A Sea Change Coming in the Way Employees Get Paid

A discussion with DailyPay’s VP of Public Policy Matthew Kopko

Matt Kopko is DailyPay’s Vice President of Public Policy, where he manages DailyPay’s interactions with regulators, legislators, other government officials and stakeholders. Matt was drawn to DailyPay because he has a passion for focusing on emerging technologies that help improve the lives of millions of working individuals. Prior to his role at DailyPay, Matt served in a similar role at Bird, the micromobility company. Matt was also a senior government official and member of the Senior Executive Service, as well as an attorney in private practice. Matt holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, and a JD/MBA from the University of Chicago.

 

Talking Points

  • What is DailyPay and How is it Going to make the Bi-Weekly Payroll Obsolete?
  • How Once-a-Month Payroll Payments Don’t Allow Employees to Access Money when They Need It
  • A Good alternative to Low Income, High Turnover Companies
  • Employee Savings on average $1,205 a year in overdraft fees and late fees

Connect with Matthew Kopko 

Website
https://www.dailypay.com

  Facebook – LinkedIn

John DeBevoise:

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to another serving of Bizness Soup Talk Radio. If it’s in business, it’s Bizness Soup. I’m your host, John DeBevoise. Matthew Kopko is going to be joining us from DailyPay. They have a system. It is so simple to work with you, to give your employees access to the money they’ve already made. And when your employees find financial security, they stay longer. Is there a fee? Yes, but man, is it easy and cheap. 

So pull up a chair, sit on down. Matthew Kopko from DailyPay will be sharing the tips, tools and techniques to human capital management on how your employees can stay with you longer by getting access to the money they’ve already made, right here on Business Soup, where business comes from business. Matthew, welcome to this serving of Bizness Soup. 

Matthew Kopko: Good to be here, John. 

John DeBevoise: You are with DailyPay, which is a program that is an employee-sponsored service. Who is DailyPay targeted to service, both in the business, as well as the customer who is going to be using it? 

Matthew Kopko: [inaudible 00:01:17]. Thanks, first of all, for having me on the show here. DailyPay is a leading provider of what’s called the on-demand pay benefit. It’s a revolutionary piece of technology that’s kind of changed the game in payroll in the last few years, that allows employees to no longer have to wait weeks in between paychecks. They can essentially get paid whenever they need, when it’s in line with their schedule and their bills and their life, as opposed to having to wait for payday. 

So it’s a fascinating technology. It’s offered through employers as an employer-sponsored benefit. And we’re very excited to be on the cutting edge of payroll, helping people keep more money in their pocket, have better financial wellness and better financial health, so that their money can work better for them. 

John DeBevoise: I can tell you’ve said that a few times. 

Matthew Kopko: We’re very proud to have been leaders in this space. We’ve had years of experience honing our message, and the fact that we work with such amazing national partners like Target and Kroger and Dollar Tree and Fortune 500 companies across the nation has been very encouraging to us. We’re very excited about the space. 

John DeBevoise: Well, let’s break this down a little bit. Let’s work backwards from the employee. So if I understand this, so many times, people in the position of being employees at companies, as you mentioned, like Target, or small businesses, for that matter… My audience are small business owners. And so, we’re talking about that employee that either works from the week-to-week or gets paid every two weeks. 

Before DailyPay came along, if they needed to pay the rent on the 15th and their payday doesn’t come until the 20th, they‘re either faced with trying to float a check, bounce a check, or go to a payday resource, or go into a building where they write a check out and they get an advance or a loan on a paycheck. That’s an expensive money. So that’s the person or the employee that you’re working with. How do you fix that problem with the employee that’s walking into the payday advance? 

Matthew Kopko: Yeah, sure. So that’s the bread and butter of what we do. We actually work in a lot of those hourly types of industries, restaurant, food service workers, grocery, retail, and we do a lot of hospital systems in healthcare. So a lot of people who are kind of clocking in and out day by day, right, two out of three workers are paid only once or twice a month by their employers. I mean, it’s crazy to think that in 2020, a large segment of our population is still getting paid only once a month. At the same time, when you’re clocking in every day, you’ve already earned that money, and your employer is only paying it once a month because that’s how their payroll or accounting system works. 

