The Use Case by RecruitingDaily
RecruitingDaily discusses with guests how practitioners make the business case or the use case for purchasing their technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better.
The Use Case by RecruitingDaily
Storytelling About Branch With Atif Siddiqi
We're thrilled to unfold the story of Atif Siddiqi, the innovative mind behind Branch, a workforce payments platform that promises to revolutionize industries. Atif and his team at Branch are altering the way payments are processed in healthcare, restaurant, and gig economies like Uber, with their groundbreaking digital wallet feature. Now, workers can cash out their payments swiftly and at no extra cost. What's more, the unbanked sector is not left behind; Branch's digital wallet and card service offer them financial inclusivity.
In this enlightening conversation, we're also pulling back the curtain on how Branch is orchestrating a shift in employer-led financial services, aiming to provide a seamless consumer banking experience for employees. Branch is not just about payments; they're about financial wellness, and we'll delve into their success stories providing liquidity and cash flow to workers. You'll learn how Branch is making inroads in healthcare, logistics, and hospitality industries, and their future plans for enriching their payment options, providing choices for every worker. Join us, and explore how Branch's forward-thinking platform is not only serving industries but also creating lucrative opportunities.
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Welcome to Recruiting Daly's Use Case Podcast, a show dedicated to the storytelling that happens or should happen when practitioners purchase technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better as we speak with the brightest minds in recruitment and HR tech. That's what we do. Here's your host, William Tincup.
Speaker 2:Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tincup and you're listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today we have a teff on from Branch. We learned about the business case, the ROI, the cost-benefit analysis, the use case for why his customers and prospects choose Branch. So, while we do some introductions, a teff, would you do us a favor and introduce both yourself and Branch?
Speaker 3:Thanks, william. I'm a Topsadiki founder, ceo of Branch Branch. We're a workforce payments platform that really helps businesses compete for workers by enabling instant payments with easy to launch solutions. Really, our goal is to help businesses pay any worker anytime, anywhere.
Speaker 2:Oh I like that, I like all of that. One of the things that recently I was going through at Taco Bell and I saw this bit on one of the windows and it was like apply today, work today, get paid today. It was fascinating. I don't know how all that works, but I was just fascinated like works change Now in the hourly market. I'm sure that this has probably been going on for more than it, but also recently learned that in the professional sourd world that it's also starting to move there. So give us an overview of the industries where this is working and where you think that the where it's going.
Speaker 3:Yeah, really, where we focus on are industries where there's a high competition for talent and there's a technical market. In addition to places like restaurants, where you see the Taco Bell poster, it's also industries like healthcare, with nurses right and their staffing companies that are looking to attract and retain nurses to their platform. It's gig companies like Uber. They're out there competing for rideshare ride services, where workers have choices and essentially they look at a company like branch to provide incentives around this, like faster payments, to keep current workers happy, to keep prospective hires, as an incentive for them to come to the work for these companies, and so it's really a big benefit that makes a meaningful impact to workers lives.
Speaker 2:So do you do you see it like an Uber and Lyft, right? They can tab out after a ride, like they do one ride and they can tab out, or they can tab out at the end of the day, or whatever the bid is. Do you see it being that flexible, where the employee chooses when they want to get there? Whatever has occurred, right? So we're dealing with whatever has occurred to that point.
Speaker 3:That's right, and I think the difference between a company like branch and just being able to cash out, say, after every ride, is that those cashouts become really cost prohibitive, right, either to the couple having to pay or to the worker, meaning that there's some transaction costs occurred. With branch, what we've done is the core of our product is a digital wallet, and what that wallet allows us to do is to send payments to workers at any time, free of cost. So you might be wondering, like, how do we make money off of this? Because we make money. Anytime that Uber driver goes out and swipes their card, right, that's associated with that digital wallet. We make a buy interchange for the merchant. So I think it's a nice way to align the incentives for branches and company as well as the incentives for the worker, where they're not incurring extra fees, extra costs, just to access their cash. Oh, I love that.
Speaker 2:I love that so much and, again, I like that you position it both. This is a great way to retain talent. It's also a great way to attract talent. So the mechanisms inside, like I know I'm going to ask you a couple of biceits stuff. But who are you selling into? Are you selling into finance? Are you selling into HR? Who's the who's your kind of, your point of contact on the sales side?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so when it comes to attracting or retaining talent right, that's usually a HR people issue, right, they're always looking to see how they can retain talent. On the cost side yeah, it's usually a CFO right, they definitely need the need where, again, if they want to do high frequency payments, we enable that because it's a very cost effective way to do it with just our digital wallet and just fee free options to the business.
Speaker 2:So do you see yourself in that category of earned wage access or? Do you see yourself tangential to that.
Speaker 3:It's look tangential right. So what we've done is really widen the aperture, if you will, from just the way. Jackson, that's where we started.
