Ecosystem

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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.

The Growing Tech Stack: Making the Case for More Connected Systems

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.

Wasted Time and Errors Found

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. 

Security Issues Come From the Top

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. 

Conflicting Views on AI

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.

What’s To Come?

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

In a recent webinar, Ansel Parikh, Co-Founder and COO of Finch, demonstrated how a unified employment data API can unlock multiple advantages for insurance providers, including pay-as-you-go premium models, and increase overall operational efficiency.

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:

• The definition of employment data
• How employment data is applied to different types of insurance workflows
• How insurance providers access employment data today
• How to automate access to customers’ employment data, specifically the data locked in payroll systems

Below, we provide highlights from the webinar. You can also watch the complete recording by filling out the form below.

What is employment data?

Employment data is the entire scope of information that sits in different systems of record across the entire employee lifecycle.

Employment data includes:

• Employee directory information like name, contact information, date of birth, manager, salary, and start/end date
• Employee income information, including hours worked, salary, wages, deductions, and taxes

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.

3 key use cases of employment data for insurance providers

There are three prevalent ways insurance providers can use employment data to innovate their processes:

1. Determining the risk profile of a company to streamline quoting
2. Using employee information, like employment start and end dates, to validate claims
3. Checking if the right premiums are being charged during the policy, based on actual employees and their pay, to unlock pay-as-you-go models

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.

What is the main challenge of accessing employment data?

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.

3 ways insurance providers try to access employment data

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.

The top benefits of an employment data API

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.

A working example: Finch and InsurePay

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.

How Finch serves insurance providers

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.

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Health and wellness benefits in the United States are at an inflection point. And if you’re a health and wellness benefits provider, that puts you in a favorable position.

The reason? Converging factors have prompted many employers to reconsider their approach to benefits–not only to entice great employees but to help existing employees stay healthy and productive. Among them:

• Changing expectations around the types of benefits employers should provide
• “The Great Resignation” and the unique bargaining power it has afforded workers
• The prioritization of core health benefits, mental health benefits, and telehealth benefits in light of the COVID-19 pandemic

Meanwhile, employers also continue to face old problems like outdated benefits management systems, costly and time-consuming manual processes, and health benefit underutilization.

To gain traction and earn market share, emerging and established health benefits providers can use integrations with payroll and HR systems to create best-in-class health and wellness benefit experiences that help employers meet their complex needs and mitigate some of their most pressing issues.

A trend toward technology

A review of employers’ attitudes around benefits technology suggests that the time is ripe for integrations.

Studies show that employers are demonstrating an increased willingness to pay for digital initiatives. According to a recent survey, spending on HR and benefits technology grew 15% between 2017 and 2021, with 70% of employers reporting a renewed focus on benefits technology following the pandemic.

Reports also suggest employers are intrigued by the power of data and how it can help them optimize their HR functions. In fact, 76% indicated they would consider sharing basic employee information with insurance providers in order to create more personalized, tailored health benefits experiences for their workers.

Integrations for the win

With employers receptive to data’s potential and poised to pursue new benefit technologies, health benefits providers would be smart to use integrations to help address some of employers’ most pressing wants and needs.

Here are just some of the ways that integrations can serve your customers:

1. Automated enrollment and benefits management

Historically, processes like benefits enrollment and payroll deduction changes have been time- and labor-intensive for both employers and employees. With integrations, enrolling an employee in any benefit takes just a few clicks–no manual paperwork required!

Integrations also allow you to push information to payroll and HR systems, making tasks like payroll deduction changes practically friction-free. In short, manual tasks that once took days or weeks and a lot of effort can now happen in minutes.

2. Higher benefit utilization

Ask almost any employer and they will say achieving high utilization rates for key health benefits like health insurance, HSAs, FSAs, and employee assistance programs (EAPs) is a struggle. Studies suggesting that one in three workers would rather talk about their weight than their employee benefits and others that show average EAP utilization does not exceed 10% support their anecdotal claims. Workers not taking advantage of the benefits they’re entitled to might put them at increased risk for worse health outcomes and financial hardship. For employers, underutilization can mean higher premiums and tax bills.

