The UK digital payslip landscape
MisthoGiven that payslips are a legal requirement for UK employers, there is surprisingly little data available about payroll digitalization.
To better understand the market of digital payslips, we at Mistho conducted some in-depth research including a study with 1000 UK employees.
Let’s take a look at the results and additional insights together.
First things first: Why does Mistho care about payroll digitization levels?
We want to democratize access to and control over employment and income data, and especially, we want to give that control to the actual owner of the data — the employee. A baseline for this is the employee having access to their employment and income data, ergo their payslips, at any given time and online.
For us to build our open payroll API, a certain level of online payslip access is critical.
Next, let’s talk about the UK market insights gained from our study with 1000 participants:
The basis for every good study is a robust and credible representative sample. We conducted our research across a population of 1000 UK employees that work for employers of different sizes as visualized below. Our goal is to enable everyone to be able to use our solution, so including as many different sectors and types of companies and categories of employees is crucial for us to establish the right conclusions.
- There is a positive correlation between company size and digital payslip access. The second insight was that the larger the employer, the more likely they are to offer employees access to digital payslips via online portals.
- Approximately 30% of small companies, (with <50 employees) offer digital payslips.
- Approximately 80% of large companies, (with >5000 employees) offer digital payslips.
- Another interesting finding is that for companies with >50 employees, the level of digital payslip access was above 50%.
Our conclusion
From this research, it is clear that the digital transformation of employee personal employment data is already underway in the Uk. We believe that these levels of digitization are only the start and we expected further increases in SME digitization in the next few years.
2. On average, 60% of the UK employed population already has access to their payslips via an online portal. Following a closer look at different company sizes we can conclude that across the whole population, a total of 60% of employees can already access their payslips via online portals. So, approximately 20 million UK adults are already using a digital income verification tool like Mistho.
3. The market for digital payslip access is fragmented. Our study shows that there is a wide variety of systems in use today. There are several ways of providing digital access to employees.
- Via payroll providers: Employers offer digital payslip access via the employee-self-service portal of their HR or payroll service provider (e.g. Sage, Xero, ADP etc.)
- Via company-owned portals: Other employers (especially larger firms) have their own purpose-built portals for digital payslip access (e.g. NHS, Tesco etc.)
- Via digital payslip providers: There are several companies entering the market who provide third-party digital payslip distribution services. (e.g. epayslip, easypaye etc.)
This market fragmentation is a challenge as there are hundreds of payroll systems across these categories, which makes providing one standard data pipeline even more valuable.
Beyond the data, we believe digital payslip access will further grow rapidly due to its advantages for companies and employees alike.
End-user (employees) advantages:
- 24/7 and instant access to payslips when needed
- High-quality pdf outputs (no phone pictures or bad quality scans)
- A central place for all payslips (no need to file paperwork or search for paper payslips in your flat or house anymore)
- Self-service adjustment of employee information (address, bank routing number, holidays, shifts, etc.)
Companies (employers) advantages:
- Employees have better control over their income data
- Environmentally sustainable solution compared to paper payslips
- Lower friction in HR departments due to simple and direct processing of requests (e.g., employment verifications)
Misthos’ open payroll API leverages digital payslip access.
Digital payslip access is the foundation of open payroll. Mistho enables people with online payslip access to digitally share their income and employment data with lending platforms, banks, rental platforms, and landlords without giving access to their whole spending history via open banking or having to manually upload documents.
Lenders, banks, mortgage brokers, rental platforms, and rental agencies can all improve their client experience through Mistho’s solution. We can help to make the credit scoring process easier and faster by making high-quality verified income information easily accessible.
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Not sure if Mistho is for you? Get in contact with our team and together we will figure it out: info@mistho.io
