The Next Evolution Of Embedded Payroll

Ever since Check was founded in 2019 and pioneered the category of embedded payroll, we’ve been on a mission to make paying people simple. Since then, we’ve radically simplified building and operating payroll businesses and have reduced the time to stand up a payroll product from years to weeks. As a result, we’re proud to now power fast-growing payroll businesses for dozens of category leading platforms, from YC startups to large public companies.

Every investment we’ve made has been laser-focused on empowering our partners to build, launch, and grow their payroll businesses as quickly, easily, and inexpensively as possible. It started with our powerful payroll API, abstracting away the nuances of money movement, calculation, and filing for thousands of tax jurisdictions. Next, we built Components, enabling our partners to drop user-ready embedded UIs directly into their products, saving many months of development effort. 

But we never intended to stop there: we know, from first-hand experience working with our partners, that building a payroll product is only the starting point. The most challenging aspects of growing a payroll business are operational in nature, hard to scale, and become apparent only after launch.

That’s why today we’re excited to announce the launch of three new benchmark-setting offerings: Credit & Fraud Protection, Embedded Setup, and Embedded Support. Combined with our core payroll API and Components, this new suite of tools represents a step change in the evolution of embedded payroll by eliminating the most complicated and cumbersome aspects of launching and running a payroll business— giving our partners the tools to scale and monetize faster.

Credit & Fraud Protection

Payroll fraud is one of the most prevalent fraud schemes inside businesses and twice as likely to occur for small businesses. With Credit & Fraud Protection built into our core platform, partners can rest assured they’re protected by relying on our powerful stack of smart underwriting, intelligent fraud monitoring and prevention, as well as advanced due diligence and watchlist screening. In fact, we’re so confident in our core platform’s payroll risk management, we take on all credit and fraud loss risk for our partners. For employers, Credit & Fraud Protection helps make sure employees get paid faster, and without delays. Platforms remain completely out of the flow of funds without needing to build their own credit, fraud, and compliance teams from the ground up. 

Payroll is just as mission-critical as it is complex, and we believe our partners deserve a better solution than what’s out there to build and grow their business: a fully embeddable payroll product, with markedly less risk and better unit economics. We’re excited to see how our partners keep pushing the boundaries of their products and what it means to provide a great, tailored payroll experience.

"Our customers place a great deal of trust in Homebase to run their businesses and pay their employees. By partnering with Check, we were able to avoid building additional fraud, credit risk and compliance tools for payroll and have instead relied on their trusted Credit & Fraud Protection. This freed us up to focus on what matters the most—building the best operating platform for small businesses." - Ray Sandza, GM, Homebase Payroll

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Embedded Setup

Getting started with a new payroll provider is complicated, for customers new to payroll or changing providers. Migrating existing company, worker, and payroll data is a daunting, labor-intensive task that can take teams of experts weeks. This slows down the time to revenue and requires an experienced payroll team to perform the work efficiently and accurately. We are uniquely positioned to solve this onboarding hurdle, which has been deeply rooted in the payroll industry for decades. As a platform serving many different industries, we are well-positioned to dramatically simplify and automate the experience of payroll setup, and we have already deeply invested in tools to do so.

With Embedded Setup, partners can leverage our advanced platform and team of experts to ensure employers are set up quickly and correctly to run payroll. This ensures partners can make sure their employers can switch without hiccups, which we’ve seen leads to referrals and drives loyalty. Additionally, not having to build out expensive operational functions also frees up resources to focus on growth.
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“Embedded Setup has been a fantastic addition to our overall go-to-market pay motions. It’s allowed us to scale faster to meet hyper demand after launching our payroll offering this year,” said Jeff Imm, GM of Pay at 7shifts. “Not only has it helped us drive adoption, but the speed, accuracy, and innovation behind it has allowed us to focus resources in other key areas to make sure our customers have the best onboarding experience.”

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Embedded Support

Making sure employees get paid correctly, and on time, is obviously important to any employer, but especially small businesses. With increasingly complex tax calculations, deduction rules, and filing obligations, employers need quick, compassionate, and reliable support from experienced payroll specialists to avoid the costly consequences of noncompliance. But hiring a dedicated payroll support team is tough, often expensive, and comes with significant overhead. 

With Embedded Support, platforms can instead rely on our qualified team of in-house experts to answer any payroll related questions, all while maintaining their brand identity towards their customers. This allows organizations to focus on growth and maintain a high bar for customer satisfaction while our team of experts handles the tough questions and issues that can arise before, during, and after payroll processing. 

If you’re looking to eliminate the headaches that come with building and running a payroll product, we’d love to hear from you.