Part of the problem seems to be that many legacy benefits systems were not designed with user experience in mind. If a system is difficult for HR teams and workers to navigate or unpleasant to engage with, utilization will suffer. Benefits education is another issue, with 68% of employers calling it “a challenge,” and 37% believing that employees don’t understand the value of benefits well enough to justify the cost.

Innovative benefits providers know that integrations are a key component of good product design. By making it simple and seamless to onboard new employers and manage workers’ benefits (i.e., no more CSV files), integrations contribute to an all-around better user experience, which can help employers realize improved utilization rates, healthier and happier employees, and cost savings.

Take HSAs as an example. Because integrations make it easy for HR teams to enroll an employee in an HSA and manage their HSA payroll deductions, more employees are likely to take advantage. In turn, employers can realize lower HDHP premiums and lower FICA taxes.

3. More insights and personalization

From their social media feeds, to their Netflix recommendations, to their subscription cosmetic boxes, Millennial and Gen Z consumers are accustomed to being catered to with highly personalized experiences, and they’re bringing those expectations with them to the labor force. In response, employers are looking for ways to offer more tailored health benefit experiences to their employees, and they are willing to trade data to get there.

Integrations allow that exchange of data to happen securely, seamlessly, continuously, and in real time, so innovative health benefits providers can build the next generation of custom benefits experiences. As a bonus, integrations can also provide benefits providers with granular visibility into how benefits are being used (or not) across customers and systems, making possible data-substantiated strategies for improving engagement and utilization.

4. Better benefits packages

Offering attractive benefits is a research-backed strategy for finding and retaining talent. At a time when there are nearly 11 million U.S. job vacancies and workers are quitting jobs in droves, employers are starting to evaluate the benefits they offer and look for ways to improve. In today’s climate, that means offering things like mental health assistance and telemedicine services but also focusing on the quality of core health benefits like insurance, HSAs, and FSAs.

This is especially critical in a country like the United States, where employer-sponsored health insurance is not a given. In fact, among businesses with 10 to 24 employees, only 52% offer health insurance. In the case of businesses with fewer than 10 employees, that number drops to 23%.

By automating countless health benefits tasks and processes, integrations free up time and help employers reduce administrative costs, making it possible for employers to offer more and better benefits to their workers. This is especially true for small businesses, who generally don’t have the bandwidth to manage traditional HR packages in house. Consequently, if a benefits provider makes it easy (with the help of integrations), offering health insurance can suddenly become feasible. And with 46% of workers saying health insurance strongly influenced their decision to accept a job, the ROI to employers is practically assured.

5. Employee retention

Integrations can also aid in worker retention. In fact, 56% of workers reported that the quality of their employer-sponsored health coverage is a key factor in their decision to stay at their job.

However, there might be something else at play as well. By automating tasks that were once the purview of internal benefits administrators, HR teams have more time to allocate to the human side of human resources–that is, helping individual employees not only understand and engage with their benefits but also develop professionally and grow in their careers. In turn, employees are more likely to feel seen and valued, and that can be reason enough for anyone to stay put.

The build vs. buy debate

In summary, integrations are essential to building industry-leading benefits products and services for your customers and their employees. But being responsible for your own integrations is a mammoth undertaking. The payroll and HR management systems industry is so fragmented (5,700+ providers - read our whitepaper here) that you would need to build and maintain dozens (if not hundreds) of integrations just to cover your total addressable market–not to mention, figure out how to properly scrub and standardize the data input and properly format it for consumption. Talk about a distraction from your core competencies.

The better solution is Finch, which provides integrations to major and boutique HR-management and payroll systems like QuickBooks, ADP Run, Workday, and Paylocity via one universal API. Finch unifies access to and smoothes over the differences among these systems to support many innovative use cases. And as we add new systems to our coverage network (which is always), you can turn them on in one click.

How Finch works

On the front end, Finch presents as a friendly, intuitive module that lets employers grant your application secure, instant, and regulation-compliant access to their payroll and HR systems. The process takes less than 30 seconds:

• Finch asks your user to link their payroll or HR system.
• Your user finds their system and enters their login credentials or API keys.
• The connection is established.

The connection allows your application to read information like census data, which streamlines onboarding and enrollment, as well as write information like contribution and deduction adjustments, which streamlines benefits management.

Basically, Finch makes innovation possible for health benefits providers that want to disrupt an industry that clearly stands ready for change.

