Why we rebuilt income verification on payroll-direct connections
Bank transactions are noisy. Payroll connections cut verification time from days to seconds — and dramatically reduce fraud.
For five years we verified income the way everyone else did: pull bank transactions, classify the deposits, and infer payroll. It worked, mostly. But it was slow, noisy, and increasingly easy to spoof.
The problem with bank-based income
Bank transactions tell you that money arrived. They don't tell you who it came from, whether it's recurring, or whether the deposit description is accurate. We were spending 40% of our verification budget on classification models — and still missing things like contract roles, multi-employer income, and pay frequency changes.
Going to the source
Payroll-direct connections pull data from the system of record: the candidate's payroll provider. We get gross pay, net pay, employer name, pay frequency, YTD totals, and tax withholdings — straight from the source, with cryptographic provenance.
What changed
- Median verification time dropped from 2.4 days to 11 seconds.
- Fraud rate on income verifications fell by 94%.
- Customer support tickets related to income disputes dropped by 71%.
- We now cover 92% of US W-2 workers and 64% of 1099 contractors.
What's next
We're rolling out international payroll coverage in Q3, starting with Canada, the UK, and Mexico. If you'd like early access, ping your account team.