In today’s ultra-tight labor market, owners of small and medium-sized businesses need to find creative ways to Hire and Keep Great People.
In today’s interview with Gino Palozzi, Chief Marketing Officer at DailyPay, I bring you a powerful new tool. Earned Wage Access lets your employees control when and how much they get paid, based on their needs – not the payroll cycle.
This level of access and flexibility has resulted in tremendous improvements in recruiting and retention success – as well as significant increases in productivity – for the hundreds of employers currently offering this service to their workers.
To learn more about how DailyPay could bring tremendous value to your firm and your people, connect with them at: https://DailyPay.com/SmallBusiness
What follows is an AI-generated transcript of our entire conversation. Please excused any typos!
[00:01:29] Frank Felker:
Yes, indeed. I am Frank Felker. Welcome back to Radio Free Enterprise.
My guest today is Gino Palozzi. Gino is chief marketing officer for DailyPay.
Gino, welcome to Radio Free Enterprise.
Thanks for having me, Frank. Appreciate the opportunity.
Gino, I’m very excited about having you here today. And I wanted to give the quick backstory of how this conversation came to be. I was I pulled up outside of a Wendy’s restaurant. I saw a big sign on the window, a big poster.
It said, we’re hiring, get paid every day. And I thought, wow, what a great way to hire and keep good people in a job. That’s notoriously difficult to keep staffed. After lunch, I went back home and I ran a Google search on get paid every day. And number one search result was daily paid. So I reached out to your communications folks and here we are today.
So Gino there’s a lot of nuts and bolts we’re going to get into on this, but I wanted to start with just a 40,000-foot overview. If you could tell us, my audience of small and medium-sized business owners. What daily pay is and the benefits that it brings for both employers and employees.
[00:02:50] Gino Palozzi:
First of all, I do eat at Wendy’s, so I can’t say the same as you, but they are a client, so that always helps. Daily pay is a simple mission, right? To effectively help people, who are working every day unlock the opportunities that, are afforded to them. And one of those opportunities is getting paid for the work that you’ve done, right?
So we want to help everyone who works make the most of every day. And, it’s, it is a simple mission, right? And the reason we came up with it really at its heart was we realized that there are a lot of challenges that people are facing, especially now more than ever, right? The workforce is struggling in many ways to keep up with their bills, to keep up with their schedule.
And one of the things that we found was going to be helpful is given that freedom, that control. Over their ability to access their wages as they earn them. It was, founded back in 2015. And since that time, we’ve really started to recognize how important this one benefit was to a many, a very diverse working group, whether they’re coming out of the retail space, QSRs like Wendy’s supermarkets, like Kroger, Target, these companies struggle.
Not just acquiring workers, but as you mentioned, keeping those workers keeping them happy, keeping them motivated. And one of the things that they’ve seen is this benefit that we offer. It’s simply just allowing them to do one more thing to make sure that they’re in the corner of the employees that work for them.
So those folks are more likely to stay and pick up more shifts and work harder. It’s a very simple concept, but a very powerful outcome that we’ve seen.
[00:04:31] Frank Felker:
And I do want to talk about the results that you guys have seen, there’s some amazing statistics about the impact that this opportunity to access what you call earned income, or what is the technical term you guys use?
[00:04:45] Gino Palozzi:
Earned wages, and it’s often referred to as earned wage access in the market. So I, I thought, by the way, Frank, sometimes people you’ll hear called on demand pay, but earn wage access is as clear as I think you can make it. It’s your money. You should have the right to access it.
[00:05:01] Frank Felker:
And I think that’s great.
And I told you a story where I took a job. It was actually quite a high paying job, but the two week pay cycle plus one cycle in arrears. And I had to move over 2, 000 miles. And wait over a month to get paid. And, that stretched me out a little bit. So this can impact almost anybody.
But when I thought back on my days, I had a printing company, family printing company. The most employees we had there was 10. I was a co founder and CEO of a dot com back in the day. We had 15 employees. The reason why I bring it up is because I could imagine specific people who worked for me back then who could have really made use of this opportunity.
Now, you touched on something just then that I wanted to go ahead and ask you anyway. It was my next question. When I saw this My thoughts immediately went to small and medium sized business owners because that’s my tribe. But I was interested to learn that you guys have been working with hundreds of quite large employers with large payrolls and finding all this engagement and benefit.
You mentioned Wendy’s and a couple of others. I noticed on your website, there’s some sports teams that use your service. And I also, I guess this is probably the best way for me to ask for your response. I saw where one of your clients, Hilton Hotels, was named the number one best place to work.
