Addition Wealth is a financial wellness company that makes personalized financial expertise more inclusive and accessible. To do this, Addition partners with forward-thinking companies to support employees and individuals to work through personal finance decisions. 

As part of the offering, individuals get access to a digital platform that brings together information from their employer, including benefits information, alongside an individual’s own personal finance accounts to give a holistic overview of what is offered by their company and what an individual already has. In the platform, Addition Wealth also offers individuals a recommended set of actions, including courses on personal finance topics, digital tools, content, checklists, and webinars. Individuals also have the option to speak with fully vetted financial advisors by booking an online virtual meeting.

Because Addition Wealth tailors its offering based on the employer or client they are working with, they needed a way to efficiently manage select employee data—so they turned to Finch. Today, the company leverages Finch to integrate with several HRIS and payroll providers to enhance their customers’ experience by seamlessly bringing in relevant data into the platform.

Democratizing access to quality financial advice

Addition Wealth works with employers by delivering tailored programs that help decrease employee stress, drive higher candidate acceptance rates, and increase overall employee retention. With its personalized approach, Addition can help any employee understand their unique financial situations and navigate through tough decisions, whether they are buying their first home, paying down debt, or planning for retirement.

“Our mission is to enable people to make the most of their money and bring personalized financial expertise to the masses,” said Amy Chou, Chief Product Officer. “It's extremely hard, unless you're already wealthy, to get access to high-quality financial advice. We help the average person get high-quality answers to their financial questions so they can live a healthier financial life.”

As an employer-sponsored benefit, Addition Wealth’s financial wellness platform provides individuals with the tools, resources, and insights they need to be financially healthy based on their own personal circumstances. Each digital platform experience is tailored to the company and the benefits they offer, from equity to student loan assistance. 

“A lot of employees aren’t taking full advantage of their benefits. Employers want their employees to use the benefits they’re given, and to value them,” Amy explained. “When employees understand the true value of their benefits, they’re more likely to stay with the company and be happy in their role.”

Reliable, consistent, comprehensive data delivery

Addition Wealth needs access to specific data to provide tailored insights to employees receiving access to their platform– for example, employee directories and salary information. Traditional methods of accessing that data like manually sending files or leveraging SFTP connections work, but it means that Addition Wealth may not have access to the most up to date information.

Finch’s API integrations, on the other hand, provide daily or on-demand data syncs. That means that if an employee’s data changes—say, for example, they get a raise or change their retirement plan contribution—Addition Wealth is able to immediately reflect the updates on their dashboard.

“We love the idea of being able to get real-time feedback on these very important pieces of information, versus having to wait for the monthly update. That’s what motivated us to work with Finch,” Amy said. 

“We love the idea of being able to get real-time feedback on these very important pieces of information, versus having to wait for the monthly update. That’s what motivated us to work with Finch."

Saying goodbye to SFTP headaches and manual intervention

Addition Wealth works with companies of all sizes—from early-stage startups to enterprise businesses. Managing small file transfers is one thing, but sending enormous data sets typically requires an SFTP integration, which can be a cumbersome, complicated process that involves a lot of back-and-forth. 

“For some of our customers due to their size, it can be difficult to batch files. It may take a long time, so it’s just easier to plug into something that already exists,” Amy said. 

Even the smoothest SFTP integration process can present a big hurdle for large employers; but there’s also a lot that can go wrong along the way: failed sends, NIGO errors, and corrupted files, to name a few. 

Customers that onboard using a Finch integration can authorize Addition Wealth to access the data in their HRIS and payroll system through Finch Connect, which takes only a few minutes to complete. The connection is continuous, meaning Addition Wealth can simply pull the data they need, when they need it.

Simplified data mapping saves hours of manual work

To take things a step further, Finch saves Addition Wealth time by standardizing all of the data through a unified API. 

Regardless of the HRIS or payroll provider that the employer uses, data pulled through Finch is always in the same format. In other words, data is mapped across different providers’ various field names to a single, consistent field name.

“Because Finch’s API standardizes the data, it’s a pretty easy 1:1 mapping versus needing to figure out what each client calls the same field, where some may call it ‘Salary’ and another ‘Salary Field 1,’” Amy explained. “That’s something we’d otherwise need to write into the code for each client, but we don’t have those issues with Finch because it’s all the same field—it’s just called ‘Salary.’”

Finch and Addition Wealth: Growing together

Amy noted that HRIS and payroll integrations provide value before a customer has even signed on with Addition Wealth. 

“Finch is a benefit in the sales process,” she said. “When prospective customers ask if we can integrate with their HRIS, Finch enables us to very easily say yes. People like having that option.”

“Finch is a benefit in the sales process. When prospective customers ask if we can integrate with their HRIS, Finch enables us to very easily say yes."

As both Addition Wealth and Finch continue to grow and expand their product offerings, Amy said she looks forward to leveraging even deeper real-time insights for employees.

“We’re pretty excited, as Finch continues to expand its capabilities, to bring in more nuanced information about employee benefits and estimate their collective value for the individual employee,” she said. “Integrations make things easier for end users—the more integrations, the better. It's just about finding the integrations that work best for the use case.”

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

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

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

Financial wellness benefits for every employee

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting established with time-saving automation

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Set it and forget it’

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

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

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

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

Unlocking new value and insights with payroll data

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unlocking innovation with payroll integrations

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

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

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

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

Manual Processes: When Good Isn’t Good Enough

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data at the right place at the right time

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

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

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

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

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

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

401(k) in 15 Minutes or Less

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Transparency Means Better Compliance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innovating at Lightning Speed

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

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

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

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

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