The Flexibility Benefit: Don't forget pay

Speaker A: When a bank failure occurs, that's when you've got uncertainty for a few days and the risk occurs because credit risk becomes more severe during the course of a bank failure. This would essentially allow companies to get their payrolls processed instantaneously and not have to deal with any type of payroll problems during the period where the bank may be taken over by the FDIC or anything like that. And we actually did have a conversation with one of the major payroll providers who basically told us if they had fully implemented the RTP capabilities, both the funding side as well as the distribution side, that uh, the bank failures that we saw would have essentially been a non event for them.

Speaker B: From the Schiff Collective, an organization committed to your ability to create meaningful, sustainable impact. This is inevitable. The future of Work. The future not only is inevitable, it's being written right now. The question for you is whether you'll drive the storyline of your future or allow someone else to dictate it to you. If you prefer to play an active role in creating your path forward, you've come to the right place. Our conversations are designed to make you think and to provide concrete, accessible ways to adapt and excel. Join us for energetic exchanges with mind blowing thinkers, expert practitioners and accomplished leaders that will leave you eager and able to be even better. Starting now. Hi, this is Jeff Lesher and on this episode of Inevitable the Future of Work, we are joined by Jim Collisano, who is the Senior Vice President of Product development and Strategy at the Clearinghouse, which is a US based payments operation company founded 170 years ago and they help clear and settle more than $2 trillion each day through a variety of payment methods. Which leads me to my question for all of us, which is how many of us really understand the process through which we get paid and how many as employers have employees who have periodic need to access earned wages as soon as possible, in other words, before a formal paycheck is issued. And oh, by the way, what's the effect of bank failures on the use of systems? Or is there a better way to protect your money and their money in the process? All of these things are not just of interest from making sure that people get paid, paid correctly, paid on time, but they're viewed increasingly as a benefit, especially uh, among workers in restaurants and other hospitality, uh, industries where, you know, really is a paycheck to paycheck existence for a lot of folks, tight margins and a statistic that we mention in the conversation and that many of you may be familiar with, which is that a significant percentage of people are unprepared financially to address an emergency costing $400 or more. So for something viewed through the other end of the periscope there, or the telescope or the kaleidoscope or whatever it is, we are, um, relatively unable, based on what is not an insignificant, but not a huge amount of money, um, put in arrears if something comes up. So if you had a better way to give people access to money that they've earned when they need it, uh, as they need it, would you do that? And what would the benefit to your people be and as a. As a complement to that to your organization? So again, we talk about all those things with Jim Calisano. I think it's a great, interesting, um, conversation and look forward to your reactions and how you might inquire differently with your payment firm, uh, and. Or the bank that you rely on for payroll. Jim Calisano. Ah, welcome to Inevitable. Thanks so much for being with us. How are you?

Speaker A: Very good. Thanks for inviting me. Good to be here.

Speaker B: We're going to talk about one of my favorite topics, which is getting paid. And really, uh, to do that we need to understand how it is that money moves, how we do get paid currently, and why it's an issue that you and your organization, the clearinghouse, spend so much time on. So maybe just give us a primer on, um, the history of how money moves between financial institutions in order for Jeff to get his money and spend it however he sees fit.