I can’t recall if it was either Fortune Magazine or Forbes. And I would have to bet that earned income access, or what you called it, is a big part of it. Earned wage access. Earned wage, I need to get that straight. Earned wage access. Yeah, that’s
[00:06:48] Gino Palozzi: all right.
[00:06:50] Frank Felker: So tell me about Hilton.
[00:06:52] Gino Palozzi: Yeah, so Hilton is a great client of ours.
They are certainly doing some amazing things, making sure that they’re taking care of their people, and it has paid off in the awards that they’ve won and the recognition they’re getting. We believe there’s certain industries where you see a lot of what, daily workers, frontline workers, hourly workers.
Hilton is one of those, right? Hotels, hospitality. We do work with companies we have a network of, sponsorships with sports teams, but that’s fundamentally supporting the concessions and the people working within the stadiums. So we’re really taking a look at people who, whether you’re working for a Hilton, whether you’re working for one of these hospitality groups or one of the large supermarkets doesn’t really matter, over, I think it’s somewhere like In excess of six out of 10 Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, right?
And 40 percent of Americans are finding it difficult to cover their expenses. These hourly workers and the daily workers that often make up a large part of not only the big companies, but a lot of the small businesses are the ones who need. opportunities to say, how do I pay, pace my pay with my expenses, right?
So that you can, pay your bills when you need to pay them and not be beholden to a two week payday cycle, right? Which is fairly antiquated, right? So it’s really helped to unlock it. Not only for Hilton’s of the world, for many companies to say, we’re going to offer things that are in your best interest to support you in the situation that you’re in.
right to provide again, not just control over when you get paid, but even visibility, right? Because a big portion of our folks that use our service, their people are just seeing their shifts and seeing the available funds that they have. And that in itself is a real powerful mechanism to manage your budgets and your finances and your well being.
So it’s not just about getting access, although certainly, people to use those opportunities to pull out the money when they need it. And it’s really important to understand that we offer three opportunities for people to get access to their wages, two of which are free. One is you can pull it out and wait for the, one to three business days for the ECH or the clearance of that, like a typical transaction.
And that’s free. You can pull it out right away and put it on a visa daily pay card. And that’s essentially a cash card to allow you to pay your expenses. The third is if you want to get it right away and put it into any of your destination accounts, and that comes with a small ATM like fee. But it’s again, one of those, just one benefit that the people we work with the Hilton’s like the Kroger’s like the targets.
Many of the McDonald franchises, Wendy’s franchises, they are leveraging this to attract people to say, here’s what we offer to help provide you and for your benefit. And people will take advantage of it in more larger numbers than anybody would anticipate. It’s the second largest benefit often that we’re seeing it within our clients right behind healthcare.
So there’s an attraction to this control and visibility that people want that in their lives. And they in many ways need that. So it started at the top and that’s not unlike a lot of new innovative technologies. You and I’ve had that conversation before, but what you’re quickly finding is. to stay competitive, to stay on path, because you’re competing, even as a small business, with a lot of these large corporations, more and more smaller businesses are looking forward to saying, I want to offer that benefit to my people so I can be competitive in the market.
[00:10:34] Frank Felker:
And that was, again, you’ve anticipated my next question, because I wanted to speak to the competitive advantage that your service offers to employers in a very tight labor market. Regular viewers and listeners of the show know that I have an online course called How to Hire and Keep Great People and Gino, you know that I’m taking the information in that course and turning it into a book of the same title.
Speak to that if you can. I guess we can imagine in our own minds. If I were trying to lure someone from another company, or if I knew that the person sitting across from me at the interview table had multiple options available to them, I can see where offering this access and the alternative opportunity they’re looking at not offering that.
Could be a very strong pole. Has that been your client’s experience?
[00:11:28] Gino Palozzi:
I think what we’ve heard from our clients and we often do a lot of studies, not just within our thousand plus clients, but across like larger spectrum of the U S labor market. And within our clients, we’re seeing benefits that are staggering and very powerful.
So I think 40 percent of the users of daily pay. Said it was a factor in their decision to take the job. So obviously from a recruiting perspective, it’s a powerful lever that companies are recognizing is important to them. We’re also seeing within our clients that they saw a 44 percent improvement in turnover among their daily pay enrolled employees.
So what the folks who take advantage of the benefit and there’s no cost to either offer the benefit as an employer, right? And there’s no cost to the employee unless they decide to have that instant access into the account that they want. But those that actually have it, are staying longer. 40 percent 44 percent improvement in that turnover.