John DeBevoise: That’s how the employee came into the relationship, was understanding that this is when you get paid, once a month, or twice a month, or on a weekly basis. They knew that going in, but you know what? The rent and the utilities, and yeah, life does not wait for that. You can’t fill up your gas tank on good intentions. 

Matthew Kopko: So we have a great piece of technology, that what we do is, we work with your employer, we plug our technology into their system. And because we can get the live data feed of time and attendance data, payroll data, and your tax accounting data, we know, after all your withholdings and deductions and elections, on a live, estimated data basis, yesterday, because you clocked in and out for eight hours, you actually earned… Typically, what you’ll see in your paycheck is something like $122, or something like that. 

We can calculate it exactly for each person. We use this system called the dynamic income algorithm that estimates almost precisely what you would have earned in your final paycheck, and so instead of just waiting, and every two weeks or four weeks, that larger number shows up as a black box in your paycheck, you can watch that balance score every day in the DailyPay app. And if you want to access that balance because you’ve got a bill coming due, or you want just access or better control over your own money, you press the button in the DailyPay app and you get paid immediately. It can be either next-day service or within as little time as 20 minutes, based on the method of delivery. 

So the way we’re doing this is, we’re helping employers revolutionize the way in which they have a pay experience with their employees by being able to now tell their employees, “Hey, you don’t have to wait a month or two weeks in between paychecks. You can get paid whenever you want in your schedule because we work with a company called DailyPay.” 

John DeBevoise: All right, let’s talk numbers. It’s very expensive to go to a payday advance. What’s the difference between me, as an employee, tapping into the money I’ve already earned… There has to be a fee, otherwise you guys wouldn’t be in business. What’s the difference between the payday and what DailyPay is providing me, as an employee? 

Matthew Kopko: Sure, so the Pew Research group, kind of a well-nationally-known research nonprofit organization, has put out a paper on kind of your average payday loan. For your typical $375 payday loan, the average employee or worker taking that out ends up paying $520 in interest because they’re rolled over, on average, about eight times. So if you ever have to resort to a payday loan, you end up typically having to pay hundreds of dollars of interest, not just paying back the principal, but interest on top, to get out of that payday loan. 

What DailyPay does is, we come in and we say, “For a fee of a dollar and 99 cents for next day service, or a fee of $2 and 99 cents for immediate service, you can have access to your paycheck and the money you’ve already earned immediately. So imagine never having to pay those hundreds of dollars, never having to pay a $35 overdraft fee, or a late fee on a bill, for the cost of literally a dollar 99 or two 99. And that’s why the service is so compelling and attractive to employees. And part of why it’s gaining so much traction is because it is such a phenomenally cheaper option than having to do some of those predatory things you’re talking about, like going to expensive payday lenders, or bouncing checks, or doing overdraft fees, or any of those other [inaudible 00:06:43]. So we’ve turned that $500 of interest on your average payday loan into a dollar and 99 cents. 

John DeBevoise: Well, the fee that you’re charging is not much different than if I went to an ATM that is outside of my bank, and it comes up with the, are you willing to pay this $3 for getting your money out of this ATM, because I’m not with Chase, I’m with Wells Fargo, or vice versa, whatever that is. It’s not much different than that. 

Matthew Kopko: You hit it right on the head, John. We actually made that comparison regularly. The typical out-of-network fee for an ATM, if you include kind of the internal bank charge and the charge you agree to, ends up being about $4 and 70 cents, so accessing your own money through DailyPay is cheaper than your typical ATM fee. And we actually use that framing very frequently. What I like to say for people who want to understand the complicated space we’re in, is we say, “Think of it like a digital ATM for your paycheck. It grows every day you work, and instead of just having it kind of loaded into your bank account once a month or something like that, access it as you need it, paying only a dollar or two at a time.” 

