UK & EEA payments at lightning speed

By bringing payments in house with Modulr, Hastee can now pay out advances in under 10 seconds 24/7/365. This is down to Modulr’s direct access to the UK’s Faster Payments scheme, and API-first access to SEPA Instant in the EEA.

“An employee can request an advance and have it hit their account almost immediately.” 

“Right now, an employee can finish their day at work, fill their car up with petrol, realise they don’t have enough money, request an earned wage advance and have it hit their account before they’ve even stepped inside the petrol station. Bringing an end to these stressful ‘strapped for cash’ moments is what Hastee was set up to do, and our collaboration with Modulr makes it a reality.”

1. In the current model, Hastee prefunds a dedicated account provided by Modulr, from which it can send
advances to employees.
2. Advances are sent from the account directly to employee bank accounts, arriving in seconds.
3. On payday, the employer deducts the advance and repays Hastee.
4. Before finally transferring the net wage balance to the employee.

No more painstaking reconciliation

Before Modulr, reconciling wage advances at the end of the month was a manual and time intensive process for the Hastee team.

“When we had different payment providers, we had to download all the data, which was a complicated process. Hours were spent, every month, just consolidating all the payments. And now it's way easier and faster with just one payment provider.”

Having a single payment provider has reduced the time spent on reconciliation by 15% which, over the course of a month, really adds up.

Rock solid payments reliability

Modulr’s robust infrastructure and high uptime has provided Hastee with a lot of confidence when it comes to payments. The increased reliability has decreased tickets raised by employers and employees chasing late or missing payments, saving the Hastee team a further two hours every week.

“Overall, with Modulr we’ve saved more than a day each month in administration time, which is huge.”

“As well as improved SLAs and uptime, we've also seen a much more consistent policy when it comes to AML with Modulr, as opposed to the more random checks of other payments services providers.”

And, with a single provider for embedded payments in both the UK and Europe, there are fewer stakeholders to manage and fewer possible points of failure.

The company’s plans include taking the Modulr-Hastee partnership to another level, enabling them to set up multiple EMI accounts under employer customer IDs. On payday, employers will transfer the full monthly salary payments for employees with advances from their external account to their employer EMI account. Hastee will then deduct advances and transfer the net salary on to the employee’s external account, with API calls triggering all fund movements through the Modulr portal.

This alleviates the need for the employer to make any manual, bank-to-bank transactions, simplifying their entire payroll operation. By taking full control of payments in this way, Hastee will not only deliver more value but also unlock additional revenue opportunities through the monetisation of accounts and payroll services.

“We'll also be able to give employees much more time over the month to request advances. There’ll no longer be a cut-off date where they can’t cash out because their employer is preparing to run payroll.”

Why Hastee reached out to Modulr

Hastee’s vision is to give employees access to the funds they have earned when they need it, instead of waiting for the traditional monthly pay cheque. However, using a traditional bank to make high volumes of payments is often challenging.

“While some of the more technologically advanced banks or neobanks have APIs for some financial services, when it comes to payouts, such a seemingly simple thing, they usually require this double verification. When you have 100,000 plus transactions every single month, that adds up. You could wait until the end of the day and then upload in batch, with a single verification, but then you lose the whole concept of being able to provide the service instantly.”

It’s an approach to payments that just doesn’t work for the wage advance business model, keeping funds and employees in payments limbo.

“But, you can’t just jump in and start doing payouts. It’s a regulated activity all over the world, so you always need someone in between. In fact, in a lot of cases, there are multiple layers involved just for you to make payments to bank accounts.”

Knowing that the traditional banking system would introduce blockers for their business, Hastee worked with several other payment service providers, but this just led to problems of a different kind.

“We had a lot of delays with other payment providers, even those who were supposedly offering instant transfers, and they weren’t super responsive. A lot of our time was spent resolving issues and chasing up missed payments for advances that had been requested weeks before.”

The collaboration between Modulr and Hastee is as an example of what unleashing embedded payments can do for wage advance businesses – empowering them to operate at scale, and provide a far smoother customer experience.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Modulr can support your wage advance business, get in touch with us today or find more information here.