How new Pay Asset Finance benefits your people and your finances

22 June 2021 | 44 Shares

Over three-quarters people in the UK worry about money. Being human, they tend to bring those worries to work. That’s not a positive influence on mental health, and continuous financial stress leads to people needing time off or being signed off sick.

The majority of employers do their level best to help and invest in the wellness and good mental health of those they employ. It makes sound business sense, after all, to have a contented workforce — happier people perform better, take fewer days off sick, and tend not to actively look for employment elsewhere.

A technology-focused website might not be the obvious place to discuss mental health in the workplace, but there is a new technology platform that helps alleviate the primary cause of stress: money.

The platform we’re focusing on, Hi (from Hi55 Ventures) is quite new: a business finance solution that enables employees to access their salaries daily (via a Mastercard collaboration) or weekly via a smartphone app. The upside is that this facility comes at no cost whatsoever to the employee.

It’s all made possible by a new service called PAF (Pay Asset Finance).

A New Source of Capital

Several key differentiators of the Hi55 pay asset finance offering are unique and make it a very attractive alternative to the expensive salary advance schemes that are currently on offer.

Organisations that sign up to Hi can give their employees daily or weekly access to net wages, and, at the same time, the company is given access to up to 12 weeks net payroll free cash flow. That’s a significant sum that the business can invest, leverage in the short term, and generally use as liquidity.

At the end of the term, companies pay back the net amount they’ve had access to, plus an agreed finance fee for using the facility (there’s also a small, recurring, per-employee payment each month).

Happier Workforces

For employees, the immediate availability of wages gives peace-of-mind about their own cash flow and allows them to budget more accurately. The in-app displays show what is available, what has been spent and where the spending took place — visibility that encourages good money hygiene and a healthier approach to personal finance decision making.

Pay Asset Finance

It also means that employees can avoid resorting to credit to help them over unforeseen expenses, the facilities for which are rarely positive contributors to mental health! Wages can be released weekly via the Hi app, or each worker can be given a company-issued salary card. The card acts effectively like a pre-paid charge card that’s filled with a day’s net salary every 24 hours.

The service helps staff retention, can be offered as an attractive employee benefit, and is available, for instance, to accountancy practices that wish to offer instant salary access to their clients. For Finance Departments, there is no ongoing management nor risk — monies released to employees are monies due, not new lines of credit. The platform handles the day-to-day transfers of wages, so the salary advance application/approval/issuing/recouping merry-go-round each month is made redundant.

Moreover, the organisation gets immediate access to up to 12 weeks’ net wage resource, which can be used for general-purpose accounting, settlements or short-term investment.

The company behind the Hi platform is a registered Social Enterprise and is presenting this platform, the first of its kind, as a low cost, highly convenient “win-win” for both the employer and employee.

Employee benefits like table football and free fruit look sadly dated in a highly competitive marketplace for the best talent. The Hi platform is a concrete example of how technology’s utility can improve the employee’s personal welfare and the employer’s financial ledgers.

Hi55 is deploying the type of payment gateway technologies we see every day here at Tech HQ (recurring payment management, part-payment offerings, subscription models, self-service payment dashboards) in innovative and wholly positive ways.

In our next article, we’ll look deeper at some of the benefits that organizations and the people in them can accrue with the Hi app and platform. Until then, read more about the application process over at the Hi site, and send an email (link launches email) to request a demo with a representative.