Changing Money Movement for Good…Is Good for American Workers
By Dekel Beeri, Vice President, Product Strategy, DailyPay
As we commemorate Financial Literacy Month in April, we take a moment to recognize the real financial challenges facing American workers and the technological advances that are helping them navigate the uncertain economic waters and begin a path toward financial wellness and security.
For most American workers, it’s a challenge each week to pay bills on time and cover all necessary living expenses. A recent poll from Payroll.org cites that 78% of Americans consider themselves living paycheck to paycheck. Research also shows that 36% of U.S. consumers say it has been “somewhat” to “very difficult” for them to pay their usual bills in the last seven days.
The challenges workers face are often related to the alignment of their pay with the timing of their bills. When bills aren’t paid, workers face a never-ending cycle of debt as they are often forced to leverage expensive financial products such as payday loans to make ends meet.
The road to financial wellness and security must begin here at the point when employees get paid. This is when they can deploy their earnings to live their best financial lives. This is the moment where innovations in money movement can help.
The good news is that advancements in payment technology such as The Clearing House’s Real Time PaymentsTM and FedNow have made the speed at which getting money from the employer’s hands into the employee’s wallets has never been faster.
The ability for employees to access their earned pay in real-time, without waiting for a scheduled payday has been transformational. This innovation called earned wage access (or on-demand pay) has proven to be a safe, inexpensive, and dependable way for employees to get critical liquidity to pay bills, spend, save, or invest. According to research from Arizent, commissioned by DailyPay, a leading EWA provider, about 7 in 10 DailyPay users who previously paid late fees do this less often or stopped completely since they started using DailyPay.
The rise in popularity of earned wage access runs in parallel to the popularity of other payment apps that move money easily and safely between friends, merchants and billers, both domestically and globally. Now, with the touch of a button, we can send a friend money for a birthday gift across the country, pay a phone bill, or access your earned pay.
Another new innovation is making money movement easier through interoperability — the ability to seamlessly transact between different payment apps. With Visa+ launching last fall, paying across services, such as between Venmo & PayPal, is as seamless as using any one service, providing ease, safety, and convenience to consumers.
But for those aforementioned workers living paycheck to paycheck, the speed and ease of these tech advancements in payments can be the difference between paying a bill late or paying a bill on time to avoid unnecessary late fees, having the ability to send money to a relative in need overseas, or simply using the money you’ve earned that day to take the family out to a special dinner that same night.
It’s technology changing money movement…for good.
