Add benefits to make your platform indispensable (and more profitable, too)

November 29, 2022
Tyler Fallon

Head of Partner Growth

by 
Tyler Fallon

Payroll on your platform is just the start

Making it convenient for employees to receive their pay—and for a company to run payroll easily—just makes good business sense. It saves time, helps alleviate compliance worries, and can make everyone a little less stressed. And if that functionality is bundled with software these companies already rely on, even better.

If you’re a SaaS provider, this one-stop-shop value proposition is the way to make the case for payroll to your customers.

But payroll really is just the start of a significantly larger business opportunity: the ability to become the indispensable operating system for the employers and the employees using its platform.

Once payroll is part of your platform, it can act as the foundation of an entire ecosystem that provides multiple employee services, including benefits such as employer-sponsored healthcare, 401(k), worker’s compensation, earned wage access, pay cards, and more. Each of these are considered adjacencies to payroll, and can open up new ways to monetize employees paid through your platform. It’s simple: the more of these adjacencies you can offer, the greater your revenue per customer can be.

In effect, payroll can be the catalyst for establishing an end-to-end operating system that comprises the entire employee experience within a company, from sourcing, to onboarding, to getting paid, to time off, to accessing benefits and beyond.

Employees are the single biggest expense any company has – made all the more costly when they leave and need to be replaced. By enhancing the employee experience through additional online services, a company creates an opportunity to differentiate itself as a recruitment and retention strategy. And it creates a new and significant revenue stream for itself as well. 

The reason payroll and benefits go hand-in-hand

Payroll is the main access point between the employer and employee. It’s where the flow of funds occurs. Employee benefits are the next natural extension of payroll.

By bundling payroll and benefits together as part of your platform, you’re providing a one-stop-shop solution for employee management while making your core offering that much stronger. It’s a way of securing a first-mover advantage. And because your customers will always need to provide payroll and benefits, it’s also a way of becoming a long-term trusted partner. 

No in-house brokers required

You don’t need to be a broker to provide benefits on your platform. Essentially, you’re providing your customers with a window into a marketplace for them to facilitate benefits coverage that’s seamlessly integrated into your platform. You get to maintain a great user experience while keeping your company compliant.

For example, platforms like Dripos extend their embedded payroll implementation with SimplyInsured, an online platform that helps small businesses compare and then purchase medical, dental and vision insurance plans for their employees. It provides instant quoting, self-service and dedicated support for its users.

Avery Durrant, Co-Founder at Dripos explains, “the Check integration with SimplyInsured allows our restaurants to offer health insurance right from our Dripos dashboard. The integration is simple to set up and significantly bolsters our payroll offerings.”

So what’s the real business value of bundling benefits?

The incremental value can be significant. 

While the exact breakdown is obviously dependent on attach rate and which benefits are offered, platforms can roughly double their revenue per employee and see a corresponding gross margin increase of approximately 50% per employee with the addition of benefits. 

The customer lifetime value increases, too. Platforms that attach health benefits to Check payroll see an average of a 10% annual reduction in customer churn.

Not every payroll provider offers the revenue potential that we do

If you’re thinking of adding benefits to your payroll, it’s important to note that not all embedded payroll providers allow their customers to profit from these adjacencies. 

Check does. We’ll partner with you by paying you to use our embedded benefits offering.

If you’re wondering how to pull this all together and what makes the most sense for your customer base, we can help. We make it easy to build and launch your benefit integration in just a few weeks.

Our belief is that payroll is just the beginning of your growth story. To learn more about how benefits can help increase your revenue potential, reach out to our team today.

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