There’s never been a better time to offer earned wage access (EWA). Traditionally, consumers receive pay on a standard cadence (e.g. bi-weekly or monthly), and for many, the amount of time they wait to get paid for completed work can present financial challenges.
Also known as on-demand pay, EWA is the process of offering a real-time paycheck to consumers. This allows consumers to complete a shift of work and get paid the same day. EWA is in high demand, and rightly so: 69% of workers live paycheck to paycheck and the traditional pay cycle leaves 87% of people in an ongoing state of financial stress.
The past three years saw a 3x increase in wages withdrawn before payday, and more than half of EWA users began tapping into earned wages within the last 12 months. Consumers have started to seek help from financial institutions to bridge the gap between time worked and payday, with an estimated 77% expressing interest in EWA if offered by their financial institution.
This trend has been building for some time, which is hardly surprising considering earned wage access gives consumers more freedom and agency over their finances, reduces reliance on high interest products like payday advances, and limits overdraft fees. Additionally, gaining immediate access to wages helps consumers pay bills on time and keep themselves out of debt. Since Pinwheel’s mission is to create a fairer financial system, we build products for our customers to help pursue that mission.
Consumer demand for EWA products is at an all-time high, though it may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in research, development and design to build one. Pinwheel can help every financial services provider that needs a plan to implement earned wage access immediately, to ensure that their consumers benefit from a service that is poised to rapidly become market-standard.
Outdated methods drag earned wage access down
Despite its growing prevalence, earned wage access is not necessarily an easy service to offer. Financial service providers that opt for a hands-on approach will likely face scalability challenges. The sheer number of employer partnerships needed to substantiate a marketable EWA product is daunting, and the time it would take to build those partnerships with individual employers is unrealistic.
Financial service providers seeking a more cost-effective and easily deployable solution are having trouble finding a direct-to-consumer EWA product that's both reliable and performative. Most packaged EWA products in the market today are built on incomplete or inaccurate consumer data, while some focus on individual employer relationships, leading to poor coverage of users. What’s more, gaps in data can limit the amount of wages withdrawn, further diminishing effectiveness. Pinwheel has built a product to bridge these gaps.
Effortlessly build an EWA product with Pinwheel Earnings Stream
Pinwheel Earnings Stream provides the necessary data and intelligence to reliably offer earned wage access (EWA) at scale. Our product does the heavy lifting by surfacing a packaged endpoint leveraging advanced machine learning and modeling techniques to assess and derive net pay for work completed during the current pay period. This is especially important for earned wage access since payroll systems don’t inherently surface net earned wages in real time.
Pinwheel Earnings Stream uses our unique connectivity to over 1,600 payroll providers (covering 80% of US workers) and over 20 time & attendance platforms (T&A) (covering 25M US workers) to provide an accurate and up to date calculation of how much a given worker has earned and real-time projection of future earnings, which helps to reduce the risk of computing wages incorrectly.
We are the only provider in the market that
- connects to both payroll platforms and T&A systems, covering the most number of hourly employees
- can offer a real view into actual earned wages based on if the user clocked in and out of their shift
- has experience supporting an EWA solution at scale
- combines all of this with Direct Deposit Switching to receive repayments
Our fully validated and packaged earnings stream product gives customers the unique opportunity to bring an EWA product to market efficiently. Enabling financial freedom can help to increase customer lifetime value, profitability and improve sentiment towards your business. Combined with our leading direct deposit switching solution and Pinwheel’s secure authentication paradigm, we help customers capture a larger and sticker share of wallet. But the possibilities with Pinwheel Earnings Stream are endless - stay tuned for more information on next generation use cases that can be unlocked!
Want to join the waitlist?
If you’re ready to offer consumers earned wage access with Pinwheel Earnings Stream, contact us today to join the waitlist!