Finch building 40 to 50 connectors
Finch
The hard part in payroll infrastructure is not building one great integration, it is surviving the long tail of dozens of mediocre, quirky systems that collectively control the market. In U.S. HR and payroll, the top 10 systems cover only about 55% of the market, so a benefits or fintech company has to keep adding connectors far past the obvious names to reach useful coverage. That is why Finch sells aggregation, standardization, and maintenance, not just API access.
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Human Interest is the concrete proof point. Before Finch, it built roughly 40 to 50 connectors itself and still covered only around 60% of its customer base. The rest required a 100 plus person operations team doing CSV pulls, deduction setup, and data cleanup by hand.
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This market is more fragmented than banking. Finch identified about 6,000 HR and payroll systems in the U.S., with 75% coverage requiring 40 to 50 connectors, versus banking where the top 10 banks cover about 75%. Fragmentation persists even inside big brands like ADP, which can sit on many underlying systems.
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That connector burden creates room for multiple infrastructure layers. Finch serves employer authorized B2B workflows like benefits enrollment and payroll deductions, while Pinwheel, Argyle, and Atomic focus on employee authorized workflows like income verification and direct deposit switching. Same systems underneath, different buyers and product jobs.
The next phase is less about adding raw connectors and more about turning coverage into higher value payroll actions. As Finch expands from reading org and pay data into writing deductions, contributions, and other payroll changes, the company moves closer to becoming the default transaction layer for benefits and B2B fintech products built on top of employment systems.