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How Unit helps Veryable pay contract laborers within 24 hours of completing a work opportunity
Veryable saw an opportunity to help the workers on their platform get paid within 24 hours of completing a work opportunity.
By partnering with Unit to offer banking features, Veryable can pay workers within 24 hours, even on holidays and weekends.
Veryable is a platform that connects independent contractors with work in manufacturing and distribution. Jeff Wells, Chief Supply Officer at Veryable, says the platform addresses a changing work dynamic.
“40% of able-bodied workers in the US choose not to work full-time,” says Wells. “They may have family obligations or other jobs, or they may simply want to work on a flexible schedule. At the same time, manufacturers struggle to match the supply of labor with their demand for it, which ebbs and flows.”
Veryable solves both problems by offering an on-demand marketplace for manufacturing, logistics, and warehousing labor. What sets them apart is their unique ability to pay their workers within 24 hours—even on holidays and weekends.
“Back when we were starting out, there were several times we had to pay workers in cash after their shifts ended so they could buy gas to drive to work the next day. What we realized is that they’re in need of work today so they can pay their bills tomorrow.” - Jeff Wells, Chief Supply Officer of Veryable
But paying workers within 24 hours is harder than it sounds. In fact, Veryable tried three other solutions before landing on Unit. The reason for their choice was Unit’s ability to build a new product that suited their needs, one based on in-house bank accounts for workers.
What Veryable built with Unit:
For Veryable, the road to Unit was long. Each of their three previous solutions offered some of what they needed—but not all.
The first vendor helped them get payments off the ground, but they added too much friction, freezing accounts without explanation. The second vendor relied on next-day ACH payments, but there was a problem: 40% of Veryable’s workers didn’t have a bank account. The third vendor was closer to the mark, but they couldn’t process next-day payments on holidays and weekends, a key requirement.
“Our previous vendors weren’t ready to innovate,” says Wells. “We needed a way to consistently pay our workers within 24 hours, even on weekends and holidays—and that solution didn’t exist yet in the market. Unit partnered with our team and, working together, we built a new product. It was exactly what we needed.”
Veryable partners with Unit to offer banking features—including payments, business checking accounts, and debit cards—to their workers. They call it Veryable Vault. Unit streamlines the banking infrastructure and compliance obligations so that Veryable can focus on crafting a best-in-class UX and expanding to new markets.
“Onboarding with Unit was a seamless experience, the best onboarding I’ve ever been a part of. The combination of excellent technology and responsive customer support is pretty lethal.” - Noah Labhart, CTO of Veryable
How does Veryable pay their workers within 24 hours? By giving them bank accounts.
Say a worker finishes their work on Friday afternoon. In the early days, Veryable would bill the business and initiate an ACH debit. But ACH payments take 1-3 business days to settle, not including holidays and weekends. And, until recently, that was the end of the story. The worker had to wait until Tuesday (or Wednesday or Thursday) to get paid.
But with Unit, Veryable is in a position to pay the workers faster. Veryable knows the worker has finished their work, and they know the money is coming from the manufacturer. So they advance the funds to the worker, making them available in the worker’s Veryable Vault bank account the next morning. Veryable then bills the manufacturer for the completed work plus a fee.
Another benefit has been the speed at which workers can start using their new Veryable Vault bank accounts. With a previous vendor, it could take as many as 15 days for workers to receive their physical debit cards and start making purchases. With Unit, workers receive a virtual debit card as soon as their bank-account application is approved—often in as little as two hours—before receiving their physical card in the mail. By adding their virtual cards to digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, workers can start making purchases right away.
For these and other reasons, the product has been a big hit. In the few months since they’ve launched with Unit, Veryable has doubled the number of banking users on their platform, and their revenue from card purchases has tripled.
“Unit has been a game changer. Nobody else was able to build what we needed to enable fast payments for the workers on our platform.” - Noah Labhart, CTO of Veryable
Once their banking products had launched, Veryable set an ambitious goal: to migrate more than 30,000 workers to Veryable Vault (the new bank accounts) within 30 days.
Ultimately, more than 75% of Veryable workers successfully migrated to Vault in advance of the deadline. Now, as a result, all workers get paid within 24 hours of completing their work.
Today, Veryable operates in 23 US markets, with plans to expand into additional markets in 2022. Eventually, Wells and Labhart hope that Veryable Vault will become the go-to financial platform for all areas of the gig economy, not just manufacturing.
“Going forward, we plan to build out BillPay, savings, lending, and credit,” says Wells. “Unit has a complete feature set that allows us to do everything we want to do.”
Ready to bring your own financial features to life? Contact us to learn more.
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Veryable is a financial technology company and not a bank. Banking services provided by Blue Ridge Bank N.A.; Member FDIC. The Veryable Visa® Debit Card is issued by Blue Ridge Bank N.A. pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. and may be used everywhere Visa debit cards are accepted.
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