Stax.ai Transforms TPA Operations with 80% Integration Adoption, Happier Sponsors

‍Stax.ai is an AI-powered operating system for independent third-party retirement plan consultants (TPAs) that powers payroll and census data collection, trust accounting, compliance, and client communications all through one unified platform. 

Plan sponsor data is at the heart of all TPA operations, so Stax.ai prioritized streamlining the way TPAs collect that information from their clients from Day 1 — and that required dozens of payroll integrations. 

Rather than investing thousands of engineering hours to build payroll connections in-house, Stax.ai partnered with Finch to embed native payroll connectivity into the platform’s automated workflows. 

The results? More than 80% of plan sponsors have successfully connected their payroll providers, TPAs receive year-end census data up to 4 months faster, and plan sponsor satisfaction has increased by 28% on average.

A TPA platform for the modern era

Founder and CEO Naru Muraleedharan got the idea for Stax.ai while working with a local TPA firm that was manually sorting, filing, and digitizing the 10,000–20,000 pages of asset statements it received in the mail every single month. Naru says he quickly “fell in love” with the industry as he identified more opportunities for technology to improve status-quo TPA workflows. 

“Data is the backbone of TPAs’ work, but it’s so fragmented in this industry. They spend so much time just trying to get information from plan sponsors, and more often than not, the data is inaccurate,” Naru explained. “We figured there has to be a better way. We should be able to directly connect to payroll providers and pull that data straight from the source of truth.”

But building all of the payroll integrations Stax.ai would need to support its TPAs would have been a major investment outside of the company’s core competency — so Naru turned to Finch.

“When we made that build-vs-buy decision and chose buy, it's because we didn't want to scale up our engineering team to focus on maintaining hundreds or thousands of connections in the long run.”

“When we made that build-vs-buy decision and chose buy, it's because we didn't want to scale up our engineering team to focus on maintaining hundreds or thousands of connections in the long run. We knew that's a whole beast on its own, and we are definitely getting that value from Finch. The team’s been incredible,” Naru said.

Making TPAs the heroes

With payroll connectivity embedded in Stax.ai’s platform, plan sponsors can connect their payroll provider in as little as 30 seconds and automatically share year-end payroll and census data with their TPA — a process that used to take hours or days.

For TPAs, those time savings are critical for meeting compliance and filing deadlines. Of the plan sponsors that connect their payroll provider to Stax.ai through Finch, 35% have their annual census data prepared by the first week of January, and 80% by the end of February. By comparison, TPAs reported having less than half of their sponsors’ data by April when using legacy systems.

Stax.ai also uses a measurement called Client Pulse Score, which uses AI to aggregate data like email sentiment and project timeliness to gauge the health of the relationship between a TPA and sponsor. Since embedding payroll integrations into the platform, Stax.ai’s customers have seen an average 28% increase in Client Pulse Score within 90 days of implementation.

“Our users are so thrilled by this because this makes the TPAs look like the hero to their clients,” Naru said.

“They’ve forwarded so many emails to me from plan sponsors, auditors, and advisors saying how happy they are and how much easier this new process is than what they were doing before. With payroll connectivity and especially through Finch, the process is so streamlined.”

“With payroll connectivity and especially through Finch, the process is so streamlined.”

Preparing TPAs for the future of retirement

Stax.ai chose to outsource payroll connectivity to focus on their core product, and chose Finch for the superior coverage and experience across payroll providers.. TPAs on the platform see more than 80% of their plan sponsors successfully connect their payroll system to Stax.ai.

“We’re trying to get as much coverage as possible to support as many sponsors as possible,” Naru said. 

That compatibility is especially crucial as TPAs face a surge in demand and plan complexity with SECURE 2., which introduced long-term part-time (LTPT) rules that reshaped census obligations in 2025. Integrations between the payroll providers and Stax.ai eliminate the need for back-and-forth data reformatting, point solutions, and extra operational headcount. 

“Our experience with Finch has been absolutely incredible, and I’m really excited about where this is going.”