So for a small business in my father owned his own small business, it’s crucial that you don’t only find good talent, but you keep that talent because you don’t have a large resource pool and the flexibility that some of these large organizations have. So it’s really important. Those two in particular, finding the talent, keeping the talent.
And then the one interesting stat that I always like to talk about. It’s left unsaid, but it shouldn’t be, which is improving the productivity 55 or some odd percentage of employers with daily pay say that the users picked up at least one extra shift per month. So what it’s showing is when you have visibility and you have that kind of control over your finances and you see how the shifts in the earnings are adding up, it motivates them to actually take on more shifts and work harder.
So keep the talent, hire the talent, keep the talent and motivate and help, drive productivity within your base is, are three of the common benefits that we often hear from our clients and from our studies that we do.
[00:13:39] Frank Felker:
That’s fantastic. Hire, keep, and get more productivity out of great people who are available out there in the marketplace and are just looking for the best fit for them.
My next question relates to the job categories. Now, just as I was surprised but it makes perfect sense that large companies would engage with this. I was also surprised to learn that it’s not just necessarily lower paid. skill, lower wage jobs, but actually some quite high skilled jobs in industries such as healthcare.
Can you speak to that?
[00:14:15] Gino Palozzi:
Yeah. The industries that we’re seeing a lot of adoption in and a lot of interest in I mentioned a few already, retail, hospitality, QSR, but we’re also seeing healthcare and there’s a lot of hospital systems and providers. have a tremendous size staff, right? And so those ranges anywhere from visiting nurses to, the orderlies and the folks that are running the operations at a hospital.
Those folks, especially on the visitor, visiting healthcare professional market, they’re almost contractors in a sense, right underneath a corporation. They’re often the ones that, have a lot of flexibility in their shifts and having the ability to get them their money when they need it to pay their bills to invest in the things that they want to buy or do on their schedule has shown tremendous success.
There’s other industries to Frank. Don’t get me wrong. Manufacturing is another one with a high propensity of daily hourly workers. But those were some of the big ones that we’re seeing. a constant demand for. And once one, one person does it in a market, you see a lot of people want to follow suit to stay competitive.
As we talked about, one area, from a size of the organization perspective, we have a lot of, we work with a lot of,
The franchises out there, and while they don’t necessarily dictate to their, the folks in the franchisees. What benefits they need to take, they make them available, right?
And they make them available to have, a vetted set of benefits that they believe in that they can choose to select for their people. And we’re seeing a lot of pickup and excitement, right? Within those franchises to have those options because a lot of those companies are Relatively small businesses, right?
They may have five locations, they may have 10, they may have 30, but it’s still a relatively small compared to the larger, some of the larger organizations that we work with. That was our first foray into, there’s a lot of need and interest in these smaller type organizations. And we continue to build towards that and we can talk a little bit about what we’re doing specifically for the, what I’ll say, the small, medium sized businesses.
[00:16:21] Frank Felker:
Great. That’s going to be a couple of more questions down the line, Gino. Sure, I’ll hold on that. I wanted to address what I think are the questions in the minds of the business owners watching and listening. So the next one I would have is, You said that there’s no cost to the employer. And so what I would like to dig into here is the nuts and bolts of how you do integrate with the employer.
My understanding is that you connect. With their payroll service company. And also you guys connect with a certain time tracking apps. Is that correct? How does that part of it work? How do you actually know what a given employee has earned?
[00:17:07] Gino Palozzi:
Yeah, this is what’s referred to in the market as employer sponsored earned wage access.
And what employer sponsored means is not only are they endorsing it, we are integrated into both their payroll. And time and attendance type systems. We have over a hundred integrations that have been developed, right? For the most common systems that companies are using and what that affords us or allows us to do.
Is to really understand, not just estimating earned wages, right? Based on some calculation, but to truly understand when somebody is clocked in what, their wages are and to be tied into the system. So there’s really no doubt that the hours were worked and there’s no it’s very seamless in the sense of how, from a payroll perspective, there’s no change.
So not only doesn’t it cost you anything to offer this benefit. We do all the work. We do all the lifting to get it set up for you during the onboarding and integrate into your systems so that then obviously it’s very seamless for the person to see what hours I’ve worked and based on my pay what I’m available to pull out.
And then from a payroll perspective, it’s almost nothing really fundamentally changes. If they take money out, at the time of their two week pay cycle that money is then removed from. The remaining balance is then paid out and any money that was taken after a wage, but before the payroll period is taken out.
So it’s really no lift at all or change any of the existing processes, which is important to most companies, right? It’s disruptive if you try to do daily pay in the current systems and the processing would almost be impossible. So we do that lift for them and we don’t disrupt Your business extremely important for small businesses as well, right?