Speaker A: Sure, Jeff, I'd be happy to. Um, so, uh, going back to the one on one process for, uh, moving money, uh, in order for one person to pay another person, uh, you actually have to move the money out of the bank that belongs to you and into the bank, uh, where it's being received. And there are only a small number of mechanisms that you can use to actually move that physical money between, uh, financial institutions, uh, originally, um, and many people today probably don't even use these anymore. But originally the main way that you paid, uh, or got paid in a payroll environment with buy a check, right? Uh, so your company would fund an account at their bank, uh, then they would issue checks off of that account. The checks would then be sent to individuals or distributed to them. You would deposit the check in your account, uh, and then it would usually take a couple of days before the money actually moved from your employer's account to your account so you could use it. And what you would see in that environment, and you still see it today, is that the total amount of your pay is actually included on the balance in your account, but you can't use it for a couple of days. So you'll see what's called a ledger balance. So if you're going to be paid $1,000, you'll see $1,000 in your account on that payday. Uh, and then maybe you can use $100 on the first day, an additional $500 on the second day, and then the remainder a couple of days later. Uh, and the reason for that is because that check needed to physically move through the clearing system, uh, be received by the bank and actually deposited to your account. Uh, so that banks accounts at the Federal Reserve were debited and credited. And that's when money actually moves. Uh, the next generation of that was what we call direct deposit payroll, which is using the ACH network. And that basically took that same process, um, and turned it into an electronic payment. But the same thing happens with, with respect to ach, right? Uh, the ach, um, you typically, your employer has to fund an account, uh, then they have to issue the direct deposit of payroll. Um, and in most instances that will get into your account at your bank the same day they send it. Uh, however, if your, uh, ACH direct deposit comes on a Friday or Saturday or before a long holiday weekend, you will probably not get access to those funds for a few days. And again, the reason for all of this is that it takes a while for the money to actually move from your employer to your payroll provider. And the payroll provider, by the way, needs to make sure they've got that money and that it can't be that the money is actually in their account, uh, and it can't be recalled or anything could happen to it. And then once they achieve settlement, then they can move the money to your bank account and then the bank that you're banking with needs to receive it before they'll give you access to it. Right? So again, in most instances it works well. And I like, uh, a quote that I received from a, uh, colleague, uh, of mine a while back that the payment system works extremely well, except when it doesn't. Right. So if I'm getting, if you get paid on the 15th and the 30th, as an example, if that's your traditional pay cycle, then what happens is if the 15th and 30th falls on a Wednesday, no problem, you've got the money in your account, you can use that money instantaneously. If the 15th happens to fall on the Saturday before Christmas, uh, then you probably won't get your money for three or Four days. Right. And uh, it's that uncertainty that we try to address with the RTP network, uh, which is the only network that operates 24 by 7, uh, and the processes each transaction in real time. So you eliminate all of the delays that are associated with payment process.

Speaker B: Yeah, so let's get into that in a minute. I just sort of feel like we heard an infomercial for crypto, you know, in terms of getting paid, getting, getting paid directly versus through, you know, all these various hoops where sure, I mean, nothing typically goes wrong, but it seems like a lot of things potentially could. And one of the reasons that that's such an issue, and I think you have the, the dollar amount figure, but there's, there's a figure I think is around $400 that basically the majority of people don't have that level of reserve to handle an unplanned emergency. Uh, and so part of this is it's not that people aren't necessarily earning enough as much as they can't necessarily access the money as quickly as they might need it. So somewhere within that space, Jim, maybe help us understand what your organization does and some of the ways in which employers might plug into or make sure that they're part of a process like yours in order to allow their people to get access to their money when they've earned it. Um, but maybe before they would normally receive it.

