How to instantly access payroll data

For auto lenders and risk managers, the race to verify income is often a race against two opponents: friction and fraud.

Traditional verification methods are proving increasingly inadequate in today's digital-first market. Asking a borrower to download a PDF paystub, save it, and upload it to a portal adds significant friction to the user experience, leading to drop-offs. Worse, it opens the door to document tampering. With widely available editing software, altering a PDF paystub to inflate income takes minutes, leaving lenders vulnerable to bad debt.

In an environment where speed is currency and risk management is paramount, relying on manual document review is a liability. The solution lies in shifting from document-based verification to data-based verification. By leveraging payroll connectivity and intelligent automation, lenders can verify income instantly, ensuring the data is both accurate and immutable.

The advantages of payroll data access

Payroll data access represents a paradigm shift in how lenders view borrower information. Instead of relying on a static snapshot provided by the applicant (which may be outdated or forged), lenders can tap directly into the source of truth: the payroll provider.

The primary advantage is data integrity. When you access data directly from a payroll platform—whether it’s ADP, Paychex, or a gig economy platform like Uber—you are viewing the exact data the employer has on file. This eliminates the possibility of document manipulation.

Furthermore, payroll data access offers granular insights that a simple paystub cannot. Beyond just gross and net pay, direct access can reveal employment tenure, job title changes, and payroll frequency. This depth of data allows risk managers to build more robust underwriting models and make decisions with greater confidence.

With MeasureOne, this access is expansive. The platform boasts 4.5X the industry average for payroll coverage, connecting to over 8,100 payroll processors. This ensures that regardless of who your applicant works for, you can likely verify their income instantly.

How to simplify income verification by connecting to borrower payroll accounts

The mechanism behind this improved verification is consumer-permissioned data. It turns a tedious manual process into a seamless digital interaction.

Here is how connecting to borrower payroll accounts works in practice:

1. Consent: During the application process, the borrower is prompted to verify their income. They select their payroll provider from a list or search bar.
2. Authentication: The borrower logs in using their existing credentials for their payroll portal. This is a familiar action for anyone who has ever checked their paystub online.
3. Data Transmission: Once authenticated, the API establishes a secure connection and instantly pulls the required data points—income, employment status, and pay history—delivering them directly to your loan origination system (LOS).

This process takes seconds, not days. For the borrower, it’s as easy as logging into an app. For the lender, it means receiving standardized, machine-readable data that can be immediately fed into decisioning engines.

Reducing manual stips for income verification

Stipulations, or "stips," are the enemy of conversion. Every time an underwriter has to pause a deal to ask for a missing page of a bank statement or a clearer copy of a paystub, the chances of that loan closing decrease.

By automating the data collection process, you can significantly reduce the need for manual stips. When data is pulled directly from the source, there are no blurry images to decipher and no missing pages to chase down. The data is complete and verified upon receipt.

This efficiency translates directly to the bottom line. Automated verification processes can lower your costs by as much as 90% compared to legacy manual alternatives. By reducing manual stips for income verification, your underwriting team spends less time chasing paper and more time analyzing complex files that actually require human judgment.

The role of paystub parsing in efficient verification

While direct payroll connection is the gold standard, not every borrower remembers their payroll login credentials, and not every employer uses a major payroll platform. To ensure 100% coverage of the US workforce, lenders need a fail-safe that is just as efficient as the primary method.

This is where paystub parsing and Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) come into play.

Modern IDP is not just simple OCR (Optical Character Recognition) that struggles with different fonts or layouts. Advanced solutions combine deterministic parsing with Artificial Intelligence to read documents like a human would, but with the speed of a machine.

MeasureOne’s document processing solution, for example, handles structured and unstructured documents with 100% accuracy. If a borrower cannot connect their payroll account, they can simply upload a digital paystub. The AI instantly extracts the relevant data, verifies it against known formats to detect tampering, and standardizes it for your system. This ensures that even "manual" uploads are processed with automated speed.

Streamlining direct deposit switching

For many lenders, particularly credit unions and banks, the auto loan is an anchor product intended to build a broader banking relationship. Gaining the borrower’s direct deposit is the holy grail of this relationship, as it significantly reduces default risk and increases customer lifetime value.

However, moving a direct deposit is traditionally a hassle for consumers, involving HR forms and voided checks.

Automated payroll connectivity solves this by streamlining direct deposit switching. Once a user has connected their payroll account for income verification, they can opt to switch their direct deposit allocation to the new lender with a single click. Because the connection to the payroll system is already established, the change is instant and verified. This capability not only secures the loan payment but also positions the lender as the borrower’s primary financial institution.

Comprehensive verification for modern lenders

The auto finance industry is evolving, and risk management strategies must evolve with it. Relying on outdated manual checks in a digital world is a recipe for slow growth and high fraud.

MeasureOne offers a holistic suite of solutions designed to meet these challenges head-on. Whether through automated VOIE (Verification of Income and Employment) for direct payroll connections, VOI (Verification of Income) for broader data access, or advanced document processing for gap-free coverage, MeasureOne ensures you have the data you need to make fast, accurate lending decisions.

By integrating these tools, you don't just protect your collateral; you create a smoother, faster experience that borrowers appreciate.