What is DailyPay’s mission?
DailyPay’s mission is to empower employers to give their people financial control and economical access to their pay. Our employee base is committed to helping underserved, underbanked communities and to disrupting predatory practices like Payday lending, which overcharge and damage the financial health of the communities they target.
Our core product, on-demand pay, gives workers transparency, choice, and control over their finances by providing access to their pay as they earn it. DailyPay partners with leading employers to offer our services as a benefit to employees. These employers have increased engagement, retention, and loyalty. As evidence of this we saw the average turnover rate drop by 35% for workers using DailyPay’s earned wage access solution.
What is DailyPay seeing in terms of hiring trends right now?
The companies we work with are still operating in a tight labor market and need benefits like DailyPay to attract and retain talent. Employers must offer flexibility, which has increasingly expanded to hourly workers. Hourly, front-line workers now expect control over their work schedule, paid leave, and pay flexibility. Without competitive benefits and flexibility, companies looking to hire hourly and front-line workers, struggle.
How is DailyPay differentiated in their market?
DailyPay provides Earned Wage Access (EWA). EWA is a benefit that allows employees to access their net earned pay. Employees get to choose when and how they get paid. We offer a variety of secure, transparent, intuitive ways for them to access their money. The difference between DailyPay and many other companies in this space is that many are just providing expensive loans, where we are giving people access to money they have already earned for less than an average ATM fee.
What attracted you to DailyPay?
I had been a portfolio executive privatizing and returning larger companies to the public markets, most recently Dun & Bradstreet. Those types of transactions were rewarding and intellectually stimulating, but they were not disruptive or transformative. At this stage in my career, I was attracted to doing something good where I’d have the opportunity to transform systems and help people. DailyPay is a mission centric business. What we are doing is changing wage access and helping to transform the financial services industry and how banking works. We have a very interesting product line that we have been able to extend. I’m excited about our plans to continue evolving our offerings in support of our mission to make this company more impactful, more interesting, and more valuable in the long-term.
What challenges and opportunities are on the horizon?
First, is the market opportunity. The total addressable market for on demand pay is probably about $40 billion a year. Today that market’s about $5 billion because it’s not fully mature. Even at $5 billion, it is a huge market, and we have a lot of room to run. Second, we are working cooperatively to get regulatory and policy certainty because this is still an unregulated part of the business. Third, this is going to be a global phenomenon. So, we need to be able to support our customers -- especially since we’re heavily skewed toward enterprises in a global market -- and we need to find adjacencies around other types of financial wellness products and services that our customers need. We will do this through partnerships, through acquisition, or directly through what we are building.
What is your advice for other growing businesses considering private equity?
Make sure you understand what you’re signing up for and that you are prepared for it. Private equity is not an early-stage investor, and they are going to have expectations. They are going to have a playbook they want to run, and they will want to give you help. If you value their advice and embrace it, it can be a great thing. However, if you are likely to fight it, it may not be the right choice for you.
What are the benefits of working with a group like Carrick Capital Partners?
Many investors are not domain experts, they are simply focused on financials. With Carrick we get help with both. Their domain expertise is exceptional. They know the market and they know the space. They are on our board and provide value on a weekly basis. As CEO there are always multiple issues you need help with -- it is never just one thing. Having access to the breadth of expertise they offer has been extremely helpful. In my first 30 days alone, they provided assistance with a number of issues including financials, operations and organizational design.
What is your vision for DailyPay as CEO?
Often when people ask this of a PE-backed company they want to hear about their plan and whether they are trying to go public or to sell, but I don’t think about it that way. If you’re building a generational business, the type of business that’s going to stand the test of time, you need to focus on supporting the stakeholders: the employer, their customers and employees, our own employees and our investors. If you do that and you are building a sustainable and long-term viable business, you’ll have lots of options.
Some of our specific goals include expanding our roster of enterprise clients, white-labeling our services to banks and FIs, exploring international expansion, and making on-demand pay the default way people are paid everywhere. But big picture, I’m hoping that we can keep our focus on simply building the most mission-centric, sustainable, generational business every day by taking care of our customers. By doing that -- keeping in mind the folks that we’re helping on a daily basis and how to extend the product line within the context of our mission -- we are going to build a great business.