Speaker 3:That's why I thought, yeah, the two payments. But we realized the opportunity here of accelerating worker payments is far greater than just $50 to $100 sort of safety net for workers, and so what you've done is look at other worker payment issues. Let's say tips. Right, you're a pizza delivery driver and you work at this job because you depend on these tips at the end of the shift. Right, you have income right away and ultimately, there's no cash at the end of the day to tip you out though. Right, everybody's paying credit cards, mobile ordering, and really what we've done is digitize that whole process. So now, instead of waiting for two weeks to get your tips on the paycheck, you can pick up a card when start working for Domino's, and if you wanna get your tips every day, we'll literally just push those tips at the end of every shift to your card.
Speaker 2:And this might be a dumb question, so dumb question alert does that help with the unbanked, with the folks that are unbanked? We have a whole population in the United States that are just unbanked, right, does that, by them having a card, does that help them?
Speaker 3:That's right. The digital wallet is FDIC insured. I have a fee checking account right, we use our partner bank, evolve bank and trust and ultimately, yeah, it's a fee free checking account where you can get a bank account up and running through the company work for and it's a great way too. And what we see too is a lot of people start using branch let's just say to get their tips and they realize, oh, this is actually like a great banking alternative to large bank I'm using. There's no fees, there's free ATMs, and one out of four users actually switched to branch as their primary account. So we own that relationship with that worker over time.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's cool, so they can move from company to company. It doesn't really matter. One of the things that I love is it gets us away from predatory lending places, and I like that a lot. But I want to ask another dumb question. But it's like why? Because everything sounds great, but why would people say no? What's when people either as you're going through proposals and pitching people it just seems like a no brainer to me but also no HR and finance? So what are the no's that they give you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think any objection we have is more around the education of how easy it is to launch a solution like branch. So it's a lot of it's. What is this going to take? Obviously, all the fee free options to educating, like how we make money. And, yeah, I think one of the strengths of the company is that we really figured out how to create these solutions where there's not a lot of overhead, there's not a lot of tech resources required to launch. A good example of this is Uber right, where Uber came to us looking for a white label solution, something that feels like the Uber brand, and we were able to launch that and get that to market in a really short amount of time. And for a company like Uber, they realized their core competency is logistic, it's moving people, it's moving things, and they look to a partner like us where we can be able to get a product to market really quickly. I love that.
Speaker 2:A couple things now. I want to do with the software side of things. So when your folks demo on the occasion that you get to actually show folks software, what do they fall in love with? What do you fall in love with? What do you think that they fall in love with?
Speaker 3:I think one of the most powerful things we do when we demo is we'll actually sign up the prospect to a branch account on the call and we'll push money to that branch account in a matter of seconds. That's cool, that dollar or whatever we push, it's like we do a cup of coffee, five dollars, to their account. It's really powerful, right? You can see that money hit your account that you can go use, and I think that's when the moment the light will click. So, oh, this could be really impactful for their workers who, as you mentioned, oftentimes if they're struggling with cash flow, they're resorting to more predatory measures to cash and so so what are questions?
Speaker 2:One of the reasons this podcast exists is trying to teach practitioners what's available to them, and so that's why focusing on the vendor side of things, but also want to educate them as to questions that they should ask in the buy side. So, if you could script it, what are the questions that you'd love to hear from finance or HR? What are the questions that they should be asking you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think under the hood, one of the things that makes us special too is we don't require any pre-funding. If you think of in the case of a W2 worker, for example, with payroll, you're having to lock up a lot of the company's cash into an escrow account for payroll. Similarly with a 1099 worker, where you need to maybe park some money aside. So then pre-funding piece is really big because what we'll do is we'll do some basic underwriting on the company itself and we will push the capital to the worker that same day and then draw it down from the company. And so ultimately let's improve like the cash conversion cycle for companies right. They're able to use that cash and generate for the company or generate interest income themselves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting. I could see first of all, the questions around stand-up, like okay, how fast can we stand this up with our workforce? I could see that question Is there any other integrations? Where does this need to be connected to payroll or benefits or compensation? Is there any kind of plumbing that needs to be done?
Speaker 3:There is right. There's a couple of data points we need to make the system work. One is how much does somebody make, how often do they work? And so all that we take care of and integrate either to a system of record if it's a W2 worker, the payroll if it's a company like Uber, they usually have that data, and so we'll connect to that in real time.
Speaker 2:So do you consider a branch of FinTech or an HR Tech company?
Speaker 3:I would say we're in the middle of both.
Speaker 2:That's what I was struggling with. I'm like. First of all, I guess I could make a case for both, but you do have your foot in both of those One. I think there used to be a phrase one foot in the canoe, the other in a speedboat, so you've got your feet in both. I've not done a lot of work in the FinTech space, so I couldn't tell you anything about it. What's different about so you have? So what's different about FinTech than HRTech?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would say the reason I mention HRTech is that Branch. The only way we acquire users on our platformers is through a company that they work for right so consumer can't go on to sign up for a branch account.
