Reimagined UX expected to increase conversion by >2x
Pinwheel was founded with a simple but powerful vision. By connecting the vast world of payroll providers to the more than 10,000 banks in the US, we could build a new ecosystem where real-time income data flows freely and enables new product innovation. These new products would better serve consumers’ financial needs (especially those who have been underserved) and ultimately help them achieve better outcomes.
For over half a decade we’ve been hard at work building toward this vision. We started by automating and digitizing clunky, paper-driven experiences with our consumer-permissioned direct deposit switching (DDS) product. Already, we’ve seen incredible results: on average, customers see a 20%+ increase in direct deposits after adopting Pinwheel. Major financial institutions like Citizens Bank, Discover, and American Express trust us to help them achieve account primacy. Yet with all that progress, we knew there was an even better way to help our customers. We’re excited to finally share what we’ve spent the past few years quietly building and explain why it represents a revolutionary step in realizing our mission.
Today we’re thrilled to announce we are pioneering a first-of-its-kind network, bringing together the United States’ largest payroll providers, such as Workday partner One Source Virtual (OSV), to power a never-before-seen frictionless and login-free experience to connect payroll accounts to banks and switch direct deposits. This groundbreaking solution automatically identifies and verifies a banking user’s payroll account, and immediately offers them the option of one-click updating of their direct deposit enrollment. This is a radical improvement over prior generation DDS experiences, all of which — at a minimum — require a banking customer to know and search for their payroll provider, and then know their credentials in order to log in and complete the automated switch. These two steps represent ~50% of the drop-off points in the industry standard customer journey and we expect it to deliver at least 2x the conversion rate of any other solution in market.
How it works
Each bank captures unique customer identifiers, such as social security number, telephone number, and zip code. These same data points also exist within payroll provider databases. Our next-generation platform works by encrypting these data points and matching them between the banks’ and the payroll providers’ databases. This matching process happens automatically, eliminating the need for the end user to know and manually look up their payroll service provider — where most users drop off.
Once a payroll account has been identified, end users complete a simple and quick multi-factor authentication (MFA) to verify their identity. This bypasses the requirement and friction of a login while maintaining — even improving — fraud mitigation and privacy protections. From here, users can configure their direct deposit allocation preferences, updating the allocation of all or part of their paycheck. Pinwheel’s system then programmatically applies any changes made.
Beyond the conversion benefits
We’re proud to claim our next-generation solution is the first and only platform of its kind, built exclusively on direct, custom bi-directional data feeds with payroll providers. This model isn’t just an evolutionary step for payroll connectivity and DDS conversion, it also opens a new universe of customer insights made possible as a result of recurring, real-time income data. We can’t wait until we can announce more about how our customers take advantage of these powerful insights in the coming months. Stay tuned!
What this means for our first generation solution
Login-based solutions have delivered game-changing conversion improvements to banks’ paper-based status quo. Our first-generation solution allows end users to complete automated DDS updates from within their banking app and we deploy the highest security protocols to make this a safe and convenient experience. However, while this solution is proven, it still requires the end user to log-in — either manually, via device biometrics, or device keychain — and this friction creates abandonment in the conversion journey. We will continue to support this accessible DDS solution, but there is no question our next-generation platform is the future.
The Pinwheel Difference
Pinwheel is the only comprehensive DDS platform to cover 100% of the US workforce receiving income via direct deposit with credential-less solutions. As of this post’s publishing, we are the only provider offering this revolutionary DDS product. Interested in learning more about what our next-generation solution for DDS can unlock for your customers? Click here to connect with our team and learn more.