What are the tailwinds in the payroll API sector and what is driving the trend of unbundling payroll and rebundling it into various apps?

I'll start with what APIs actually are: building blocks that allow anyone creating an app to plug in a component that will allow them to do something really easily. 

The example I like to give is building in the ability to message your customers, for that you put in the Twilio API. Or, if you need access to geo data or mapping data, you plug in the Google Maps API, and you can use that to build what you want to build. So, we're just another building block for builders.

The reason why that's so important is because there has never been more money being deployed right now into tech. Founders want to build amazing solutions that will either do one of two things, significantly improve customer experiences, or significantly improve the value of products that are being built. No one wants to spend time building out components that someone else who is an expert in the field is already doing, and they can take it off the shelf and just plug and play. That's the general trend of like the APIzation of everything, and it just makes sense.

With that in mind, when we're talking about kind of the tailwinds behind us, it's all of this money going into financial services innovation, whether fintech or otherwise. It’s all these builders being like, “I want to build something that is so much better than the bank that I have now. I want to rethink how people think about their finances.” Well, you need our data. So, put the API in, and boom, that whole piece is solved for you.

Beyond that, there's also these other major tailwinds. Financial inequity has been a problem for a very long time, but it’s especially now in the forefront because the gap between haves and have nots has widened substantially. And here’s actually an opportunity now to build great businesses servicing historically underserved consumers. Chime is a great example of this, or Cash App is another great example. Founders historically believed that consumers who are low income and low FICO—or completely no file—weren’t great to build products for because there was no way to build business. You wanted to collect high income earners, get the AUM, and sell them high margin services. These are the valuable businesses or people that you want to service with financial services.

But, especially on the tech front, it became fairly compelling that you could actually take a different monetization model—where you're not selling them high-margin mortgages per se—but you could do high transaction volume businesses for people, and still serve them when they've been historically underserved. That's another really big tailwind that we saw, where you really need the data and the access to direct deposits that we enable to actually serve that segment of consumers. That's a second tailwind that I think has really helped us.

Thirdly is just, there is so much fraud happening right now, just ungodly amounts of fraud, especially with the stimulus and whatnot. Like some stupid amount of money was completely fraudulent, and the government was literally just handing money to like fraudsters. So the need for real-time, source of truth data has become so much more important now. And that's a third tail one that's really helped us with the digitization where it's like, ‘I just don't want paper performance anymore, the risk for fraud is way too high. Like give me the source data, I want to know that this is legit.’