Speaker A: That's correct. And um, to that, um, in response to that, Jeff, let me just give you a little bit of context around the RTP network. Uh, the payment networks that I was talking to about a few moments ago, the wire network, the ACH network, um, those are the only ways right now that money can move. Um, the last time that the banking industry built uh, a payments infrastructure to move money was over 50 years ago. ACH was actually the last payment rail that the banking industry built. The RTP network, which the clearinghouse stood up, uh, about six years ago, allows for the instantaneous movement of money 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Um, that was intended to align with the way commerce and the way people were actually conducting their lives and managing their lives in the present and in the future, uh, which is more digital, more instantaneous, uh, which is you don't typically do banking during banking hours, you typically do it on the weekend. Um, one of the things that some studies have shown, and this was going into the pandemic as well as currently, is that households do not, typical households do not have enough reserves, uh, to be able to pay for an unanticipated $400 expense. So if their car broke down in the middle of a pay period, um, and it cost them 5, $600 to get it repaired, they would not have sufficient reserves to be able to pay, uh, for that unanticipated expense. Uh, by allowing employees to get access to monies that they've earned, um, before the traditional pay period, it relieves some of the financial stress that individuals are incurring in dealing with these unexpected expenses. So that's where the RTP network comes in because it's an enabler for those types of activities. And let's take two pieces of it, right? Uh, it first started with a lot of the gig economy activity because, uh, gig economy workers typically want to get paid at the end of their shift. They work, they drive, um, for a while, uh, at the end of their shift they put their time cards in, they want to get the money into their account so they can use it as quickly as possible. You can't really do that with the traditional payment methods. You need something that would allow um, a company to actually be able to get the information, process the payment and put it into that customer's account immediately, to that employee's account immediately. And that's what you can do with the RTP network. Uh, in more traditional environments where people typically get paid twice a month, um, on the 15th and the 30th of the month, uh, we're seeing a lot more activity in what we're calling earned wage access. So being able to, if an employee worked three days that week or in that two week pay period, that they would like to be able to get paid for those three days and not have to wait for that 15th or 30th or the end of that traditional payment cycle. Again, what RTP enables is the ability for um, an off cycle payment to be made any time of the day or night. So similar to the gig economy environment, but a little bit of a different spin because you're actually getting uh, money that you've earned but haven't yet been paid. And again, you need the plumbing, uh, and we use that term a lot in the payments business. You need the plumbing to allow you to do that, uh, not only to allow you to pay somebody, uh, off cycle and at any time that they want it, uh, but also to be able to collect that money from employers so that the payment processors are always uh, in sync in terms of the money they're receiving and the money they pay out. And that's pretty much uh, encapsulates what the network does.

Speaker B: Okay, so for employers, uh, what do they need to do? Like, or how many employers are plugged into this plumbing? And how do you know if you are?

Speaker A: Um, it's typically. Well, if it's offered, it would have to be a benefit that employers are offering to their employees. Uh, so it would have to be enabled through the payroll company that they're using today.

Speaker B: Um, okay, so, so a place to check would be the payroll company that they use.

Speaker A: Correct.

Speaker B: And they would be asking what if, if they use the RTP network or what's the, what's the proper inquiry there?

Speaker A: Well, I, I think the inquiry would be to ask them about earned wage access. Right. So do they have the ability to provide, um, you know, um, uh, employees with access to funds on demand or between traditional payroll cycles? Um, that would be the starting point. Uh, the payroll companies would know whether they're offering it and whether they're using the RTP network to enable it. Uh, we're starting to see some of the payroll companies now adopt it because there is increasing demand. To be honest with you, one of the interesting phenomena we've seen is, um, during the pandemic, the need for people to have money, um, when they needed it, uh, was absolutely top of mind with absolutely everyone. Uh, before that, to a very large degree, people were pretty much used to the traditional payroll cycles. Ah, they had kind of worked their expenses around when they expected to get paid. And if something unusual came up, they might have tried a payday loan or some other method to try and get additional funding, not necessarily going to their employer for that capability. Uh, um, during the pandemic, it became increasingly important in order to get people to recruit people, uh, to offer them this as an additional benefit. Now, as individuals are coming out of the pandemic, uh, they want to continue to get that capability from their employers. And it's becoming, quite frankly, a recruitment tool, uh, as employers are trying to recruit new talent.

Speaker B: Yeah, so you, you mentioned that some of the payroll companies are adopting this now because there, there's a demand. Do you have a sense of, of, you know, what the coverage is now? Like, how much of a likelihood is it that you have access versus don't? Because benefits are sometimes comparative in nature. So it's, it's not just keeping up with. Maybe it's getting ahead of. And I just want to give folks a sense of, would you be getting ahead of the curve or are you catching up to the curve? Where is the market at this point?

Speaker A: Well, the market is still nascent. It's still early stage, uh, for some of these payroll activities. We're seeing it evolve. Uh, and not every payroll company is offering it today. So you'd have to actually talk to your payroll company. It depends on who you're working with, uh, and whether they've adopted that capability. Um, but we are finding that virtually every company we talk to nowadays, um, are looking to offer that capability both to employers as well as to employees. Um, so it is something that they are definitely seeing more of a demand for and more payroll companies are looking at it.