John DeBevoise: And I can do this off an app? 

Matthew Kopko: Yep, do it directly through an app. It works all digitally. The DailyPay app, again, you can’t use it unless your employer offers it. So part of what we think is great, from a regulatory standpoint, is, we do all the hard work of integrating with your employer, so we have the live feed of time and attendance, so we know that this is verified, earned income you’ve already earned. 

And in a lot of states, as you know, John, California and others, if you quit or are fired, you’re entitled to that final paycheck within, typically, one to three business days. So the same concept is, if it’s yours already, why is the employer holding it for you, aside from accounting convenience? And we can use technology to plug in and say, “For a cost of a buck or two, access your own money whenever you need it, and if you don’t need it in a given pay period, you don’t pay a penny.” 

John DeBevoise: One of my first business ventures that didn’t go so well was, I got involved in the fuel industry, service station, truck stop, as well as the convenience store, the drinks, the candy bars and all of that. And I’m dealing with employees that were on the low end of the hourly wage. I can’t tell you how many times I had to lend them money to keep them as employees, because it’s expensive to retrain somebody on how to use a cash register. But I had to try to keep my employees. I would lend them money. Oftentimes, I would never see them again. 

I see the benefit, as the employee. It’s not much different than going to an ATM, and I can do it right there from my phone, from my app, from my computer. Let’s turn that over to the employer. As an employer, I see the benefit of being able to get the opportunity to advance money to my employee. And it’s their money. I’m not lending them anything. It’s not costing me anything because it’s already in the bank for them. So how do I benefit, as an employer? 

Matthew Kopko: So we’ve actually had a lot of demonstrated benefits for employers. You kind of hit it right on the head. You have great business sense. Retraining costs are insanely high for lots of industries, especially these lower income, high turnover industries. I don’t have a deep dive, per se, on the convenience store industry itself, but some of the industries we deal with in retail, we’re talking about 300% annual turnover. That means, on average, your employees are staying for four months, and every time they leave, you’ve got to retrain them. With a system like DailyPay, we’ve seen, on average, that four months can become six months. And if you’re turning over twice a year instead of three times a year, that’s a lot of retraining money in your pocket, that’s happier, more satisfied employees, more productive employees. 

The other thing we found too, John, is people can interact with our app and request funds that they’ve already earned, whenever they want. They can also monitor their balance on a daily basis, or oftentimes, with some of our newer partners, an hourly basis. So you can literally watch throughout the day when you’re on a shift, as your balance is growing. People love just having that access to that information alone, so we find that people actually check the app and check their balance every day, but they might only access it once a week. 

So the information benefit alone is huge to be able to start building their understanding of financial wellness. And so, when you, for example, have an extra shift, you need someone to pick up, right? It used to be, I think, well, I guess some money will show up in my bank account the next payday, but I’m really doing this more as a favor to XYZ person. When you’re on the DailyPay system, you can see, oh man, I picked up that shift for my friend the other day. I just put $140 in my pocket. It creates a much better experience and relationship with your money. We call it the pay experience, and it makes people typically more productive, more satisfied, happy workers. They stay around longer, so they’re more productive and they stay longer, and that’s substantial employer savings as well. 

John DeBevoise: As an employer, and my audience are primarily small business owners and entrepreneurs, how would I sign up for this, and is there a fee to the employer for this service? 

Matthew Kopko: We have a small and medium sized business in our sales department that loves to work with all types of new and emerging companies, growing companies. So if you want to contact DailyPay, we can absolutely talk about how we can set this up, given your existing systems. But the beauty of DailyPay is, it’s typically no cost to the employer. What we do is, we offer employers the option to subsidize those fees. So some employers, for example, tell us, “Hey, I want my employees to have one free next-day transfer per pay period,” and that will kind of be accumulated on a bill to the employer, ends up being a pretty marginal cost because it’s not like it’s a heavy volume. 

