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Ceridian INSIGHTS 2023: Dayforce Wallet is a Game-Changer in Employee Empowerment with Deepa Chatterjee of Ceridian and Melina Alvarado of Mister Car Wash

• William Tincup

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William Tincup sits down with Deepa Chatterjee COO of Consumer Services at Ceridian, and Melina Alvarado, Payroll Supervisor at Mister Car Wash to discuss the groundbreaking features of Dayforce Wallet. Join them as they dive into the world of employee empowerment and financial wellness, exploring the benefits of real-time access to earnings and on-demand pay. Discover how Dayforce Wallet is revolutionizing the way employees manage their finances and gain financial freedom.


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William Tincup:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tincup, and you are listening to the RecruitingDaily podcast. We are broadcasting from Insights, which is Ceridian and Dayforce's user conference. It's a wonderful conference. If you, If you have never been, you should come. You should put it on your radar for next year. Why I say Ceridian slash Dayforce is uh, Dayforce is becoming uh, Ceridian is becoming Dayforce in January. So it's a little bit of a dramatic foreshadowing of the, the rebranding, and it's beautiful, and there's a lot of energy to this conference. Uh, super, super, Super fun, so why don't we do introductions first? Deepa, would you do us a favor and tell us a little bit about yourself? Your rank, serial number, title, you know, the important stuff.

Deepa Chatterjee:

Right, um, Deepa Chatterjee um, and I am uh, the, I think the official title is COO, Dayforce Consumer Services, but I think that for um, uh, for the audience, it is uh, essentially that I bring. My team and I help bring Dayforce Wallet to life.

William Tincup:

Oh, cool. Okay. And Malina?

Melina Alvarado:

Hi, my name is Melina Alvarado, and I work for Mr. Car Wash. Um, We are the largest car wash industry in the United States currently. And um, I've been there about six and a half years, and I've served as a payroll supervisor.

William Tincup:

Oh, wow. Okay. Very cool. Now, where are y'all based? Where are you based?

Deepa Chatterjee:

I'm out of the Bay Area in California. Of course. I'm out of Tucson, Arizona.

William Tincup:

I went to U of A. I was uh, for grad school. I was there 94 to 97. Loved tucson. I Love Tucson. So I was up in the foothills. Never stayed on campus. Just had a, my wife and I had a place up in the foothills. And it was fantastic. Yes. Only reason I'm not in Tucson is at the time there wasn't a lot of industry. Now, with remote work. I could leave, I could leave today. Yeah. It's such a great city.

Melina Alvarado:

It is. It's a big little city.

William Tincup:

It is. It is. It is. It is. Uh, If you're in Texas uh, Fort Worth's like that. It's a big little city. Um, And it's, it's, it has the same vibe as Tucson, so very cool. All right. Now y'all had a session today. So tell me a little bit about the session. What did, What did you, when you, when, I know when you cook up. You know, Years in advance, or months in advance, you kind of cook up this idea like, Hey, let's talk about this, and then you get in front of an audience, you go way off script, and start talking about other stuff. Tell us about the session. What did y'all want people to learn from your session? Yeah

Deepa Chatterjee:

so, from our perspective, we were um, you know, I mean, I could talk about Dayforce Wallet all day long, but the thing is, is, it's... It's probably less interesting um, to hear me talk about it than to hear our customers talk about it. And so for, you know, for prospects who, for prospective customers who don't offer Wallet today um, having Melina and we had a couple of other customers who were up on the panel, having them talk about their experiences, why they offer Wallet, how they decided to, you know, how they vetted the product um, their experiences since its launch. That was, I think, super helpful for people to hear, not just me rattle off statistics and surveys.

William Tincup:

What about yourself? How was the experience for you?

Melina Alvarado:

I enjoyed the sessions. I think that's definitely a good perspective. I know in the past, when we had our other team members come before we had integrated Dayforce Wallet, that was what helped them learn, ask questions about it, get some more information to kind of... get the customer's perspective of it, which is really nice, because sometimes they just only hear the company side of, you know, this product is so great, but it's good to hear the other side of things.