But don’t just take our word for it

Learn how Finch is making it possible for Lane Health to offer first-of-their-kind, tax-advantaged loans to workers with HSAs–saving both Lane Health and its customers time and money in the process.

Want to know more about integrations for health benefits?

Click the black Request Access button in the upper-right of this webpage to submit a question or ask to see our API documentation.

By not dividing your team’s attention between your core product and the ancillary technologies that support it, you can build smarter, get to market faster, and create an exceptional experience for your customers.

As an innovative retirement benefits provider, you already know that the retirement benefits industry has room for improvement. Legacy business models and outdated management systems are prevalent and prohibitive–serving as barriers, in many cases, to employer and employee adoption.

Consider the numbers. Some 68% of private-sector workers have access to retirement benefits through their employer, and, of them, 51% elect to participate. At first blush, the data doesn’t seem half bad. However, it belies the fact that more than 38 million workers aren’t being offered retirement benefits at all, and 40 million more aren’t opting in for one reason or another. Meanwhile, among those who do participate in a retirement plan, more than half are behind on their retirement strategies, either because they aren’t contributing enough or they’re raiding their plans in times of emergency.

This statistic also obscures the reality that access to retirement benefits is far from inclusive. In service industries, for example, workers with employer-sponsored plans drops to 40%, and in some verticals, like restaurants, it’s as low as 18%.

Clearly, something’s not working as it should. When you couple that with employers’ struggle to attract and retain employees and the challenges of remote and hybrid work models, the need for viable HR technology solutions in the retirement benefits space is apparent.

A product-led approach

While there’s no one solution that will address every issue, focusing your efforts on building a best-in-class platform for your customers is a great place to start. The reason? HR professionals are overwhelmed by the tedious transactional tasks associated with retirement benefits management and consider it one of their most pressing challenges. That makes retirement benefits ripe for digital disruption. In fact, HR leaders are more likely to realize benefits from HR technology when it’s applied to benefits administration than any other HR function.

Staying ahead of the pack is another reason. Whether you choose to optimize your retirement benefits platform or not, your competitors certainly will. The HR tech market is booming, and that means next-generation benefits solutions–with best-in-class platforms–are regularly hitting the market.

Synced is superior

At its core, a best-in-class retirement benefits platform is a connected one, meaning it can exchange information with employers’ HR and payroll systems (e.g., Paychex, ADP RUN, Gusto), for a highly synced, coordinated, and automated benefits management experience.

From onboarding and enrollment to deduction management and compliance reporting, a well-connected platform–one with sophisticated software integrations–minimizes friction at every step of the benefits lifecycle, alleviating your customers of their benefits management burdens and making engagement with your platform an enjoyable and reliable experience. In turn, you realize higher employee participation and contributions.

In-house inefficiencies

Chances are, this is not new information to you. You’re probably building or already have built integrations with market-leading HR and payroll systems. At the same time, you’ve probably experienced one or more of these common headaches along the way:

• Maintenance difficulties
  No matter how successful your initial build-out, integrations are bound to break at some point, whether due to a system change on your end or the data source’s. Staying on top of and solving for these changes is a full-time job that your team doesn’t have the bandwidth to handle in a reasonable timeframe –  they’re too busy focusing on your core product. Ultimately, it’s your customers’ experience that suffers.
• Ongoing costs
  In addition to taxing your team’s time, integrations come with a heavy price tag when you consider the average salary of your employees and the hours they spend building and maintaining your connections. In some cases, an initial build-out can cost $300,000 or more, not including upkeep. There are also opportunity costs to consider; how much more could you accomplish and how much faster could you get to market if your team’s attention wasn’t split between your product and the ancillary technologies that support it?
• Suboptimal performance
  Then there’s functionality. The more integrations you build, the more difficult it becomes to get them to work optimally for your purposes. That’s because disparate data sources have different data models, and each source value has to be mapped to a target data field to make it operable for your system. The more source values you’re working with, the more complicated things get. If mapping is not done correctly, it can end up requiring a lot of manual interventions. What’s more, unless you have an integrations specialist on staff, it’s unlikely that your team has the niche expertise to optimally enrich the data you retrieve for your particular use case. In other words, the data you’re accessing isn’t reaching its potential.

