Employment Hero’s new super app gives workers main character treatment

The latest super app to drop isn’t by your typical consumer services or fintech company. Instead, it’s Employment Hero, the Australia-based human resources tech platform.

It works with over 200,000 clients – mainly small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) – to provide recruitment, payroll, and other HR solutions. Collectively, these businesses manage more than a million employees.

Employment Hero CEO and co-founder Ben Thompson / Photo credit: Employment Hero

In May, the near-unicorn launched Swag, an “employment super app” that offers its HR tools to workers, too.

Employees – only in Australia for now – can make payments via a digital Swag Spend account and Visa debit card. They can also enjoy cashback at select retail stores and service providers as well as earn discounts when they spend using their debit card.

Users can obtain their wages as they are earned via InstaPay, an earned-wage access (EWA) service, among other financial services. Such benefits, Employment Hero claims, are crucial for hiring and staff retention.

“Within five years, people will consider where they want to work based on the benefits they get with employment,” Employment Hero CEO Ben Thompson told Tech in Asia ahead of the Swag rollout. The ability to access and keep those benefits – like wages in real time – will become an important part of choosing a job, he added.

While Swag is free to use, the level of access and services available depend on the employer’s Employment Hero subscription.

Payroll before banking

The idea to combine payments, benefits, and work into one app was inspired by the super apps of Southeast Asia. “We were seeing all these super apps and going, ‘That’s the future.’ I don’t understand why Western countries haven’t done super apps yet,” Thompson says.

To him, wages and spending are effectively the opposite sides of the same coin.

Given that we are the source of pay, the proximity to payroll couldn’t be any closer than we are.

Every year, the firm processes A$80 billion (US$52.8 billion) worth of wages for its clients – the equivalent of “A$80 billion worth of payments and buying power,” he notes.

While developed markets like Singapore don’t lack for services offered by banks and fintech firms, Employment Hero is a contender to be a consumer’s primary deposit account. “Payroll comes before banking … and given that we are the source of pay, the proximity to payroll couldn’t be any closer than we are,” Thompson observes.

Using InstaPay, for instance, employees could receive and spend their wages before they are even credited into a bank account.

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