William Tincup:

I think for practitioners, it's uh, it's almost, it's almost critical to hear, because we've been doing this for a long time, and a practitioner will listen, so that y'all are both wonderful, beautiful people, everything's both smart, but a practitioner, if I'm a CHRO, I'm going to listen to you. Not that you wouldn't tell me the truth. Of course you'd tell me the truth, but for whatever reason, you're doing the job, you're in the weeds, you're working with the technology, you're logging in every day, you're doing stuff. So that practitioner voice and having a practitioner talk to other practitioners, I think it's critical.

Deepa Chatterjee:

Do you know, and we really saw it in the q and a. Yeah. Um, People would ask questions, , and there was almost this sort of sigh of relief because, Everybody on the panel had experienced the same thing, and then there's so, in some ways, there was so much more trust with what they were hearing, because as you said, it's a practitioner, it's somebody who's actually living it every day.

William Tincup:

I love that, I love it. What type of questions did you get?

Melina Alvarado:

You know, How we implemented it, what made us, you know, implement the program, and anything that we've discovered as far as feedback from our employees. Um, Senior leadership, of course, when we implemented it um, is important to, you know, tell them why we wanted this product and how it was going to benefit our employees. So those are the type of questions that we went over. I love

William Tincup:

it. You know what we forgot to do? What's that? Say what, what wallet is. We should probably do that for the audience in case they're not, you know, like up on technology We should probably talk about like what it is that you do What is wallet if you're describing

Deepa Chatterjee:

it? Sure, Sure, we can definitely talk about wallet. So the Dayforce wallet is essentially it is an app on your phone and using this app you can do two things that are sort of unusual and the critical value. The first is that You can get a sense, you can open it up, and you can see real time, up until that point, your gross earnings, your taxes, your deductions, and so your net earnings. So that means that for an employee, say a shift worker, who doesn't maybe have a schedule that's you know, that's so predictable, they have this information, this data at their disposal. about how much they've earned up until that point. That, in and of itself, is very useful for people. It goes a long way towards their financial wellness. But the second thing, then, is that there's a pink button, and you can use that pink button to then request what we call on demand pay. Right. So, Of your net earnings up until that point, you can request to have those, and those are then deposited into your wallet account. Immediately. Right. And you access it, the wallet account comes with not just the app, but also a card, a MasterCard prepaid card. Right. You can use that card, you can go out and spend it at a retailer, at a gas station, you can use an ATM, we have a network of free ATMs, and um, and you can actually uh, you can use that solution to uh, meet any of your needs, that, where you have a cash need between paychecks um, and so that's essentially what the wallet is.

William Tincup:

And so, sometimes in the industry, what is it, is it earned wage access? Earned wage access, that's right. How are, How are folks using it? Like, uh, Some of your employees, without naming names or anything like, but, you know, how are they using Wallet? Um, They

Melina Alvarado:

use it for a variety of things. I mean, Emergency based is kind of how we, you know, started off saying, Yeah, you have an emergency, you need a gap in between paydays. Right. But, we have employees that use it daily. And um, our current setup with our company allows them to use it daily. So, you know, Maybe they wanted to go out with their friends and then expect an unexpected lunch. There's

Deepa Chatterjee:

refunds. Oh, I

William Tincup:

love that. I love that. Because, you know, like with Uber, you can tab out after a drive. If you're an Uber driver, you can literally tab out, hit your account, you can use it. So I love that. I see it also not, not just in the hourly market, but I also see it now moving into the corporate market. Which is really crazy to think of, that you're an accountant, and all of a sudden you've worked so many days, you're a salaried employee, and it's like, I wanna, I want access to that money that I've earned. I

Deepa Chatterjee:

mean, I think two things are happening. The first is that um, employees are consumers. Right. And consumer applications are becoming much more real time, on demand, and if you think about it, you're um, Your, you know, your bills don't wait to show up every two weeks. No, turns out. When you need to go to the garage and fix your car, that doesn't wait until you have money in your account. No. It happens. And so, um, so much like that where the rest of their lives are happening on demand and at their control, employees are now looking for that to happen on their, you know, on their um, on their own terms. The second thing that I would say is that because um, You know, because of the advent of uh, uh, of gig work and, you know, expectations for consumers, particularly this segment, you have a segment that's sort of an hourly shift worker, but it starts to become for um, you see the same patterns for younger consumers. So you could be a salaried younger consumer, you're still establishing yourself. And you still need to tap into funds between, between paydays.