Outsourced and optimized

So, how do you leverage the very best of system integrations and all the benefits they offer your customers while avoiding the pitfalls that come with in-house build outs and maintenance? The answer is outsourcing.

In a fragmented industry with 5,700+ employment systems, outsourcing your integrations saves time and money. Instead of building integrations with dozens of payroll systems yourself, an integration partner does the work for you, while also providing ongoing support and maintenance. This outsourced infrastructure lets your team focus on fine-tuning your product, executing your roadmap, and creating the best user experience possible.

That said, the right integration partner won’t just relieve you of headaches; they will add extraordinary value to your platform. For that, you need a use case specialist.

Benefits specialists > data generalists

Say hello to Finch, the only integration platform solely focused on connecting applications to their employer clients’ payroll and HR systems. This means all of our efforts are spent optimizing and scaling integrations to cover all the edge cases relevant to your business.

Finch offers a unified API with 360° integrations into an ever-growing list of HR and payroll systems (125 at the time of publication). In this context, 360° means  read and write access, so you can pull census and pay statement information as well as push payroll deductions depending on employee contributions. Since Finch abstracts away inconsistencies across systems, all these actions can be accessed through a single set of endpoints.

Aside from streamlining technical workflows, Finch offers high-touch support, ensuring any issues are dealt with swiftly and, most importantly, without intervention from your team.

From 30 days to 30 seconds

Perhaps the most immediate benefit of Finch is the hyper-streamlined onboarding it enables. With Finch, it only takes a moment for customers to authorize you to retrieve and send data from and to their payroll and HR systems. Here’s how:

• Finch Connect (our secure front-end modal) prompts your customers to choose their payroll or HR system.
• Your customers authenticate their account and authorize a set of permissions by entering their admin or API credentials to that system.
• The connection is established, and you start reading and writing data.

That’s all it takes. In seconds, you have what you need to begin enrolling employees in retirement plans and managing their payroll deductions.

Automated onboarding and compliance

Once you’re connected, you can access live census data to streamline onboarding and offboarding of eligible employees. From day one (or the first day they can participate), you’ll have their key contact information, location, and worker status to ensure they can start contributing to their retirement as soon as possible. Similarly, when someone is no longer employed or eligible, you can offboard them from the system automatically and transition their account to a non-employee access so they can still manage the plans they do have.

For retirement benefits applications that also act as recordkeepers, you can access current and historical pay statement details down to the line item to ensure proper tracking of all contributions (pre and post-tax), enrollments, and TINs required to comply with IRS regulations.

End-to-end deductions management

Now that employees are onboarded, you’ll want to make sure they start contributing to their retirement goals with their first paycheck. You’ll need to create benefits, enroll participants, and make changes directly in payroll as their retirement savings plans shift.

Using Finch’s Benefits endpoint, you can create benefits (pre-tax, post-tax, recurring, one-time deductions), enroll individuals to one or many benefits, and select their $ or % contributions with employer matches where applicable. Throughout this whole process, the sponsor’s HR admin doesn’t have to lift a finger to upload deduction files or manually enter changes. That can amount to hours per month saved and dozens of potential human errors avoided.

Onward and upward

Best of all, Finch is dynamic, responsive, and built to scale.

For new edge case systems that come up in customer conversations, Finch can unlock support in as little as two weeks. That means, on the off chance you’re trying to land a customer that uses a system not yet covered by Finch, we have a gameplan to expand coverage so you don’t lose a sale.

Finch is also designed for large-scale synchronization with tens of thousands of employers, from small startups to massive public companies. Our team has accumulated expertise in constructing mission-critical infrastructure over many years, enabling us to surface large quantities of sensitive information reliably and securely.

Want to know more about integrations for retirement benefits?

Click the black Request Access button in the upper-right of this webpage to submit a question or ask to see our API documentation.

The employment landscape is undergoing dramatic changes, and data integrations are crucial to keeping pace. But maintaining them in-house is a drain on your resources and a distraction from your core competencies. Here’s what to do instead.

Not so long ago, it seemed like all it took to earn a reputation for a great work environment was a few ping pong tables, some quirky seating arrangements, and a gourmet cafeteria. Then COVID-19 happened and the story changed dramatically.

