3 things to look for in an embedded payroll partner

The single biggest expense item for your customers is paying their workers. And unfortunately, it’s a huge headache for them to manage. Despite the opportunity to solve a critical pain of their customers, most software platforms don’t offer this capability and instead refer customers to 3rd party payroll providers that don’t connect to their worker data. This dilutes the relationship and the company’s importance to its customers.

If outsourced payroll has such a negative impact on customer relationships, why haven’t those software companies built a payroll offering? It’s simple. Building and running a payroll product is incredibly complex and cumbersome. There are too many intricate rules and regulations that need to be followed, and building an offering from scratch might take a development team multiple years, which most software companies can’t afford.

Your customers want payroll simplified: they would prefer it to be part of the same system where they are running everything else in their day-to-day, and they prefer it to be tailored to their unique operating environment. But how do you find the right FinTech partner to get you there?

There are three practices most important for creating and maintaining a true partnership with the FinTech company you choose.

1. Find a partner dedicated to compliance and security.

Offering a successful FinTech product has inherent risks, so you want to find a partner who cares about following complex rules and government regulations and will still be in business 10 years down the road. On top of that, FinTech products often require you to gather personally identifiable information (PII) from your workers: social security numbers, tax information, personal addresses, bank account information, and more. The last thing you want is that information getting into the wrong hands because your FinTech partner didn’t invest in security early on.

It’s vital to find a partner dedicated to both helping you stay compliant and keeping your customers’ data secure. A partner that takes compliance and security seriously will ideally have:

• A strong compliance and legal team
• SOC 2 Type II Certification
• Data encryption
• Authenticated API interactions
• Regular vulnerability scans
  

2. Look for developer flexibility. The more options for development, the better.

When you start embedding your payroll solution, your developers may need help. You may not have the resources to build it all yourself. Or you may want to build the entire thing from scratch, fully custom and connected to your platform. Or your needs might change over time as your company grows and your priorities shift. Finding a partner with flexibility and a spectrum of options when it comes to embedding FinTech into your platform is the smartest move for you and your business.

How will your FinTech partner help you with whitelabeling? Does it offer components you can leverage so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel? These are important things to ask when you’re vetting a potential FinTech partner. The more flexibility, the better.

3. Choose a partner that will continue to support you after the contract is signed.

The best partners are ones that stick around after the contract is signed. If your relationship with a potential partner’s team is impersonal, lacks talk of support and resource investment, and they are only selling you on features and benefits, they’ll likely leave you high and dry. You need a FinTech partner who will help you beyond just signing a contract and getting you started.

Partners focused on your success will have invested in a team and resources focused on your success, complete with technical consultants, payroll and compliance specialists, and go-to-market experts to help you when you need it. You should always have someone to turn to for help as you embed, launch, and scale your payroll product.

Getting the right partner involved from the start sets you up for success. Our entire business model at Check is centered around helping software companies build, market and sell payroll products that offer a differentiated service for their customers. In a traditionally complex industry, our mission is to make paying people simple. And it starts with arming software companies with the tools they need to build easy-to-use payroll businesses. We’ve created a modern API that connects directly to your platform, allowing us to perform three core payroll functions for you: tax calculations and withholding, production and filing of tax documentation, and movement of money to employees and tax authorities. Three years in and we have partnered to build payroll capabilities for more software platforms than any company in the world, leading us to create a Path to Payroll with key learnings to help you have a successful go-to-market. To put it simply, your success is our success.

While Check will provide resources to assist with product and design guidance, technical and compliance questions, and go-to-market consultations for packaging, pricing, marketing, and sales, it’s imperative that you embark on this endeavor with the appropriate resources on your end, too. Your payroll dream team combined with a dedicated FinTech partner is a winning solution.

To learn more about how to expand your product line with a payroll offering, contact us.