Speaker B: All right, so we're going to go into our dumb question segment which is included in every conversation, Jim, that we have with esteemed guests. So the first dumb question is there's been recently very high profile bank failures. Uh, is there any risk, any additional risk that an employer or employee for that matter is taking when providing real time, I'm going to call it real time access to earn wages, uh, through a system like you described?

Speaker A: Um, that's a great question and not a dumb question at all, Jeff. It's actually a really great question. Um, because of the immediacy of both getting the money from the employer, uh, and the finality of getting the money from the employer and the ability to quickly and instantaneously distribute that to employees, uh, that capability would actually aid in the event of any type of bank failure like what we have seen, because it allows the payroll companies to, to uh, severely restrict any credit risk that they assume today. So again, harkening back to what I talked about earlier, traditional payroll usually takes several days to collect the money, get it into the account of the payroll provider and then distribute it to employees. Uh, when a bank failure occurs, that's when you've got uncertainty for a few days and the risk occurs because credit risk becomes more severe, uh, during the course of a bank failure. This would essentially allow companies to get their payrolls processed instantaneously and not have to deal with any type of payroll, uh, problems during the period where the bank may be taken over by the FDIC or anything like that. We actually did have, um, a conversation with one of the major payroll providers, uh, who basically told us if they had fully implemented the RTP capabilities, both the funding side as well as the distribution side, that uh, the bank failures that we saw would have essentially been a non event for them.

Speaker B: We'll get back to our conversation with Jim Collisano in a minute. I wanted to address briefly a really big question that we received recently and it has to do with managing global talent in economically uncertain um, times. And there are many different ways in which an organization can approach this. But my encouragement in a broad way would be to remind people something that we've talked about before, which is that economic downturn, REM recession in particular, can actually be the window opening on opportunities to redefine the market or the service provided within an existing market. There are myriad great examples of this as recently as the pandemic where food delivery and other online merchants saw a boon to their business when the needs and shopping habits of people changed significantly and more. Historically, organizations that you might have heard of like Walmart, Google and Amazon have all benefited from recessionary periods during which they continue to move forward. The analogy that I've written about and offered verbally from time to time is, is that of stock car racing, nascar, uh, something I happen to enjoy. Constant left turns do not bother me. They thrill me. I'm a little bit distraught that Kyle Busch no longer races under the peanut M&M's banner because Mars has withdrawn, uh, sponsorship. And they, uh, peanut M and ms, uh, are my favorite dessert. But that's a conversation for another day. But when you are racing, sometimes there's an accident or mishap on the track and the race goes under caution, the yellow flag, and that gives drivers the opportunity and their teams the opportunity to pit, to take on new tires, to get adjustments to the chassis, to get refuel, to fix body damage and other things that can prepare the car to be more effective when the race goes back to green, full speed, normal racing conditions, too many of us under caution hunker down. Uh, rather than change four tires, we only change two because what if we need the money for the other two later? But you could actually benefit from putting them on now. But it's a good way to think about how not whether, but how to continue to invest in your business when you have a bit of breathing room to do it. And that's frankly regardless of whether or not we enter a recession formally or otherwise. But what makes sense from a business investment perspective, and oftentimes while it may not be rapid expansion, the opportunity to focus on developing, developing the strategy that will allow you to return to normal racing speed with the greatest potential for not only going fast, but going fast for longer is what helps thoughtful and somewhat risk, uh, willing organizations to be better prepared coming out of whatever circumstances stance may exist. And so the short answer is the best global management philosophy is keep your eye on the prize and figure out the way in which you're going to continue to make positive moves. Now versus just trying to wait it out. You cannot tread water and then get back to full speed, speed quickly. You need to continue forward movement, maybe at a slower pace, maybe in a slightly different direction, until the current catches up with you. Now, mixing analogies and metaphors, but I think you get the point and I encourage you to experiment with that, uh, to find out what works for you. But if pulling the covers over your head is your instinct, fight that instinct and figure out a way to get out of bed and, and really go after today. So for, uh, folks, that sounds like that's a, that's a vote in favor of this. You know, in terms of security. Um, this is, this is a question of perhaps more observation than necessary fact per se, but I'll ask it anyway. Just because you've got a perchance, uh, that oversees some of this in terms of what employers or financial institutions might be suggesting as an area of concern or consideration, and that is, if somebody does the work and they're eligible for pay, does it increase the likelihood or risk of somebody, um, ghosting me as an employer? Uh, you know, if they can take their money and run, so to speak. Have you seen or heard anything along the lines of, you know, if we, if we make this available to them before the end of a formal pay period, we lose some degree of predictability, especially when we're talking about industries like hospitality and so forth, where turnover is already at a pretty high rate.