Now, old standards have given way to new expectations about what it means to provide an exceptional workplace. For employee engagement platforms, it has been a clarion call, prompting innovative players to build next-generation platforms that solve the challenges employers face today and are predicted to face going forward.

One aspect of great platform design is integrations. They are foundational to best-in-class functionality and user experience, but not all approaches to integrations are created equal. In this blog post, we’ll cover how to approach integrations more efficiently and effectively, so you have greater bandwidth to focus on your platform’s core technologies and deliver a superior experience to your customers and their employees alike.

But first, let’s talk landscape

To understand how and why integrations are so important, we have to consider the current state of affairs. It likely goes without saying that COVID-19 and the concurrent social and political movements of the past few years have seismically changed aspects of our collective work life in ways that fundamentally impact how employers approach people management and employee engagement. Some of the most important include:

A shift in the power balance

We would be remiss not to mention what you probably already know: workers are quitting and switching jobs at record rates, or leaving the workforce entirely, and there are now more available jobs than there is talent to fill them. Experts don’t expect the tide to change anytime soon. While many employers are responding to the pressures by offering higher salaries and wages to new hires, an effective, longer-term strategy may be investing in a “sticky” workplace culture—one marked by regular, effective communication—that promotes employee retention.

The rise of remote and hybrid work models

Office closure mandates at the onset of the pandemic forced many employers to allow employees to work from home, and it seems employees have come to favor the arrangement. According to recent polls, 45% of full-time U.S. employees continue to work remotely all or some of the time, including 67% of office workers. Of them, 91% would like to work at least some of the time from home even after the pandemic fully subsides, with 30% disclosing that they are extremely likely to seek a different job if they lose their option to work remotely.

Another factor to consider is that remote and hybrid work models can mean fewer friends in the workplace, which can lead to weaker emotional ties and less social pressure to stay with a company. Moreover, without any geographical constraints, remote workers have a wider pool of employers and job opportunities to choose from, making it easier to find alternative work. As a consequence, employers who don’t develop viable solutions to manage, engage, and build connections among remote talent not only risk operational inefficiencies, they also risk losing valuable employees.

Higher DEI standards

As activists continue to bring renewed and revolutionary attention to issues of racial and gender justice, employers are being called on to look critically at their own diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and execute proactive, ongoing plans to remedy their gaps and shortcomings. Many, it seems, are heeding the call. A recent analysis of S&P 500 earnings calls found that CEOs have discussed DEI 658% more frequently since 2018, and 40% of organizations report having hired a DEI specialist, the majority of which were added to their rosters in the past year and a half. As a result, DEI initiatives will naturally extend to employee engagement strategies, including measures like surveying employees on DEI issues, tracking and analyzing measures of workplace diversity, and instituting inclusive career growth paths and coaching opportunities to ensure everyone has the same access to success.

An emphasis on mental wellness

The collective and individual trauma and stress employees have experienced in recent years has had a toll on their mental health, making it more clear than ever that employers can no longer afford, from an ethical or financial standpoint, to ignore the overall wellbeing of their workforce. As talking about and seeking help for mental health challenges becomes increasingly normalized, especially among younger generations of workers, employers are increasingly expected to not only provide resources and benefits to support employees in crisis but also cultivate an environment that supports employee mental health. According to one study, employers (and the employee engagement platforms that serve them) would be wise to focus on reducing job boredom and monotony, supporting employees’ work-life balance, improving workplace communication practices, and fostering connections and networks of support among colleagues and managers.

These trends and others have led thought leaders to call for a large-scale humanization of the workplace. Now more than ever, employers should create opportunities and leverage technology to drive connections, inspire creativity, and help individual workers achieve their potential.

The role (and challenges) of integrations in employee engagement

Clearly, this new world order presents a litany of challenges for employers, and employee engagement platforms are working to deliver best-in-class solutions and experiences that address those pain points.

For many employee engagement platforms, this includes integrating with employers’ HR and payroll systems (e.g., Workday, ADP, etc.) to automate data connectivity and unify data across disparate sources as a means of reducing friction and optimizing the performance of their product.