But what we do is, we offer employers the choice. Do you want to just let employees pay this low fee? Do you guys want to partially subsidize it as kind of a good faith showing to your employees or to show leadership when you’re competing against other employers? We’ve seen an example where multiple employers in the same space are offering DailyPay, and one decides to say, “Oh, hell. I’ll offer one free transfer a month, or something like that, as an additional benefit to my employees.” So for the employers, it’s no cost, unless you want to show leadership and engage in a discussion on subsidization of the fees. 

John DeBevoise: Matthew, is this something that I would incorporate into my employee manual? Is it necessary or advisable that I make this a part of the employee manual? 

Matthew Kopko: So we typically work very closely with HR departments. As you can imagine, we build a custom technology integration for every company because what we have to do, we have to set up the data system to receive your time and attendance feed, your payroll feed, and your accounting feeds. So that’s obviously always very sensitive. And then there’s the kind of nitty gritty of figuring out how to download the app, how to interact with it, making employees aware that this benefit is available to them. So it’s not forced on anyone, it’s only if anyone wants it. And so, what we typically do is, we do work with HR on messaging for employees or communications to employees. And then DailyPay, of course, has an in-house support system. So if you ever have an issue with any sort of transfer, you can get a live person on the phone through DailyPay directly. 

So yeah, I would say we’re closely involved in the compliance concept and the compliance space with our employers, because we have to be to make sure that they’re doing it all right. And then some employers do it through direct communications, some include it in their employee benefit packages, some update their compliance manuals, or handbooks and things like that. And we work with every employer to make sure that their employees are adequately informed in the services available to them. 

John DeBevoise: We’re talking with Matthew Kopko. He is from DailyPay, and this is a service that I’m finding very interesting, as an employer, in helping employee retention. That can be very expensive to retrain, just in the point of sale machine. It’s a computer that takes everybody else’s money, and boy, that can cost you a lot of money if the person that is pushing the buttons pushes them too often. 

Matthew, your background in law and business and such, you’ve been with some pretty notable companies, including Bird. What brought you over to DailyPay to take the role that you’re on here? What was it about this company that took you away from the law practice, as well as the micro mobility in the bird company, which you see those scooters go on all over the place? 

Matthew Kopko: Yeah. Well, I was very blessed to have a very exciting tenure at Bird. I was an early employee there. I was, I think, employee number 38, and I ran a team that legalized scooters across the country in 2018 and 2019. We were phenomenally successful. I look out my window here from my office, and I’ll see someone driving down the road on a scooter and say, “Oh, I had a role in making that legal,” so really exciting company, very excited to see what they’re doing. And I was very excited to have been a part of that core team that kind of started that revolution. 

John DeBevoise: Well, that was a big job, to be legal on the street. And I love the technology. I was fascinated by the whole approach. I would see these things laying around down in San Diego, down the Convention Center. I’m going, “Where did all these things come from?” And then I started to inquire and learn, not only about Bird, but the competitors and such. And of course, with a great idea comes litigation, regulation, and legislation. You can’t have one without the other, and you’re at the forefront of that. So you helped get Bird over those obstacles, so that brought you over to DailyPay. What is a role that you fill that is similar to what you were doing over there at Bird? 

Matthew Kopko: Part of the great opportunity at DailyPay, in addition to it being an amazing and fantastic and fast-growing company is, there was a great role for me that was kind of the next step in my career. So at Bird, I was focused on legislation a little more narrowly, and I did a lot of assistance on kind of local regulation and general legal. But the role at Bird to be their vice president of policy was just such an amazing opportunity because I was able to handle all of our regulatory portfolio, all of our legislative portfolio. And then also, a large part of the policy space that some people don’t think about when they generally think about government relations and things like that is, you have to be out there in public and engage with the stakeholders, engage with the public, make sure your narrative and your message is being understood generally by the public, and also, the specific people who may have an interest in your business. 

So there was this great opportunity to join DailyPay and have both of those portfolios, both the thought leadership policy stakeholder engagement, and then also, kind of the nitty-gritty blocking and tackling of legislation and regulation. So I’ve been very busy here at DailyPay, making sure that we’re doing everything by the book, and add every conversation about new and emerging laws and regulations affecting our space, because this is a new technology and it’s kind of a living legal space right now, and then also, being core to our narrative to make sure we can explain to the public, how I’ve explained to you here, about how this is such an exciting opportunity. 

