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DailyPay is grateful to have many highly engaged and motivated integration and alliance partners, especially ones like Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG), the company formed by the 2020 merger of Ultimate Software and Kronos Incorporated. Kronos and DailyPay partnered in 2019 and DailyPay has continued that partnership with UKG. UKG provides workforce and capital management solutions for their clients, which include Tesla, Marriott and Yamaha.
Jerry Nepon-Sixt, a Partner Alliance Manager at UKG, is our main point of contact and a champion of DailyPay. He has worked for Kronos, now UKG, for 26 years. Jerry lives in Tampa, Florida with his wife of 36 years, and is a man of many hobbies and interests including traveling, monkeys, theater and playing the piano. Jerry is also an avid cyclist, so much so that he rode his bike 1,300 miles from Florida to Iowa for his 40th high school reunion and, along the way, he raised $15,000 for Powerstories Theatre, a Tampa-based non-profit organization for girls. He had a Facebook group that followed him along his ride.
As a longtime supporter of DailyPay, Jerry walked us through why he values the DailyPay-UKG partnership, and how our integrated technologies can satisfy the needs of UKG clients and their employees.
DailyPay: What does it mean to be a Partner Alliance Manager at UKG?
Jerry: My day-to-day covers a lot of different tasks within UKG and with our partners. My primary job is to work with partners on integrations and to work with our sales and customer success teams to place the right partner in an opportunity. I help customers with an existing UKG solution engage with partners like DailyPay. I also work with our technology and service teams to align on implementation timelines.
DailyPay: Ultimate & Kronos have now merged to become Ultimate Kronos Group! Tell us what makes you excited about the merger.
Jerry: The organization more than doubled in size, and so did our customer base and revenue. Prior to the merger, both Kronos and Ultimate had high employee satisfaction; with this merger we now have an even stronger culture. It’s exciting to see two mid-sized companies come together to dominate the human capital management market, and to see our alliance teams come together and grow along with UKG.
DailyPay: UKG has an impressive network of technology & innovation partners. Tell us what value that network brings to UKG clients and why DailyPay was added to the mix.
Jerry: Our technology partnerships allow us to move into new spaces and help our clients improve their employee experience. We found out about DailyPay from our customers a few years ago, in particular post-acute healthcare, where DailyPay has quite a bit of traction. On-demand pay is so different from what UKG does, which is why our partnership with DailyPay is so important to us. Vendors like DailyPay allow our customers to take advantage of innovative new markets and to change and adapt as new needs arise.
DailyPay: Do you find that there is any trend as to why UKG customers are looking for an on-demand pay solution?
Jerry: I have seen that in certain industries and companies, on-demand pay is becoming a requirement. The nature of work has changed in the United States, which is a good thing and a bad thing. One of those changes is the need for access to on-demand pay. I think this is in part due to changes in the way people work and in the relationships between workers and employers. And personnel may work multiple jobs with multiple pay cycles. Partners like DailyPay allow those individuals to see the fruits of their labor on their terms.
We have been seeing this as a need from the workers’ perspective, but increasingly it is also something employers need to offer. Solutions like yours can help with recruiting and certainly with employee retention; employers also simply see it as a benefit they can offer to their employees. On-demand pay allows employees to be more present at work and take less time off. Using DailyPay helps them to eliminate some of the difficulties of living paycheck to paycheck.
DailyPay: Have you found that there has been an uptick in interest in DailyPay due to COVID? And are there particular industries that have more interest than others since the start of COVID?
Jerry: We have definitely seen some uptick since the start of COVID. We specifically see increased interest in retail, healthcare and home care. Retailers were shut down for a long time; as they open back up, it is clear that employees have financial obligations that may not be able to wait until the end of the pay period. Some individuals just need to get ahead or feed their families. So yes, there has definitely been an uptick in the demand for earned income access.
In manufacturing and healthcare, there are many hourly employees and gig workers who have varying schedules. These are also industries that tend to have complex pay systems, which has been to the advantage of UKG and DailyPay.
DailyPay: How do you explain how DailyPay works?
Jerry: Put simply, DailyPay is a solution that allows employers to give a great benefit to their employees. This benefit enables access to 100% of net earned income, on-demand, with just a small fee for that privilege. On the backend, DailyPay has a mechanism that interacts with the payroll system and processes in a way that makes DailyPay the on-demand pay industry leader in compliance. That is a unique value that DailyPay delivers, and my connections at DailyPay are always happy to get on a call and explain their value.
DailyPay: Why do you think it is important to offer on-demand pay from a specific vendor rather than as an extension of a payroll platform?
Jerry: We see our Marketplace as a place where end consumers can find solutions that meet their unique needs. Payroll is often a stable and slow-moving industry just by nature. It is very compliance-driven and focused on accurate outcomes. Having a specific vendor like DailyPay, who provides this type of benefit, is advantageous to everyone. It allows UKG to take advantage of the innovation in the market with the agility of solutions such as DailyPay.
DailyPay partners with a vast network of best-in-class HCM, payroll, TMS and pay card providers to make our solution more widely available to the American workforce. Through our Integration Partners like UKG, DailyPay can be offered to client companies as a turnkey solution. DailyPay is grateful to work closely with HCM professionals like Jerry to co-strategize and position our solutions with synergy to best meet the needs of employers and their employees.