But integrations are not without challenges, especially if you choose to build them in-house. For starters:

They’re expensive

It takes many engineering hours to build one integration, let alone the dozens or hundreds required to connect with systems in highly fragmented markets like HR and payroll software, where some 5,700+ systems have shares (check out our whitepaper on the landscape here). When you consider the average salary of an in-house developer, you’re looking at an investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars, excluding the considerable and ongoing expense of maintaining integrations over time (a full-time job unto itself).

They’re a distraction

All that time spent on integrations is time your team isn’t spending on your core technology—a huge opportunity cost. How much more could you accomplish and how much faster could you get to market if your team’s attention wasn’t split between your product and the ancillary technologies that support it?

They’re hard to do really well

If integrations aren’t in your team’s wheelhouse, your integrations are likely not functioning as well as they could be. That’s because different data sources have different data models, and each source value has to be mapped to a target data field to make it operable for your system. The more source values you’re working with, the more complicated things get, and if mapping is not done correctly, it can end up requiring a lot of manual intervention to make right.

Then there’s the issue of data enrichment. It takes a specialist to add value to the data you retrieve and make it optimally usable and actionable for your particular use case. In other words, it’s likely that the data you’re accessing via in-house builds isn’t reaching its potential.

Outsourcing your platform’s integrations enables you to take advantage of all the benefits while avoiding these common challenges.

One API, dozens (and dozens) of integrations

Innovative employee engagement platforms looking to build best-in-class experiences and get to market faster turn to Finch—the only integration partner focused on HR and payroll systems via the employer access point.

Finch works via a single, universal API that offers 360° integrations with an ever-growing network of HR and payroll systems (125 at the time of publication), so you can cover more of your addressable market than ever before.

By building your platform on the Finch API, your customers can authorize you to retrieve data from their payroll and HR systems in just a few clicks. Here’s how it works:

• Finch Connect (our secure front-end module) prompts your customers to choose their payroll or HR system.
• Your customers authenticate their account and authorize a set of permissions by entering their admin credentials to that system.
• The connection is established, and you start retrieving data.

That’s it. With Finch, what was once a 30-day process of tedious CSV file uploads, phone calls, and back-and-forth between your support team and your customers is reduced to 30 seamless seconds.

From there, you have access to your customers’ entire employee roster and dozens of data attributes per worker (e.g., hire date, job title, work and home location), allowing your customers to start using your platform immediately.

Not only does that save you time and improve your lead conversion rates, it’s a selling point to customers, who can be easily deterred by a drawn-out onboarding process.

And because the data connection is continuous, your platform is automatically apprised of new hires and other changes in end-user work status. In turn, your platform also makes onboarding and offboarding your customers’ employees easier, faster, and more automated. That can pay dividends for your customers, as studies show that strong onboarding processes improve employee retention by 82 percent.

Additional benefits

The advantages of using Finch don’t stop there:

• We standardize data across our entire coverage network and output it in a unified format for optimal usability, saving you from the hassle of having to worry about the intricacies of your customers’ (many) HR and payroll systems.
• Our API is dynamic and built to scale, which means we can respond swiftly to new edge case systems and unlock support in as little as two weeks, ensuring you never lose a sale because of lack of coverage.
• Finch is designed for large-scale synchronization with tens of thousands of employers. We surface large quantities of sensitive information reliably and securely (check out our Security page for more information).

Last but not least, we handle all upkeep and maintenance of your integrations, so your team can focus on what you do best—helping employers cultivate engaging, connected, and productive workplaces, no matter what the world throws their way.

Want to know more about integrations for employee engagement platforms?

Click the black Request Access button in the upper-right of this webpage to submit a question or ask to see our API documentation.

The Finch advisor and former HCM (Human Capital Management) exec shares his wishes and predictions for the industry he helped shape over the last two decades.

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.

How to build a best-in-class learning management system experience with Finch

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.

The L&D landscape

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:

• 72% of professionals polled agree that L&D has become a more strategic function at their organization.
• In Q3 2021, demand for L&D specialists grew 94% compared to Q2 that same year.
• 48% of L&D leaders worldwide, including 51% in North America, expect their budgets to increase in 2022—a six-year high.

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.