William Tincup:

Yeah, and it keeps us away from predatory uh, kind of payday loans. I mean, That, that industry is uh, it's just not a great industry. It's, It's predatory, and it's, they call it predatory lending for a reason, because it's predatory uh, and this gets us away from that. The emergencies still happen, but now there's an actual, a way, a legitimate way to access your money and uh, not, not have 40 percent of your paycheck taken

Deepa Chatterjee:

from you. Yeah, you know, we try to be very thoughtful with, with uh, with the pricing of the product. And so, you know, for many of our competitors, when you do an earned wage access transaction, you have to pay a fee on it. And so, say you, say you, say you got like a hundred dollars of your, of your income and then you had to pay five dollars on it. That is a meaningful amount. Right, Of course. Um, Whereas for us, we keep it free for the end consumer. Genius. So your, your employees are getting their pay. Well, You don't pay to access your paycheck every two weeks. Right. You shouldn't, You shouldn't pay to access your uh, your on demand pay. That's a better

William Tincup:

model. I mean, I think it's better for the employees too. It's also better to sell it to people and say, hey, this is why you can use it. This is why it's important. And oh, by the way, it's your money. Yes. Oh, you keep all

Melina Alvarado:

your money. Yeah. You know, I, I also think uh, another benefit to it is, you know, I think kind of as we're moving to a more modern age, a lot of people don't like banks and that's what's really nice about Dayforce Wallet is they can get their direct deposit on there, they control it, they can see it, they can transfer funds to their Apple Pay and their Google Pay and things like that and that's, they're, everything's on their smartphone. Right. Easy. Flexible.

William Tincup:

Well, My wife uses uh, Zelle more than like, I don't even know if we have checks. I would, of course, be the last person to know if we have checks, but she uses Zelle for everything. It's crazy. And so, like, you're right, this is the modern age where people just, they want transparency. Which I think Wallet, I think this is a wonderful way of actually saying, this is what you've earned, this is where you're at. You know, Just having that transparency at a point in your life where you need the transparency, you just... desire the transparency because of everything else you get that's transparent. Um, Was it a hard sell when you, when you, when you kind of talk to your executives about it? Was it a tough sell?

Melina Alvarado:

No, it wasn't actually. Um, We had a previous product um, and we felt this was so much better for, you know, even from the integration standpoint to how easy it is to use. The fact that we weren't charging our employees a fee to get their own money was something that was great for us. And um, I mean, Dayforce made it just really easy for us to make that decision and to have that other component with the product we were already using to process everything. It's, everything's

William Tincup:

there. Yeah, it makes it easy for the payroll department, right? Very easy. Click, click, click, click, Click,

Melina Alvarado:

done. Yeah, there's little to no work on our end at all.

William Tincup:

That's the way it should be. Because now you can use your mind to do other things. This is the thing about HR that's kind of held HR back for years. Their entire week is firefighting. And if you can take away some of the firefighting and something like payroll and say, yeah, it's not that much firefighting, now you can use your brain to then innovate and think about other ways to help make the employee experience better. Yes.

Deepa Chatterjee:

If I may also add, Yes, you may. Part of what Molino is very smart to do, and we heard this from some of our other, from some of the other panelists who were customers, was... They spent a very long time using the product themselves. Genius. So that they were sure about how it would work when they released it out to their employee base. So they actually registered for an account, got an account, went out and transacted in the real, in the real world. Tried to return things and things like that. Genius. And um, and essentially as they, they, they put it, they tried to break the product. So we called our panel Women Breaking Things.

