(Earnipay founder, Nonso Onwuzulike)
With investor encouragement and now a rebrand, Nonso Onwuzulike and the first-rate team at Earnipay are eager to help businesses improve their operations. They are doing this by providing businesses with essential solutions and tools to manage finance and people operations.
When we first met the team at Earnipay, they were only solving an employee problem. At that time, Earnipay only offered employees flexible access to their earned salaries, on any day of the month. Now the company has expanded to provide overall business solutions and businesses can now come to them with their finance, people operations, and employee benefits challenges. The company’s range of products is aimed to help improve employee satisfaction, productivity, retention, and overall business growth.
With a lot of small businesses holding up the Nigerian economy and these businesses employing salaried workers, a large number of working adults are paid in 30-day, end-of-the-month cycles. But human needs don’t wait for your salary to drop and having access to cash and easy liquidity through the days of each month is important to survival. Desperate employees often turn to predatory loan sharks or payday lenders. These advance salary schemes and loans often come with astronomical interest rates that keep employees in recurring debt cycles because before their salaries are paid they’d have spent it and still have added interest to pay. Sometimes the interests amount to triple the initial amount borrowed. Also, in exchange for quick no-collateral loans, these companies get access to borrowers’ contact lists and when they default on repayment the methods applied by the lenders often jeopardise a person’s job, relationships, and mental health.
How earned wage access and specifically Earnipay works is that employers bring them onboard and share access to employee data, specifically payroll data. These employers onboard their staff to the platform and with that employees have access to up to 50% of their accrued salary on any day of the month. At the end of the month, the amount the employee has previously accessed is deducted from their salary and paid to Earnipay and the employee get’s what is left. What makes Earnipay’s on-demand pay system better than typical loan apps and salary advance schemes is that salary earners on the platform get access to their earned wages at a flat fee. What this means is that if an employee earning ₦200 thousand a month has worked for 10 days and needs to access their salary, they can get access to ₦60 thousand at a small one-time flat fee starting from about ₦250. Unlike advanced salary loans and loan apps that offer indiscriminate amounts with exorbitant interest rates, Earnipay users have access to the funds they have already earned and this helps them live within their means and make better financial decisions. Also, Earnipay gets to the crux of the 30-day salary problem because when it comes to wanting an advance on their salaries, employees don’t want loans per se, they just want to have quicker access to funds they’ve already earned.
According to Nonso, this recent rebrand is a natural evolution borne from studying their customers and understanding their pain points, “We started by solving cash flow and liquidity problems for employees paid in 30-day cycles. We were working with HR departments and business owners to provide employee benefits and working with HR helped us see the bigger problems they dealt with processing employee payroll month-on-month; problems with reconciling payments and offering employees their full benefits. Providing on-demand pay also made us realise that businesses also struggle with long wait times between when they’re paid by their own customers and they too have financial shortfalls. So because of the solutions we created to tackle these challenges, we’ve evolved from just employee benefits and earned wage access. Who we are today is a finance, people operations, and employee benefits solution, all in one place and we’ve updated our brand mission to reflect this.”
(L-R: Nonso Onwuzulike, CEO and Busayo Oyetunji, COO)
With this rebrand and the range of products now available, Earnipay has expanded its financial solution offerings and it’s now a full financial wellness solution provider. Now with Earnipay businesses and employees can access:
- On-demand salary access: as mentioned previously, Earnipay offers employees flexible access to their salaries in little bits on any day of the month. This service is based on salary earned so it comes with a small flat fee in place of interest. The cost is borne by the employee and the team at Earnipay works tirelessly to seamlessly integrate their system with businesses without disrupting the already established payroll system.
- Financing: Earnipay provides a range of financing solutions for businesses to manage and track their finances better and eventually scale up. Including earned wage access they offer digital tools for bulk bill payments; invoice and purchase order financing, which gives business access to the capital they need so they can better serve their customers and vendors; and payroll processing and financing.
- People operations: With the wide range of tools and services available from Earnipay, businesses can securely manage employee information. These tools help businesses avoid errors in financial reporting, payroll regulation, and employee management and benefits.
- Loans: On-demand pay is good for daily use but larger financing is required for bigger purchases like buying a car and putting a downpayment on a house. Earnipay provides loans to employees to fund large ticket items with more affordable rates than what exists in the market today.
- Full financial wellness solutions: While dealing with employee financing, the company continues to discover new challenges and unlock new solutions to these challenges. Earnipay has expanded to provide further financial services like savings, loans, and financial literacy tools. Employees from companies using Earnipay can get direct access to financial education through the mobile app and this is a free benefit at no additional cost to the business. The company also organises coaching sessions in collaboration with these businesses. According to Annastacia Ejionye, the Growth and Marketing Manager at Earnipay, the company’s goal is to “improve financial wellbeing for income earners, so we provide them with financial education to guide/advice them in best practices for daily financial management” These services enable employees build better financial habits and make better decisions on how they save, spend and invest their hard-earned salaries.
Earnipay is committed to improving employee financial wellness and productivity, and ergo businesses. Nonso believes that earned wage access is the future of salary payments in Africa. “When we launched our product leading on-demand pay in Nigeria, a lot of people followed after us and we’re very excited about that because we believe that earned wage access is the future of salary payments and we like to see that we’re setting the path for that. What sets us apart from other players is our deep understanding of the problems and the solutions we’ve layered on that to solve them.” he says.
The team at Earnipay is currently focused on connecting with HR departments and now finance departments too. They are seeking out companies who are eager to optimise their people operations, finance, and employee benefit systems.
To explore these digital tools and services available with Earnipay, book a demo here.