Essentially, it’s a free market way to make sure your employees never have to take out a payday loan again, without putting any sort of burden on your back. So we’re very proud to bring that message to the American public, and I’m very proud to be able to be part of this revolution that is changing the way people think of money. I mean, I think in a couple short years, we’re going to say, “Man, we used to make people go a month in between getting paid? How did that not go the way of Venmo years ago?” The answer to that is, it takes companies like DailyPay, building the technology and infrastructure, to make that future a reality, so we’re making that future a reality, and it’s very exciting. 

John DeBevoise: What do you find was the biggest obstacle in getting DailyPay to where it is today, and would there be something different that you would recommend to our entrepreneurs and business owners on how they can move up the ladder in avoiding the legislative and regulative penalties? 

Matthew Kopko: Well, I was blessed with the opportunity as well, to serve in government in a prior life. So I actually was a regulator for a couple years, so I was able to bring that experience to this as well, understanding from the inside, how government works. The first thing you need to do when you’re in a policy role, or you’re starting a business or running a business that is starting to impact regulations is, you got to have someone to have their handle around what you’re touching and what laws are implicated. 

So for us, we call that the monitoring function. We have a lot of resources invested, including with lawyers on retainer and lobbyists on retainer, on keeping tabs on what’s happening in the world. So that means monitoring the federal movements, not just legislatively, but each individual agency’s regulations. And then for a company like DailyPay, we actually have to monitor, on a state-by-state basis, what every state is doing. So California and New York, have started to look into, hey, should we regulate this space? How should we regulate this space? And you have to be forward leaning enough to know that it’s happening and then be connected enough to be present at those conversations. Part of why we‘re very proud of what we do at DailyPay is, we’re very collaborative with our competitors and our not-so-direct competitors, so we make sure that we’re at least having a line of communication with everyone. 

And then we’re also pride ourselves on being the first people at the table and the most trusted voice at the table so that we can help explain to governments, who might be new to this new innovation, help them understand the context, background, and opportunity here so that they don’t rush into making bad rules or rules that are too rigid, because one thing, as you probably know, John, as a business owner, one thing that a government can do is be too rigid, too early on, and then you can strangle some innovative businesses that are coming up. We are revolutionizing payroll right now, and displacing payday lenders and old business practices that have been in the banking system for decades. So the challenge for governments in this space is to say, “Let’s get a handle on what’s happening, let’s make sure people aren’t doing bad things, but let’s let the technology develop and let’s let innovation thrive.” 

John DeBevoise: Nobody cares about you until you start either winning or taking money away from them, so payday loan companies probably didn’t care about you until you started impacting them. Have you had any blowback or any impact regulatory movement changes from these payday centers that occupy these corner buildings and give you payday advances? 

Matthew Kopko: We’ve stayed out of the monitor having any sort of adversarial relationship with other market participants like those. Our view is, we need to give people choice, and the employee can do what’s right for them. The nice thing about DailyPay is, we’re not in the business of walking to governments and saying, “This or that should be illegal,” put our competitors out of business. What we think is, we have a different pathway, which is through employer integration. It’s a much larger burden for us, so we can’t just advertise to any person on the street. We have to have that relationship with the employer first. 

And we think that’s great for us because that creates an environment of trust and verifiability. And that’s part of why there’s no lending going on here, is because we’re working with employers to verify and help employees access their own money, so we don’t need to do some of the things that payday lenders do. And for us, it’s, we’d love to touch every employee in the country, and we have grand ambitions to be there one day. And in the meantime, we’re working within our space and we’re using the free market system to give people a great option that we think is just compelling on its own. 

John DeBevoise: The founders of this company, of DailyPay, what was the aha moment when they realized, “Hey, you know what? We can do this better.” What was it that the founders found that said, “You know what? There’s a better way,” and what were the steps that they took? 