William Tincup:

Genius on so many levels. Genius on so many levels because again. Now you've got, when you talk to employees, it's like, yeah, we've had it for six months. We've been trying to break it, and you might be able to break it. But so, we're not going to say it's perfect, because no technology is. However, we've tried to break it. So we've returned things, we've bought things on Amazon, we've returned them, we've done this, we've gone to the grocery store, we've done this, we've done everything. But, I think it gives the employees that much more of an assurance that, A, it's something you should care about. B, okay, I might run into a problem, but... It's probably less likely that I'm going to run into that problem.

Melina Alvarado:

Definitely. I feel like it worked out great because when they do call us, you know, as they do sometimes, they're having an issue, they can't figure something out, we're able to be like, Did you try this? Did you try this? And we're able to walk them through it completely and they're like, Oh yeah, I didn't even think about that, you know, and we know it because we

Deepa Chatterjee:

used

William Tincup:

it. Yeah, you tried to, and you tried to break it, which is genius. What were some of the other questions from the panel? What were some of the other Q& A? I find the questions at panels sometimes the best. Uh, Stuff. Is it a Q& A? Yeah. Like, Because it's just like they have such, you know, just crazy questions and stuff like that, so... Well,

Deepa Chatterjee:

the really, the really classic question is um, sort of, sort of around, you know, how do I make sure that my employees aren't going to run out of money? That they're not going to um, take all of their pay and then they'll get to payday and they won't have um, they won't have enough um, enough to actually meet the rest of their needs. And Melina, I thought you had a very... Um, Again, a very elegant answer to that. Don't underestimate your employees.

Melina Alvarado:

100%. They are financially responsible enough to know what they have, and since everything's there on the app, there's no question to what they're able to do to manage their own money, and know that, where they're going to be at payday, based on, I've taken this amount,

Deepa Chatterjee:

I've taken this

William Tincup:

amount. I think it's an older world, but first of all, I think it's wonderful, the answer is genius, but it's, it's kind of an older world view like, we have to take care of them. It's very parental, right? In nature, like we've got to somehow shield them from the real world, and we'll keep the money and we'll give it to them at the appropriate time. I think that's uh, I think that's kind of an old fashioned model, kind of an old fashioned mindset.

Deepa Chatterjee:

You know It may be a little bit, but I also think that employers have their employees like, long term interests at heart. They, They need to show up and they want to make sure that they are not worried about their financial wellness and their financial stability when they show up every day. So I think there's a little bit of um, of that concern behind it is that, you know, what is, you know, is this going to work for my employee in six months? But the other thing that I want to say that we heard from the panelists in that regard was um, The first is that, you know, there are a, there are a couple of settings that the employers themselves can set. Right. So that um, so that they can actually um, kind of test out the program and make sure that... Calibrate it. Calibrate it and make sure that it works for their employee

William Tincup:

population. So something like that you can get 80 percent of, of their pay, but, you know, kind of holding back a little bit of it or something like

Deepa Chatterjee:

that? That's right, yeah, that's right. Smart. And then the other thing that we heard is um, that just um, a couple of them, and Lelena, I can't remember if you guys did this, but they actually just tested it themselves. They just took it and they tested it and they got comfortable with it and they sort of gradually rolled it out so that they're, you know, they're able to kind of, um, see what their employees are doing and get comfortable with it.

Melina Alvarado:

And we actually like the functions of being able to change the percentages based on how we feel our employees would use it. And um, different, you know, pay codes that you can include in it, or not include in it. So, It's awesome that it's very, very

William Tincup:

customizable. Well, it's, It's also because you're sitting on the data. You can do what Reagan said, trust but verify, right? So, You can look at your employees, and if, if they change for whatever reason, they spend outside of their limits well, you dial it back a little bit. In their interest. You do it because of their interest. Uh, I think that's just smart. I think that's just good business. I also think it's a real clever retention tool. Right, So once an employee gets used to this, gets used to Wallet, they might not want to go work somewhere else. Have you heard that before? Have you

Deepa Chatterjee:

thought about that before? Yeah, I mean, we have, so when we um, when we look at the data, and we look at our um, day four uh, customers who have the Wallet, and calibrate against those that don't have Wallet, we've seen that um, Wallet really helps out in um, The three areas, the first is recruiting becomes faster, particularly for those types of positions, so I think 13 percent quicker time to hire uh, for, for customers that offer wallet and can, can go out with it as a benefit when they're

William Tincup:

recruiting. That's like the first thing a recruiter should say. Yes, you have access to your money.