Speaker A: So, um, that's getting a bit outside my particular area of expertise, Jeff. But let me give you a couple of observations, right? There is no increased risk because the relationship is still between the employer and the employee and you're only giving them access to the funds that they've actually earned. So this is not an advance, uh, against future earnings. You, uh, are actually just paying them out for time that they've already, uh, that they've already, uh, earned or for pay that they've already earned. So.

Speaker B: Right, and I get that. I mean, my curiosity is. And again, you know, this is just two people who have some window onto the employment world. If I can get my money through Wednesday, and I've decided that I'm going to work across the street because the guy's offering 50 cents more an hour or whatever. Do we see any increase in the speed of turnover? Um, in other words, minus two weeks notice or something like that?

Speaker A: I haven't heard about that. Again, I'm not close enough to know that that would be, um, that that would be happening. What I will tell you, uh, and it's an interesting phenomenon. What we have heard anecdotally we've heard from businesses, uh, we've heard from individuals and most prominently we've heard from banks is that as consumers in particular start to get access, uh, and even small businesses start to get access to real time payments, uh, it gives them the ability to manage their cash flow in ways that they never have been able to before, down to the, down even to the minute. And once they get access to that capability, if their bank or a prospective employer is not offering that, that will be a reason for that individual or that business to change banks, uh, or another argument for them to move employers Moreover than the 50% differential in wages, uh, the ability to get access to that money when they need it, uh, is something that once they see it and once they realize what the benefit is, is something that they will want more of. And we've heard that pretty consistently across the board.

Speaker B: Yeah, which raises the sort of converse question which is why would somebody not do this?

Speaker A: Well, from my approach if you will, uh, I always kind of look at this from the perspective of what are the reasons for you to do it. It's a great question. I uh, would say that um, a lot of companies have very um, traditional um, payroll processes and uh, adopting something new like this would require some changes in payroll processing. I know that there are probably uh, some, not just the payment side of it but also the processing side of it, the tax side of it. So there may be other development activities that may go along with this, uh, that companies may not have um, on their immediate timeline. Uh so like I said, part of the issue here is going to be adoption. And we are, as I mentioned before, we are still in the early stages of seeing this deployed in the marketplace. And the comment uh, that I have heard from some folks in the industry is that they may wait a little while for it to mature before they jump in. And you hear this. When it comes to any new technology coming out, you're going to have a lot of companies who see the benefit and the value early on and they will jump in and be early adopters. You'll see early stage providers who are going to be offering it and then you'll see a number of people who just want to wait, uh, and see how much demand for it and how necessary it is to their employees. Now part of the challenge is if you're actively hiring, if you're actively recruiting, um, you know, waiting too long before you can offer these capabilities could have some detrimental impacts. But for the most part the Main reason why I see folks not adopting it is they, they are waiting to see when it becomes in high demand, uh, or when it becomes something that's more ubiquitous, uh, that ah, that their employees are expecting it as opposed to requesting it. Mhm.

Speaker B: I remember reading a few years ago that McDonald's, uh, was as an employer providing um, some counsel to their employees about financial management. This, this was in the context of relatively low, um, per hour wages that the company was hoping people could stretch further. But we've also had um, at least a guest, uh, on this podcast who focused on financial literacy partly because of the amount of stress that illiteracy can cause. And I know one of the positions that you take is that this helps to combat financial stress. Um, I'm curious again, just from an observer perspective, in the space that you occupy, are there specific symptoms or ills that you've seen cured or at least alleviated when people have more real time access to earned wages?

