SSO, and multi-factor authentication to help Finch developers to keep sensitive data on a strict need-to-know basis. 

• Greater accessibility through Finch Flat File — Not everyone has the resources to invest in building an API integration to Finch right now, but we still want them to benefit from our platform. So we introduced Flat File, a new feature that delivers standardized data from the Finch API via SFTP. Flat File lets organizations with limited technical resources reap all the benefits of Finch — from data standardization to streamlined employer onboarding — even without engineering resources.  

Supercharging our platform for Benefits and Retirement experiences

Employer-sponsored benefits have undergone something of a renaissance over the past five years. New legislation like the SECURE Act has opened the door for more Americans to access retirement benefits — more than 19 million Americans are expected to enroll in a plan for the first time as a result. The health benefits sector is growing too: unsustainable cost increases and regulatory changes are opening the door for options like the Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement (ICHRA), a new health benefits structure that is quickly gaining traction. 

New companies entering this fast-growing market need a way to integrate with payroll systems quickly, and incumbents need a way to scale existing operations to accommodate increasing demand. This past year, we made deep investments in our product to align with and support their unique needs.

Modernizing retirement administration

Retirement recordkeepers and third-party administrators (TPAs) have turned to Finch’s wide network of payroll providers to modernize their operations and keep up with compliance regulations introduced through new legislation like SECURE Act 2.0. More than 40 recordkeepers use Finch to connect to their sponsors’ payroll systems, including both tech-forward companies like Ubiquity and Human Interest and established incumbents like Ameritas and ePlan (Paychex).

• PensionPro partnership — We partnered with PensionPro, a leading retirement plan administration platform used by more than 1,000 TPAs. Our collaboration allows TPAs to import sponsor data into PensionPro directly from the payroll system, eliminating manual work, significantly reducing data errors, and streamlining plan administration.

• Data standardization and transformation — We introduced the Rehire Date and Pay Group fields specifically for retirement providers, who rely on this information to determine eligibility and vesting schedules and manage plan contributions. Through Finch’s platform, this data is transformed and standardized, ensuring it’s always delivered to the recordkeeper or TPA in a standard format.

• Improved sponsor onboarding experience — Finch now supports detailed pay statement mapping for earnings and benefits to streamline operations and administration for TPAs. 

Powering innovation in health benefits

At the same time, Finch is enabling the emergence of new health benefits. ICHRAs like Thatch and health financing platforms like TempoPay are leveraging our platform to power automated deductions management — a capability that dramatically reduces these companies’ operational costs and allows them to scale. Finch supports deductions for 24 payroll providers, with more to come this year.

“Instead of waiting a month for new deductions to process, we can make updates every week. That’s lightning speed in our niche.” — Erika Davison-Aviles, cofounder of TempoPay

We’ve also expanded the ways we can support health benefits providers with the launch of Documents, which establishes a programmatic way to access critical tax withholding and filing status information from W-4s. By combining W-4 tax withholding data with Finch’s Pay product, providers can automate complex, data-intensive processes, such as estimating employer and payroll costs for benefits quoting or assessing payroll impact before processing deductions each pay period. We’re excited to see how the industry leverages the Documents API and look forward to expanding support beyond W-4s in the future.

Optimizing the connection experience

What good is an integration if your customers won’t use it? This is the challenge many platforms face when the integration setup process is too complex or time-consuming. It’s a problem Finch has sought to solve since day one, and we continue to invest in our solution year after year. By simplifying the onboarding experience for employers, we help our customers realize the benefits and ROI of their integrations faster. 

The evidence proves it’s working: we’ve connected nearly 52,000 employers to our platform to date. Plus, our customers have told us they’ve reduced onboarding time by leaps and bounds: Saveday, a 401(k) recordkeeper, cut new sponsor onboarding time from 5 hours to just 15 minutes. 

In 2024, we rolled out our all-new connection experience, reducing employer onboarding friction and making it easier for our customers to view and manage connections.

Removing Friction for Employers in Finch Connect

We obsess over every step of the Finch Connect process to increase trust and remove points of friction for employers. This year, some our customers’ favorite improvements have included:

• Embedded Authentication Guides — Depending on the provider, some connections may require API keys or the creation of an administrator account to set up a connection. We now include step-by-step instructions inside of Finch Connect on how to authenticate, ensuring employers have all the information they need to successfully connect right in front of them.

• Exit Intent Screen — The exit intent screen prevents employers from accidentally closing out of Finch Connect, so no one risks losing their setup progress. 

• Clearer Error Messages — Snags in the onboarding process can be frustrating. We made our error message screens more clear and actionable so employers can continue their connection setup without delay.

• Smart Re-Authentication — It’s not often that an employer needs to re-authenticate their connection, but it can happen from time to time. When re-authenticating, employers can now skip to the final screen of Finch Connect to log into their HR or payroll system, saving them time and reducing drop-off.

Increased Visibility & Control Over Connections

Beyond reducing friction for employers, we’ve also focused on giving our customers greater visibility and control over their employer connections.

• Invite Employers to Connect with a Secure Link — For many customers it makes sense to embed Finch Connect into their platform, but some use third-party software to power their employer experience. In these situations, Finch users can now create secure Finch Connect invitation links through the Dashboard. These links create a unique session for each employer, which enables better visibility into their onboarding process.

• Track Progress through Authentication — Once you’ve invited an employer to connect their HR or payroll system, they’ll need to complete the authentication flow. With the introduction of sessions, you can now see exactly which steps an employer has or hasn’t taken to set up their connection, including agreeing to the terms of service, setting permissions, choosing their provider, and authorizing access. The Dashboard will also flag any errors the employer encountered — like an invalid password —  enabling your support team to reach out to help.

• Monitor Connection Health — With our redesigned connection experience, it’s easier than ever for your engineering and support teams to monitor the status of connections. The connections page has transformed over the past year, with improved connection statuses, error and data sync history, unique connection IDs, the ability to export your connections as a CSV, and more.

Looking ahead to 2025

Now that we’ve taken a moment to look back on all we accomplished in 2024, we’re setting our sights on the year ahead. We have big ambitions this year to expand Finch’s footprint in the market and to continue improving our existing offerings. As always, we’ll be guided by our core mission: to create an open, connected, and programmable future of employment technology. Ready to join us? Get in touch with our team or sign up for free to learn what Finch can deliver for your company. And if you’re excited about what we’re building, we’re hiring! Check out our open roles.