Check has the potential to become payroll’s “platform of platforms.”

MARIO GABRIELE NOV 03, 2021 를 PAID

This is a partner piece, which means it has been sponsored by Check. If you’d like to learn more about The Generalist’s partner program, its incentives, and ethical guidelines, just click here. As an unwavering principle, I will always note partnerships transparently and will only work with companies I consider truly exceptional and worth understanding deeply.

Money is often best visualized as water.

When we have it, we are “liquid” or “flush.” When we lose it, we are “washed out.” Money “flows” and sometimes “ebbs.” It moves through banks and platforms like water through pipes, and when we talk about companies like Stripe and Plaid we use the language of plumbing. It is a metaphor that works so well, has fit so cleanly that when someone speaks of “cash flows” it no longer registers as figurative.

In this world of liquid motion, Check is America’s boldest plumber and most ambitious urban planner. Founded in 2019, the company is taking on one of the great modern financial challenges: trying to fix the broken, byzantine piping of payroll.

In 2020, $8.9 trillion was paid in US wages. That’s an almost impossible sum to understand, though that makes it no less real.

It is about twice the GDP of Japan, more than four multiples of Brazil’s, and north of 22x that of prosperous Norway.

It is three and a half Apple market caps, four and a half Alphabets, and just shy of 10 of the entity formerly known as Facebook.

It is a figure so absurdly large that only contortion and comparison can help us make sense of it.

And all of it passed through a decrepit architecture - a leaking, crumbling aqueduct.

Does anyone like their payroll provider? It is for most, a place of dull pain, an inconvenience that must be endured because it manages something so essential: our money. No sane mind enjoys logging on to a legacy platform heaving under the burden of sixty-year old coding language, riddled with complexities.

A small but significant mental and emotional tax is levied when we use such systems, and it is repeated across the working population, month by month, as regular as, well…a paycheck.

Why have such inadequate solutions stood for so long? Why hasn’t the free market and the tech revolution not disrupted the old guard?

Payroll is extremely hard.

Any entrepreneur crazy enough to take up the challenge needs to assemble a team with both extreme technical skill and regulatory knowhow. Laws differ state by state, and change with political winds. Even these qualities would not be sufficient. Payroll is so deeply idiosyncratic that to get a handle on its intricacies, you need true experts onboard, people that have been in the industry long enough to understand how it works, and how it can be innovated upon.

You need all of this, and more.

You need patience and endurance. These are problems that don’t move easily.

You need intelligence and curiosity. You cannot mend a watch if you are quietly not mesmerized by its gears.

You need a sense of mission and a respect for payroll’s importance. The smallest error can ripple to the wallets of millions