The big ones obviously don’t want disruption, but you don’t always have the same resources, HR teams, payroll teams. needed. So we do a lot of that lift up front and then we just seamlessly bring it into your process. So there’s really no effort on your part.
[00:19:12] Frank Felker:
So if a, an employee were to draw some money some of their earned wages out before it was payday, would your system reach out and grab that money out of the employer’s bank account or where would that money come from?
[00:19:28] Gino Palozzi:
Yeah, that, that money essentially before it flows back from the employer to the employee, on the day of payday. It flows through daily pay, and then we remove it from that perspective at that point in time. And then the distribution comes from us so that we can ensure that any money that was removed is taken out before the final remittances is made.
The money that we do, obviously, we work with a lot of financial institutions to provide that cash flow need in between before we get. Paid by the employer, so we cover that through our different credit work with different large institutions that support us.
[00:20:10] Frank Felker:
Good. That’s just what I was, so there’s no surprise.
Surprise bank balance change for the employer. That’s great.
[00:20:19] Gino Palozzi:
Now Yeah, I’m sorry, no cash flow impact to them, which is a big thing, obviously, for them. What was that? I missed what you said. There’s no cash flow impact when you run it through that process, which is a huge impact and not something people would want to try to float that out and change their cash flow so we don’t disrupt their business from an integration or a cash flow perspective.
[00:20:41] Frank Felker:
Now, before we talk about what you guys might be working towards in the future, Let’s talk about how an employer can either get more information or start working with you guys. I know you have set up a specific place for them to go, which we’ll show on the screen here in a moment. Tell us about that.
the spot that small and medium sized business owners can visit.
[00:21:08] Gino Palozzi:
Yeah. For the first time, we’ve recently opened this up for for organizations with less than 400 employees. It’s our small business group and we actually have, it’s very easy to get started. So there’s a website, it’s dailypay. com.
Slash forward slash small business and all one word small business. And this is an opportunity to it’s in about 15 minutes. You do want to talk to somebody, people, there’s opportunity to connect with us, make sure that the systems that you’re using are going to be in effect.
If the systems that you use are not one of the a hundred plus integrations that we offer. We definitely want to understand what you’re using so that we can put it on our roadmap, but that’s where I would go is dailypay. com slash small business. And at that point, it’ll give you an overview of the offering itself, how it would work, some of the benefits that I’ve already shared.
And then you obviously will want to be in touch with somebody to understand where you’re coming from, what you’re trying to do, what systems you have so we can get you up and running pretty darn quick. They tell me within 15, 30 minutes, we can at least get you set up.
And then we work through the onboarding process which again, is not a big lengthy effort especially if the systems that you use are in our portfolio of integration partners.
[00:22:27] Frank Felker:
That’s great. I remember even when I had small number of employees. I always had a payroll service, I think I used ADP, and it just made life a lot easier.
Certainly there was a monthly charge of a couple of hundred bucks, but I just knew that all the reporting was going to be handled. It’s something I’ve always recommended to business owners. Not everyone does it, but I showed this as another great reason why you should use a payroll service provider.
[00:22:54] Gino Palozzi:
Yeah. And I’m sorry, just, ADP is one of our larger partners. Team software in particular is another one that we’re, obviously partnering with, and we want to leverage those relationships, with some of those like technologies, some of the word largest to really make sure that.
We are doing this as an ecosystem. We can’t do this alone, especially because of the employer sponsored nature of it. But this small business experience has been tailored for their needs, right? They don’t always have the time or the resources to offer these types of benefits, but they’re starting to hear about it in the market.
They’re starting to see You know, competitors offer it, and we just want to give them the opportunity to compete in that same labor pool is the larger counterparts. So we’re really tailoring this program, and we’re excited about it because we want to bring. We believe that everybody should have visibility and control and access to their wages, right?
We want to bring that to everybody. And in order to do that, I think nearly half of the U. S. Population is, in that private sector is in So that means we have to tailor our offerings, our experiences for those folks, right? To make sure everybody can get access to this.
[00:24:06] Frank Felker:
One thing I really enjoyed about your website you’ve got great testimonials and naturally the ones I was watching.
We’re from employers and I’ll give a quick example of one I saw that I’m sure you have a million of them, and maybe you’ll think of one that you’d like to share where the employer got a phone call from one of his top people and the person calling said his car had broken down as he was driving to work.
And if it had not been for daily pay and as access to his earned wages, he would not have been able to get his car fixed, but as it turned out, he was able to. take the car to a garage and rent a car to get to work. And not only did it mean that he got to work that day, but he was able to work the rest of the week while his car was still in the shop.