Speaker A: So um, this is absolutely a very important point. When we start to talk about real time payments, when we start to talk about early access to wages, earned wage access and the like, it's got to be provided within the context of financial, um, literacy. Right. Uh, because what winds up happening with any situation where you give an employee early access to their funds, if they're constantly requesting that, it is a sign that there is probably, uh, a deeper problem that needs to be addressed and that can be addressed by financial planning. Uh, what many employers are doing and what many banks are starting to offer, to be honest with you, are additional tools to be able to increase, uh, financial literacy across the employee base. What RTP becomes and earned wage access becomes is one more tool in the tool chest. Right? So you should not need to take out, um, advances against your pay or early, early wage, um, withdrawals on a regular basis. But when you do need it, when an emergency comes up that you can't plan for, that you can't address in any other way, you need to be able to get access to those funds. And getting access to those funds, uh, by getting early access to wages as opposed to using credit or going through other routes is extremely important. So it really does have to be viewed within the context of that. And part of the issue is when you talk about financial literacy, it really is how do you effectively manage credit, how do you effectively manage the use of funds, how do you kind of schedule your payments? And again, being able to know with certainty when your money is going to come in, that helps, um, being able to get access to Those funds, uh, before your traditional payday, that helps. But that should not be something that employees are leveraging every single week, uh, or every single pay period. That really does need to be combined with um, you know, with that aspect of financial training and increasing individual's ability to deal with budgeting, planning, forecasting, credit usage and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker B: That all sounds good. And I'm sort of in the business of pulling threads on things. So there are a couple of threads that pull present themselves. It seems like one is on the employee side a feeling of um, what I would call negative transparency. Like I don't want my employer in my business, that money is mine, I don't need their counsel and coaching. Um, and on the other side of that coin, an employer having sort of a similar view, which is none of my, none of my business or concern. I think we could make the case that it could be a benefit to them if they help their employees establish more stability. But again, just from a, uh, position of some line of sight that you have, is this a question that's raised, and if so, either on the employer or employer side, transparency wise and responsibility wise, how is that addressed effectively, um,

Speaker A: with respect to employees, and this is more my personal perspective than, uh, my business expertise. But I will tell you that most of these services that we see offered to employees, uh, are not forced upon them. Right? Uh, you can't tell them they need to use or leverage the financial planning tools in order to be able to get access to early wages if they wanted them. These are decisions that are specifically left in the hands of the employees, uh, so that they can use it as they deem appropriate. If they don't want to use these tools and want to use others to kind of stay outside of the realm of visibility with their employers, uh, that is typically something that it is up to the employee to manage and most of the manager pretty effectively. I'll also tell you the privacy is something that comes up. Employee privacy, uh, is something that comes up pretty regularly in virtually any discussion around these topics. Uh, which is employers don't really want to start to have visibility into the financial lives of their employees. What they want to do is to provide them with all the tools necessary for them to effectively manage, manage, uh, their financial lives and all of the statistics, everything that you see, every research work that I have seen indicates that financial stress, um, is a major factor in all sorts of problems that employees have, um, and more tools to be able to manage that financial stress, um, benefits the employees, benefits the employers, ah, over the long term. So again, the approach that I see most employers taking, or what I've been hearing, uh, is that providing these tools to their employees is really the major factor that they're trying to work with. And not, you know, not overseeing, not look, not looking to breach the privacy veil or that kind of stuff, but really to be able to provide them with tools to be able to more effectively manage their financial lives.