L&D pain points

Specifically, L&D professionals are concerned about three key areas of LMS functionality and performance:

• Admin time: L&D professionals want to spend fewer hours onboarding employees into learning management systems, enrolling them in courses, and managing and tracking their progress.
• User adoption: To meet their objectives, L&D professionals need an LMS that employees want to use and do use. This is usually a function of an LMS being easy and enjoyable to navigate and engage with.
• Analytics: It’s critical for L&D professionals to be able to view and assess the impact a particular course or learning module is having, so they can adjust their approach accordingly, report on progress, and prove their value to leadership teams.

Enter integrations

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:

• Admin automation: With access to employee census data, HR and payroll system integrations make it possible to build numerous features that take the manual work out of tedious tasks like onboarding users, program invitations, course enrollments, compliance tracking, and user deactivations. Instead of requiring L&D professionals to enter and manage this information themselves, or upload and reconcile clunky CSV files containing sensitive employee data, integrations pull the data instantly and output it in a normalized, actionable format for your LMS to consume and leverage.
• Optimal engagement: In retrieving data like job titles, department, and location, HR and payroll integrations provide the visibility your LMS needs to create hyper-personalized journeys that are tailored to the skill sets, interests, seniority, and location-specific compliance requirements of your customers’ individual employees. By offering employees an experience just for them, they are more likely to enjoy and complete courses and modules, and L&D professionals are more likely to be satisfied with the engagement rates your LMS generates.
• Valuable insights: The data that HR and payroll systems unlock can be used to identify correlations between courses and modules completed and things like compensation, job performance, and promotions. These insights can be pulled into your LMS’s dashboard to provide visibility into ROI and impact. In turn, L&D professionals not only have documentation of the value of their work, they can also make adjustments to their strategies and policies as needed to optimize that value.

Your integration options

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.

The unique value of Finch

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:

• Finch Connect (our secure, embeddable front-end modal) prompts your customers to choose their HR or payroll system.
• Your customers authorize a set of permissions by entering their admin or API credentials to that system.
• The connection is established, and your LMS starts receiving data.

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.

Concentrate on your competencies

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.

Want to know more about integrations for LMS platforms?

To start building with Finch, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.

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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:

Growth KPIs

1. New logo acquisitions

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.

2. Sales cycle length

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.

3. Average contract value

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.

4. Free-to-paid conversion

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.

Expansion KPIs

5. Logo retention

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:

• It makes for stickier customer relationships. Since your product is directly connected to your customers’ source of truth, and they’ve already configured their workflow based on how your product ingests their raw employment data, they’re highly invested.
• By syncing with census data, you can track champions, buyers, and other key stakeholders within a customer organization and proactively reach out when organization changes occur, helping to ensure a continuous relationship.
• If your product drives employee retention, you can measure the impact of your product on individual team and organization-wide retention rates from the time of implementation. That way, when renewals come up, you’re able to concretely demonstrate ROI.

6. Revenue retention

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.

Cost KPIs

7. Engineering expenses

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.

8. Support costs

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.

Accelerating success

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.

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!

1. Internal mobility rate

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.

How to calculate internal mobility

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.

Pulling internal mobility rate from Finch

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:

1. Call the Directory endpoint to gather all active employees.
2. Pass employee IDs through the Employment endpoint and store the employee types you want to track—this count is the denominator.
3. Refresh the Directory and Employment endpoints regularly to track new employees and any changes to job title, department, compensation, or direct reports to calculate the number of internal movements—this is the numerator. You should also account for new hires and former employees which shouldn’t necessarily factor into this metric.

Learn how to ensure equitable promotions for your customers’ employees.

2. Compensation history

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.

How to calculate compensation history

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.

Pulling compensation data from Finch

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.

1. First, call the Directory endpoint to gather all active employees.
2. Then, call the Payment endpoint and input the date range you are interested in to pull in earnings for that period.
3. Lastly, call the Pay Statement endpoint, and aggregate gross income for each employee.

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.

3. Turnover rate

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.

How to calculate turnover rate

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 turnover rate from Finch

Pulling the data you need to calculate turnover rate from Finch is a simple process:

1. As with the other entries on this list, you’ll first make a call to the Directory endpoint to gather all employees.
2. Then, call the Employment endpoint to aggregate start and termination dates.
3. Lastly, take all the employees whose termination dates fall within the last year, and divide it by the average number of employees who were active during that same period.

Find out what turnover rate can tell you about your customers’ business.

Align insights with your customers' goals

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.