And that made a tremendous difference to both the employee and the employer. So that’s the story that I really enjoyed learning about. But I bet you have a million stories like that, that you’ve seen from your clients. Could you share something from that for us?
[00:25:12] Gino Palozzi:
We do. We hear it every day, right?
Whether it’s on our social, whether it’s through our voice of the customer teams, we hear really powerful stories of how we’re supporting people and giving them what they need. And really, we often look at this, Frank, as is certainly You know, daily pay is helpful in that time of need, whether you need to put gas in your car, whether you have an unexpected emergency that you hadn’t budgeted for.
But I like to think about this broader, like we also have a strong passion for wanting to help build stability, financial wellness and stability for people. So yeah, the stories we hear are moving. right? Those stories can include stories of how somebody didn’t know how they’re gonna pay rent or, was worried they’re gonna be homeless.
But the ones that are really exciting is I’m able to help, my son or myself go back to school, right? Or I’ve been able to save and been able to purchase my first, car. Those are really interesting stories as well, because it really shows a pathway of everybody’s on their own journey.
And, we’re having a real difference in not just helping with the emergencies or we’re really helping to stabilize people’s financial wellbeing. Some of the data I shared, some of the data that we often will talk about on the client side, from the employee side, right? The data shows that 69 percent or nearly 70 percent of users who previously paid late fees are doing so less often or stop completely once they started using daily pay.
That’s significant, right? That helps you build that stability and that lack of the fees all, add up. They make better financial decisions, right? And 69 percent of them said that daily pay helps them to be more diligent about their spending. And the one that I, there, there’s often a level of reduction in not just the late fees, but the impact that has on reducing their dependency on other forms of credit, to float them in those times. So when you can pay your bills on your schedule, not based on your, your pay schedule, it provides the opportunity to avoid some of the more reoccurring and higher credit facilities out there. So I think it’s a real powerful financial tool. We’re doing things beyond that too, Frank.
I think we, we have things within the tool like motivating people to save, right? And demonstrating even, The ability to schedule those saving mechanisms. We’re offering great mechanisms fairly recently here, piloting the ability to see your credit health, which is a really core fundamental part of your financial wellness, and we’ll continue to broaden out these financial Consumer financial tools and resources to support people in building the stability for long term benefit to the people that, we want to reach.
[00:27:59] Frank Felker: That is truly amazing.
[00:28:00] Gino Palozzi:
Those are stats that really make a difference. And we want to really help you a small part of that.
[00:28:08] Frank Felker:
I think you guys, what you’re doing is just great and it’s a win for everybody. Certainly I, as I had mentioned to you in a previous conversation, if this service had been available when I was running the family print shop I can see it being a tremendous value to me out there recruiting and trying to retain good people.
But also there’s several people who work for me. Who I know this would help. And you and I also talked about how expensive being broke can be when it comes to things like late fees and payday loans. That kind of stuff and all at once, you’re not spending that money anymore. So it could go somewhere like a savings account or anywhere else that you’d like it to go?
[00:28:49] Gino Palozzi:
Yeah. I grew up in a family that didn’t have a lot right. And we, my, my dad did own his own small business and I think it’s really hits home when I know the challenges that people are going through and if there’s small things that we can do. to not only help the small business owner, but more importantly, the employees and making sure that they’re taken care of.
It is truly a win. It’s a win for the employer like we talked about, but it’s also more importantly, a win for those users, those people like my own family that would have loved to have this access early on, right? It just wasn’t there. But now with the tools it’s not hard and without disrupting your business, you can offer this up.
And, we continue to work with these small businesses and large businesses on what do those folks that they are, what do they need? More importantly, are we hearing from the users themselves and what types of resources can we offer to them? to help build their stability, to help build their kind of progress and their own financial journey.
So we’re going to continue to evolve. We’re going to continue with a mission to help everybody unlock those opportunities every day. And continue to find opportunities to continue to expand our impact that we can have. We’re committed to it. We’re passionate about it. We’re excited about what the future holds.
And I hope some of the folks listening here Take a hard look, take a look, talk to our people and see is this something that, I may want to bring to my own folks.
[00:30:13] Frank Felker:
That’s great.
Gino Palozzi, I thank you so much for joining me today on Radio Free Enterprise.
Thank you for having me, Frank.
Thanks again to Gino, and thank you for joining us. Until next time, I’m Frank Felker saying I’ll see you on the radio.
[00:30:30] Dude Walker:
He’s the kind of guy who finds microeconomics fascinating, but go ahead and listen anyway. Radio Free Enterprise with Frank Felker.