Speaker 3:With that said, we do provide really great consumer banking like experiences. Right, I mentioned the one of four people uses as a primary account. Once they leave their company, they can still continue to use branches like a fee free checking account, and so that's why it's and what we really see is this idea of employer led financial services. Right. If you think about in the past, it's employer led financial services are more focused around like longer term objectives. Right, it's 401ks, it's just agencies, fsas, whereas we're solving for this new generation of workers right, that maybe need some more short term needs like liquidity and cash flow. Help with cash flow.
Speaker 2:So we did talk about earned wage access, and I know y'all started there and you've morphed into something else. What do you call that category? And again, I hate software categories, so just bear with me. But like you're not, you do some of that. But what do you do much more? What do you call that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know I mentioned the employer led financial services. I think another category that's emerging, that's on the radar of a lot of HR professionals, is like financial wellness. Right, and I realize that financial wellness is just as important as like health wellness and making sure the financial wellbeing of their employees is taken care of as another category we see.
Speaker 2:I like that a lot because, again, can you like said health, health, wellness, mental health, financial health, like all those things are wonderful and it gives you another entry point. So, if not through HR directly, the benefits folks that deal with all of the things, that are all the wellness programs and things like a compensation that's another category to go after as well. That's it, that's cool. Tell us all the success stories, and no brands or anything like that. It's more the story of maybe even someone who's a bit skeptical and then all of a sudden they're like yeah, I can't do without this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I really go back to where we I mentioned, like opening the aperture on like other work or payment use cases.
Speaker 3:Like during the pandemic, we were working with a lot of Domino's pizza franchisees and they really saw the value of the ability for us to push money at any time, and so they actually came to us saying, hey, listen to your wall.
Speaker 3:It's great. Is there a way you can help us support paying tips to drivers because we just don't have any cash at the end of the day, like our managers are running to ATMs or right, or a lot of cash on site? We're like, yeah, absolutely, that sounds like a great case, as long as you get us the data like we're able to make that happen. And it was a big win for both sides. Win for the worker, where they didn't have to wait now till they're paycheck to get their tips and we can push that immediately. And one of the other innovations we did was we launched a product that allows us to push pre-printed cards right, so they didn't have to wait in the mail for a card to come in. We just put a stack of cards at their employee break room and they can pick one up, scan it and their tips would be on that same day I love that.
Speaker 2:So what's the and again? Any more of those stories that those are great because practitioners love hearing those. But I did have a question around go to market and getting your brand out there. So how do you, how are y'all looking at this? We're what two quarters into this year.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what is.
Speaker 2:What is it? What's the idea for the rest of the year of getting people to to know what branch is and what they do?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think for us it's really looking at other industries that have this competition for talent and I would say, this year, one of the larger industries we've been targeting is around healthcare. We're staffing companies where, you know, as there's like a shortage of nurses, a lot of these platforms, a lot of nurses are also open to doing more contract work sort of 1099 work and a lot of platforms have emerged. We're getting a lot of growing really rapidly and Ultimately, working with those platforms to pay nurses faster has been a big driver for the company. Other areas around logistics, like last-mom delivery not just the Ubers of the world, we're also companies that are doing essentially shipping packages to customers' doorsteps, Right. So there's a lot of these players, too, that have been growing. And then, finally, in the hospitality space, we started off in quick service restaurants are now expanding into full service restaurants, whereas, you would imagine, tips are a big part of those workers' lives as well and, yeah, I'm making sure that they can get paid immediately.
Speaker 2:So, on the technical roadmap, what's about just divulging anything secret or anything like that? But what's next? What do you think that? The what do you see this? If we were to have this podcast in a year from now, what do you think we would be talking about?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think for us. We realize that workers want options right, and so, although we started at the core of the product with Wallet, which I mentioned, we've now also launched solutions that allow workers to also get paid to their bank accounts if they want right. And so, just while workers are sweet of options that allow them to again access their money however they want has been really important. I think that's important for the company because now we own really all worker payments coming through a branch. Whether you want to get pushed to your existing bank account, whether you want to get for free to our wallet, that's all enabled.
Speaker 2:So last question and I think you covered it before, but I want to make sure the practitioners understand it it's how you make money. Where in this process do you make money, or where do? Where are they going to feel it? I guess it's probably some of the things that they would care about too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for the companies themselves it's. You know, we have fee-free options, right. There's no cost to the company. Where we make money is one via interchange, right? So anytime a worker goes out, swipes their physical debit card, makes a purchase online through the wallet, we make it from an emerging. The other thing we do, too, is again mentioning the optionality. We allow workers to push money out to existing accounts. We do that for free via ACH right now, but we also charge a small fee, like most digital wallets, and then no cash shop if they do a debit card to debit card transfer. So that's the other way.
Speaker 2:That's excellent. This has been fantastic. I love what you're doing because it's as you said. It meets employees where they are. It meets talent. So, again, as we recruit and retain talent, the talent wants to be paid a certain way, which is we can keep trying to force them into some false model or we can just meet them where they are. I love that. I love what you build and thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, william, absolutely, and thanks for everyone listening Until next time.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Recruiting Daly's Use Case Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite platform and hit us up at RecruitingDalycom.
