2021 recap and product update: An amazing year for Pinwheel

January 5, 2022

2021 has been an incredible year for Pinwheel. With that in mind, we have a special edition product update that will not only give an update on how we’ve enhanced our recurring access feature, but also provide a summary around the tremendous progress last year in shipping new products, growing the breadth of coverage on our platform, and more.

Year End Recap

Last year, Pinwheel experienced dramatic growth - on a number of fronts:

Employees: We tripled the size of our team to over 60 employees, with growth across all functional groups - from Engineering, Product, Commercial, etc.
Funding: We raised our $20M Series A from leading investors after experiencing 11x revenue growth. These investments have helped us accelerate the pace of our product development and innovation efforts - and build a superior payroll connectivity platform.
Coverage and Mappings: We’ve worked hard to greatly expand our employer and platform mappings to give our customers best-in-class coverage. Our mappings grew by 7x to ~80,000. This expansion included newer, non-traditional platforms such as Etsy, Stripe, and Upwork - which is particularly critical given the emergence of new forms of work with the rise of the gig and creator economies.
New Products: We dramatically increased the breadth of our product suite with the launch of Income & Employment data and Paycheck Linked Lending. Additionally, we shipped new enhancements that enable our products to power use cases like Earned Wage Access via access to shifts and paystub data. We’ve also enabled recurring access so that customers can monitor data around direct deposit allocations and income & employment data.

Product Enhancement: Recurring Access

Over the past few months, we’ve invested heavily on building out a recurring access feature for our products starting with Direct Deposit Allocation Monitoring and rounding out the set with Income & Employment Monitoring.

The monitoring function is important because banks, fintechs, and other financial service providers today get a single point-in-time snapshot of their end-user, typically when the account is first connected. However, a person’s life is not static – updates in employment and income can cause one’s financial situation to change. These offerings provide our customers with ongoing access into their end-user’s payroll accounts, enabling them to craft engaging product experiences based on changes to payroll data.

While getting a continuous stream of updates is valuable, there are cases where an immediate refresh of data is needed, e.g., before a loan is approved, or when earned wages are advanced. To address this, we’ve augmented our recurring access feature with On Demand Updates, where customers can trigger an action on an existing payroll account without requiring end-users to credential in again. This function is extensible across any combination of jobs, allowing for a host of new product experiences to be created. Some examples: verify the identity of an end-user prior to executing the direct deposit switch to mitigate fraud, or allowing an end-user to trigger a refresh of their shifts data immediately after they’ve worked such that they can get access to the maximum amount of wages – all without requiring the user to login! It’s a win-win for both customers and end-users, as it removes a significant point of friction and dramatically improves the UX.

We’re proud of the progress we made this year, but more importantly than that, we’re excited about how this progress helps us deliver more value for our customers.

The best is yet to come this year, and we can’t wait to share more exciting updates as we continue delivering on our mission to enable a fairer financial system.

Want To Work With Us?

Interested in test driving our new Recurring Access features? Chat with us here. And as always check out how our APIs can power use cases from Direct Deposit Switching, Income & Employment Verification, Paycheck Linked Lending, and more.