One of the UK’s leading payroll software providers, PayCaptain, has recently launched a new feature in its app to help employed people become more financially resilient.

The new feature, ‘SmartPay’, has been born out of PayCaptain’s thorough market research into employee savings behaviour, which has uncovered that a notable proportion of UK workers are having issues with their financial security.

To gather this information, PayCaptain worked with both Nest Insight and the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) over a period of 15 months on a paper around using payroll to build financial resilience - discovering that almost half of UK workers experience financial difficulties. The research has also determined that people with variable and unpredictable incomes are more likely to be impacted by poor financial wellbeing, and the majority of workers feel they would benefit from personalised support and guidance regarding money management.

SmartPay was then designed with this research in mind, and PayCaptain also worked with the BIT to curate SmartPay’s functionality in order to help users overcome the ‘behavioural barriers’ that many - according to their study - are said to be having with making savings.

The technology also offers a variety of personalised financial services, all delivered via PayCaptain’s mobile app. These services - which sit alongside PayCaptain’s existing payroll tools - are powered by bespoke recommendations for employees that they can make to build their financial resilience at key points.

During SmartPay’s onboarding journey, for instance, a user has to answer a series of questions designed by the Money and Pensions Service to measure their existing ‘financial resilience’, before giving them a unique ‘well being score’. This score is then used to tailor the financial recommendations they receive. An example of this being if an employee received a pay rise or bonus, SmartPay would acknowledge this in real time and automatically offer appropriate suggestions where this employee could save their money and how much they could put away.

Simon Bocca, the Founder of PayCaptain, offered these thoughts on SmartPay and how it can be used:

“Our research quickly showed us that millions of people would benefit from guidance with their money, so it simply made sense for us to create SmartPay as a way for employees to benefit far more from the process of getting paid. We also wanted to make sure that SmartPay was intuitive and easy to use, which is why we worked so closely with the BIT on its functionality.

“Ultimately, being able to get automatic prompts and recommendations at key points and to move appropriate amounts of money in just a few taps really takes friction out of what some people find to be difficult decisions and subsequently helps overcome barriers to saving. The results so far from those using SmartPay have been very positive too; we’ve seen a 205% increase in the numbers of users now making savings, while so far 7 out 10 employees who were shown SmartPay have told us they want to use it.”

An early adopter of SmartPay is existing PayCaptain client, Dishoom, who have already championed the positive impact the feature has had with the employees who use it. Kate Moscardini, Head of People at Dishoom, offered these comments:

“SmartPay has brought about a whole new level of positive financial engagement and education for Dishoom employees. More people are saving money regularly with the option of FSCS protected, interest bearing savings accounts. More people are putting extra into their retirement funds and over £45,000’s worth of state benefits have been identified that the team could be missing out on claiming. The launch saw high numbers of engagement and it’s been fantastic to watch the numbers of savers grow, knowing they have extra peace of mind with access to a financial buffer that they did not have before”.

PayCaptain also hopes that businesses whose employees use SmartPay will begin to realise a variety of additional benefits. This is because PayCaptain believes that a financially resilient and secure workforce will lead to lower stress levels and increased productivity, engagement and efficiency.

SmartPay officially launched November 2024 and new or existing customers are also able to book a demo if they would like to trial the new feature before choosing to upgrade.