Global Fintech Interview with Kevin Doerr, Chief Product Officer at DailyPay

Hi Kevin, welcome to our Fintech Interview Series. Please tell us about your tech journey and your story behind joining DailyPay as the new Chief Product Officer.

I’ve worked alongside and led engineering and product teams for over 20 years where I’ve been fortunate enough to work with great teams at startups, mid-size and large public companies.  I’ve also worked on an interesting cross-section of services, including large consumer communications platforms, internet infrastructure, and more recently fintech and payment systems.

I was interested in DailyPay’s mission to change how people can better plan and manage their finances and live a better life which is why I decided to join their team.

How is DailyPay reshaping the payments module? What exactly are you providing to your clients?

DailyPay partners with America’s leading employers in just about every industry, from restaurants to retail, to offer a benefit that enables employees access to their earned income as they earn it. For decades, employees were controlled by these invisible rules of money whereby you were only given biweekly access to your pay even when you worked and earned your pay. To address this challenge, DailyPay built a new financial system that’s centered around the employee.

Our first-of-its-kind technology platform gives our users a real-time accumulating balance of available funds as they work throughout the pay period. We have seen DailyPay users, who once relied on overdraft and credit to make it to the next payday, begin to save their hard-earned pay before payroll is even run. By putting money in the hands of the people when they need it and when they earn it, we can break the negative cycle of financial stress that has endured for too long.

For our clients, DailyPay is a zero-cost benefit that employees love.

The companies we work with are still operating in a tight labor market, and need benefits like DailyPay to attract and retain talent. America’s leading employers leverage DailyPay to hire faster and retain employees longer, which can be a critical differentiation during challenging economic times.

Also Read: Global Fintech Interview with Paul Monk, Chief Executive Officer at Alpha Development

Employee time on the job increases by 27% on average when employees use DailyPay. How does DailyPay work with technology?

Managing multiple or variable income streams (multiple employers, varying shifts, etc.)  can be a challenge for many employees. DailyPay enables them to better predict, plan and manage their income streams; enabling them to perform better at work and at home. Predictability and stability lead to better employee retention overall.

Which applications of AI and ML have made your digital platform frictionless with on-demand pay solutions with modern, insight-driven pay strategies?

Many. Applied ML shows up in multiple areas across our services. Typical applications would include improving our ability to better match employees with their employer systems, providing suggestions to improve financial wellness, managing financial risk, and identifying and preventing fraud. We expect this list to grow dramatically as the technology matures.

When it comes to strategizing a young fintech product or innovation, what, according to you, should marketing and sales teams in newer fintech startups be focusing on more, given that they do have interesting products and ideas in the pipeline?

Great question. Ideally, even a small organization has created a mechanism or approach to incorporating valuable customer feedback into the product planning loop. This may take the form of a monthly group forum, living document, or other tool capturing feedback or other inputs. Most important is that both the customer and the product teams are spending time directly in front of customers to learn first-hand how to best solve their challenges.

Also Read: Global Fintech Interview with Diallo Gordon, CPO & CMO, Digital Payments at Passport Technology

With cybercrime on the rise, how safe is it to use DailyPay? Which security tools are you using to protect your client’s interests?

Very safe – as in bank-grade safe. Security is a super high priority for any financial service, it’s no different at DailyPay. We employ the latest technologies (both our own and 3rd parties) to build a set of defensive capabilities that protect our customer’s interests.

Our handling of data and payments is compliant with all standards and governance requirements. Because we’re moving money at scale, our infrastructure provides constant and varied checks for fraud and abuse. This includes everything from KYC and AML checks on the front door of our applications to applied machine learning that reviews transactions for potential fraud patterns. Rather than disclose our specific tools and security products here, we work hard to reduce the surface area that bad actors may consider interesting.

What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?

Build a great team and delegate.

What are your predictions for the pay tech domain for the next couple of years?

Tough one, predictions are a bad business. I have one that seems likely. We’re moving inexorably to a point where payroll will want to be run and disbursed every hour, every day. Perhaps not for all disciplines or work environments, but the idea that people should be paid at one, two, or four-week intervals has expired. The complexity of payroll has been fully conquered by software and compute ability.

We just need the rest of the world to catch up.

Also Read: Global Fintech Interview with Sam Compton, Director of Operations at Chetwood Financial

Tag (mention/write about) the one person in the tech industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read!

David Cutler

Thank you, Kevin! That was fun and we hope to see you back on globalfintechseries.com soon.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]