Matthew Kopko: Yeah. You got to remember too, this industry didn’t exist before us, so we kind of created it. The great story that our CEO tells is, he was ordering a pizza in one day, and he was giving a cash tip and paying in cash for the pizza. And he asked the pizza delivery guy, say, “Hey, you get to keep this money, right, and then you work it out with the employer when you get back to the office?” He said, “No. Unfortunately, all the money goes back to the office, and then I get paid once a month.” And he started realizing that a lot of these folks in the economy who are working hard on the front lines every day, you’d think they’re bringing money home every day. They’re going weeks at a time without getting paid. He said, “Why don’t we build something that can shorten that timeline?” 

We actually started going to Uber drivers first, because early on in the Uber days, they were only paying their drivers once or twice a month. And we said, “Hey, why don’t we put a car technology into your system and help you start getting paid every day?” Uber now allows technology that allows their drivers to get paid every shift. And we saw, hey, instead of having to go driver-by-driver, what if we went to the employers directly? And that was where it all started, so it took a couple iterations to build the product and say, “This could work.” And then we had the aha moment of saying, “If we offer this through the employer directly, there’s no guessing anymore. It might be a larger investment upfront in getting access to users and getting access to the employees, but it’s a much better framework because we’re not lending, we have this verified trust system, we’re integrated with payroll, the employer supports it, and has endorsed it, and is sponsoring the program.” 

So I think we got our first couple accounts after the Uber experience, which were just a couple of small companies who were looking to do something new in the payroll space. And fast forward a couple of years later, we’re working with Fortune 100 companies, we’re working with Fortune 500 companies. I mean, we are just so proud as a company to have been able to… It was actually just last month, the full rollout happened, rollout DailyPay to hundreds of thousands of Target employees. You’re kind of in the big leagues when you’re able to go to some of the largest employers in the country and they’re offering your product, so we’re just so proud of what we’ve been able to do in a couple of short years. And the idea that people weren’t talking about getting paid daily just a few years ago, just shows how quickly technology is moving. 

John DeBevoise: Well, technology has been at the forefront of being able to, what I call, put the spoke in the wheel. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you just have to know how to put a spoke in it to make it turn smoother, faster. And with each spoke, you find that there’s more spokes that you can put in it. You didn’t reinvent the getting paid, you just put in a spoke in the wheel and allowed the employees access to money that they’ve already earned. And with you, that’s low risk. You’re giving them money that is already in the banking account, so it’s not like the payday where you are extending a loan, you’re just advancing their pay. And you’re getting paid the moment that they get paid. 

Matthew Kopko: The beauty about how DailyPay works is, yeah, we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, we didn’t say, “You have to pick a new payroll system,” we didn’t say, “You have to pick a new time and attendance system.” What we just did was, we built technology that interfaces with your existing program. So we have hundreds of modules, right? If you have XYZ hour management system for your employees, or you have XYZ payroll system, QuickBooks, Intuit, some of these other ones, ADP, Ceridian, Workday, we work with all these large companies. 

So for us, the edge is saying, “Don’t overhaul your corporate systems,” because we know as an entrepreneur, how much of a ask that is, for someone to come in and say, “Hey, you want to take advantage of my great product, but you got to go change the way you do business to do that.” We said, “No, we’re never going to win that way,” so we said, “Your existing payroll system works fine, your time and attendance system works fine. We’ll write the tech that integrates it all.” Everyone gets the interface through the DailyPay app now. So you’re right, we didn’t have to rebuild everything from the ground up. What we did was, we built technology that allowed systems that used to not talk to each other, now, they’re able to talk to each other. And that was a lot of the big innovation. 

John DeBevoise: And that is a huge obstacle. Oftentimes, there will be companies like your credit card processing. You have to swap over to their hardware and their software. And a lot of times, you might have a better deal, but the act of changing and moving completely over to a new system is too daunting, and they won’t do it because of the time to reeducate everybody with the new software equipment. All you’re doing is, you’re just putting that spoke in the wheel that’s already turning and making it easy to access your own money as an employee. And it’s a value add, from the employer’s standpoint, to keep the employee there. And you don’t have to retrain others with having to go every four months, and start all over with a new employee, and teaching in the old system. 