Deepa Chatterjee:

Next. Immediately. Well, The second that we see is that um, from an employer perspective, is when uh, when an employee knows that they need extra funds um, they will pick up extra shifts. Right. Because they know that they can get access to their money um, immediately. And so you can think about Christmas and the holidays coming up. And, you know, and people are going to want to, you know, spend on their family and friends and they're, and they're going to pick up extra shifts so that they can, they can do that and then use the wallet to, to get the funds immediately. So I think we saw something like 56 percent of employees who have Wallet do that. Right. But then the last one, and this is going back to your question on retention, is it does impact retention. So we find that for employers who offer Wallet. Um, I believe it's something like uh, 25% um, lower attrition in those uh, sort of hourly shift workers uh, than for employers who don't. So I think that it has material benefits, not just for the employee, but for the employer as well. I can see that. Yeah, I would agree.

Melina Alvarado:

Um, Definitely, you know, I hear our recruiters all the time when I'm in the office with them. I can hear them making those phone calls to those potential candidates or the ones that they're actually onboarding already. And Dave Friswalla is definitely one of

Deepa Chatterjee:

the things that they mentioned.

William Tincup:

And again, it's the, I mean, it's for the prospect or the candidate. That's going to be something that's on their mind. And I think that the way we've thought about payroll, whether or not it's every week or every two weeks or once a month, whatever the bid is, we've thought of it as standard. And you mentioned it earlier, spending or life experiences or whatever these, that's burstable. It's seasonal. Like you mentioned Christmas that got me to think about it, it's like if you haven't saved for Christmas, you're going to have this big expense and you don't have the money for it. And again, people get taken advantage of if they don't have that money, either they take the money out of savings or out of the stock market or they, you know, go to payday loans or something like that. So, I absolutely love it. Is there anything that we haven't covered about the uh, the session? Okay, so next year what I want to do with women breaking stuff is I want to actually have a record room. So do this session and then everybody get geared up and then break stuff. Can we do that?

Deepa Chatterjee:

I think that would be really exciting. Um, I'm just waiting for uh, for Dayforce to come out with the liability waivers.

William Tincup:

Yeah, yeah, Yeah. No, No, don't worry about that. The risk, The risk is minimal. Don't worry about it. Um, Last thing is, is what did y'all want to get out of it outside of your session and doing a great job there? What else do you want to get out of Insight?

Melina Alvarado:

I was here to learn about new innovative products that are coming this way. I heard about some today that I'm very excited about and can't wait because I feel it's going to help make things easier on our end for payroll processing, which is anything that can make it easier and done faster is great

William Tincup:

for us. And accuracy. Yes. One thing in HR that you can't mess up. Definitely. Yeah. How

Deepa Chatterjee:

about yourself? I mean, I, you know, I, I live and breathe the Dayforce world every day. I also um, I'm, you know, I work virtually, so I sit in my home office and I, and I, I talk at my computer for hours on end. So,

William Tincup:

Just the human contact is good

Deepa Chatterjee:

for you? The human contact is great. It is great to be able to meet customers. 100%. And that's been a lot of fun um, both with Melina and our other panelists at our booths and being able to talk to prospective customers, new customers, it's been great. I think

William Tincup:

the, the putting the, the secret sauce is putting prospects and customers together and just getting out of the way and letting them talk. And then because they'll tell the real story, they'll ask the real questions, but y'all have been absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for carving out time for us. Thank you. Thank you. Absolutely. Thanks for everybody listening. Until next time.

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