Speaker B: I may have either misunderstood something or jumped to a conclusion which is that the access of uh, earned wages was a trigger for offering this financial literacy support or whatnot. And so in the answer that you just gave, not hearing that. So it's. Are the two things essentially operating in parallel and not intersecting? Is that a more accurate representation?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's what we've been saying. The whole issue of financial literacy is becoming much more important to employers. Banks are starting to realize it, uh, especially with access to some of the services that are available, buy now, pay later capabilities. Because if you really don't understand the implications of using these services, it looks really, really great at the front end until you take a look at what it costs you when you have to pay the money back. Right. Which is why managing wages that you've earned becomes a better way of dealing with these types of things than dealing with something that um, involves credit, uh, and future payments that are greater than um, the money that you receive. Uh, and that's what people generally don't get. And quite frankly we offer these services to individuals. Uh, it really is up to the individuals to understand the services that they're purchasing. Uh, but you've got to be able to provide them with the resources and the information that's necessary for them to understand what their options are, what's available to them so they can make an intelligent and informed decision that won't take them, that won't put them in a bad place. And that's really what, and I can speak more on the banking side around this. That's more what the banks are looking to provide whatever services we can to increase, because we know payments. Right. Uh, so to increase uh, companies and individuals awareness of how they should be using these tools and when, uh, and providing more access like earned wage access or on demand pay, um, and how that could be used to supplement or deal with emergency situations as opposed to using some of these other um, services. No.

Speaker B: Great, we appreciate it. I mean our purpose is helping people see the future with kind of the tongue in cheek recognition that the future is something that's almost always happening right now. So what you've clued us into is an area that I venture to guess most of our listeners not familiar with at all, other than the concept of getting access to their money as quickly as possible. And as you just laid out in a way that doesn't put you in a worse situation or, you know, essentially cost you more than it might be worth. Um, and that, that seems like a great way to better support, uh, people, uh, across really any number of industries, but certainly in areas where there is, I don't like this expression, but more of a hand to mouth, you know, paycheck to paycheck circumstance. But again, as you noted, uh, the majority of people out there don't have resources to cover what seems like a relatively modest expense, uh, that comes up unexpectedly. $400 being the threshold for that. So for all of that insight and knowledge, I just want to make sure I'm giving people, uh, one or two takeaways. One is that this is an opportunity to be a little bit ahead of the curve, uh, and B, that if you want to know for sure whether or not you have access to this benefit, this ability to extend access to wages to your team, you should talk to your payroll provider, um, as your first stop, and then based on their answer, maybe make a different choice. Do you think that's fair?

Speaker A: I think it's fair. The other point that I would make, which is always important, uh, I worked in banks for about 25 years, um, and I can tell you that banks and any service provider, uh, respond when there is demand. Right. So if you want your payroll providers to provide more of these types of services, if you want your banks to provide more of these types of instant payment capabilities to your employees, then you need to talk to them about it, ask them for it, tell them if you are interested, engage in the discussion. Demand will beget supply. Uh, that is always the case here, especially when you're introducing new technologies into the mix. Right. And again, uh, this is not something that the banking industry or the financial services industry does very often. Uh, like I said, the last time we did it was 50 years ago. So, you know, this is your opportunity. Right. Um, um, you know, the next time

Speaker B: we did Haley's Comet in some way, every 50 years, we get the opportunity to make. Make a change.

Speaker A: Exactly. So I would encourage you to engage in the conversation, uh, let your, uh, payroll company know that you're interested in this, uh, and even in your conversations with your banks, tell them that you are interested in this capability, uh, and you will start to see more supply, uh, coming, uh, out as a result.

Speaker B: Jim Calzano, thank you for being our guest on Inevitable and bringing so much knowledge to the show.

Speaker A: Thank you very much. It's been my pleasure.

Speaker B: We hope you enjoyed this episode and will will continue to support our community of activators as a listener and an inquisitor by visiting our website@inevitablefutureofwork.com where you can get more content or listen to additional episodes and submit a question for address on a later episode. That's inevitablefutureofwork.com and you can follow us on Instagram evitablefutureofwork. We certainly encourage you to subscribe to take the guesswork out of making sure you have all of our latest episodes and if you're so inclined, submitting a thoughtful review or referring us to a friend or colleague. All are greatly appreciated. More than anything, we don't take your support. We know that in fact it's not inevitable. We want to continue to earn your support and we look forward to hearing ways that we can do that. And before that, we hope that you are well and stay well and we will talk to you soon.