Matthew Kopko: We serve the employees of these employer partners, but the employers are partners, and they’re critical to this. So if you’re not careful in how you do this, or you pick the wrong technology, imagine having a thousand-person company, and every time someone wants to use a service, like a competitor with DailyPay, someone in HR has to go in and input something or deal with something. That’s an overhead nightmare too, right? 

So what we said is, we built a system that says, keep your existing payroll in place. You run it in normal course to what you normally do. DailyPay, as a service provider, takes on all the nitty-gritty of how to implement it. And so we’re very cognizant and know that the way you win deals is having a great service and product for people, but also not being unreasonable with the employer, to say, “Look, we’re serving you too. We want to make this as easy as possible for you. We don’t want you to have to do this, and all of a sudden, have a headache.” 

John DeBevoise: Well, technology has empowered many entrepreneurs to do things such as DailyPay. You just put that spoke in the wheel, and hats off to you. So what’s next? DailyPay, are they growing? Are they planning an expansion, other products, services, other widgets that will be offered to employers? 

Matthew Kopko: We’re growing very rapidly. We have millions of workers on the platform now. There are obviously, as you know, tens and tens of millions of workers in America, so we’re doing everything we can to be in every corporate office and every corporate boardroom, to say, “Hey, if you’re looking for something to make life easier for your employees, you should be including DailyPay in that.” The space is taking over very fast, but it still has a lot of space to grow, not just in the U.S. market, but internationally. 

And then we’ve started rolling out other interesting tools. We just introduced a free savings tool, kind of similar to the idea of saying, “If you want to access your own money whenever you want, we could find a very simple, free tool for you to be able to save whenever you want.” So what we’ve built is, you can either… Let’s say, you need $45 for a bill that’s coming due and you want to access DailyPay. With the touch of a button, you can round that up to 50 and put five bucks into your savings account, or you can tell DailyPay, “Hey, every time I get paid, put aside 4% of it into my savings account,” or, “Hey, I just want to save a hundred dollars right now because I’m feeling very forward-thinking and I want to start making sure I’m building up my emergency savings platform.” 

So what we do is, we’ve built out a savings tool for employees. We’re building out additional tools for employers to be able to manage payroll easier and easier. So we’re expanding kind of into this employee-employer pay experience platform and offering tools on both sides that make it better for employees to interact with their money, save money, get more financial wellness, and also easier for employers to handle the constant hassle of the intricacies of payroll in the 21st century. 

John DeBevoise: Will you be, at some point in the future, working with the employees and employers on the retirement, whether they’re Roth IRAs, or ones? 

Matthew Kopko: We typically tend to intercept workers at either an earlier part in their career, or when they’re trying to build that first step of financial stability. So our first challenge as a company is to do what we can to help them stop the bleeding, so to speak, right, make sure you never got a payday loan again, make sure you never have to do an overdraft fee or pay a late fee again. 

And then with our save tool, for example, we… For many people, it’s very gratifying, John. This is the first time they’ve ever saved, so we help them set up their first savings program ever. And typically with savings, you’ve got to crawl before you can run, so who knows what the future holds for us? We have very grand visions for the future, where hopefully we’re a part of your solution for the rest of your life, in terms of increasing your financial wellness. But we’re doing this gradually, right? First, you got to help people use their money wisely, then it’s to help them start saving, and then we imagine a lot of these people will keep graduating to better and better financial wherewithal. 

John DeBevoise: Excellent. I love the business model and that it’s a win-win for both the employer, as well as the employee. It’s one that you would have my attention, as a business angel, so well done. Matthew, I can’t thank you enough for being on this serving of Bizness Soup. Matthew Kopko from DailyPay, thank you for being on this serving of Bizness Soup. 

Matthew Kopko: Thanks, John. 

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