Integration Overview

What is Digital Employment Verification?

Digital Employment Verification is the ability for employees to share their employment and income information digitally with financial service providers - such as banks or mortgage lenders - directly from your payroll system. This eliminates the need for manual payslip requests and speeds up credit application decisions.

Paycircle supports this through two provider integrations:

· Experian Work Report™

· The Verification Exchange® from Equifax

What does it mean for your company?

A recent Experian survey of 230 HR and Payroll professionals shows that many large organisations receive an average of 150 requests a month from employees to source and share payroll data. This equates to 11 hours a month of HR and Payroll team’s time devoted to managing these requests.

Enabling Digital Employment Verification removes this administrative burden, reduces your carbon footprint (where paper payslips would otherwise have been shared), and supports a more direct and secure way of sharing employment information on behalf of your employees.

What does it mean for your employees?

Employees who are applicants for a credit application with their chosen financial institution are given the option to upload payslips manually, or to use a Digital Employment Verification service. If they choose to use the service, it automatically accesses (with their explicit consent) the required records from their employer and passes them to the service provider. This can provide direct confirmation of gross and net income, employment status, and tenure in a matter of seconds.

How do employees know they can use this service?

Each provider maintains a list of employers supplied by Access Group for those companies that have opted in to this service. If the financial institution uses one of these providers and if their employee is on that provider’s list, then they will be given the option to use the service at that point of transaction.

Is there a cost to my organisation for enabling this?

No. The integration is free for employers. There are no ongoing costs associated with enabling Digital Employment Verification for your employees.

How the Integration Works

What is required from my organisation to provide this service?

As an employer and Paycircle client, you control whether this feature is available for your employees by enabling it in your Paycircle system. Once you enable the integration, your employees will have the option to consent to a financial institution using the service to digitally share relevant employment and income data.

How does the integration work?

When the integration is enabled for your Paycircle instance, the relevant data for your employees is shared with a database hosted within the Access Group UK. This database exists solely to make data available for employees who choose to use the service.

Only when an employee opts in to using the service with their chosen financial institution, and provides their explicit consent, will the verification provider (Experian or Equifax) be able to access that employee’s data via a secure API – on a one-time, transaction-by-transaction basis.

Payslip data is held in the holding database for a rolling period of 12 months. Data older than 12 months is automatically deleted. If your organisation disables the integration, all corresponding data will be deleted from the holding database.

Will there be any changes in Paycircle visible to end users?

No. There are no changes within the Paycircle application. Admin users can view the option in Company Settings.

Can employees use this service if the integration is not enabled?

No. The only way for your employees to benefit from Digital Employment Verification is for your organisation to enable the integration in Paycircle. This ensures that at the point in time an employee needs to use the service, their data will be available to the verification provider. It is not possible for the integration to be enabled on an employee-by-employee basis.

Can an employer see when an employee has used the service?

No. The employer will not be notified of, or able to report on, employee usage of the Digital Employment Verification service. Employee financial transactions are kept private.

Can an employer enable for a specified provider only?

No. Once Digital Employment Verification is enabled, this applies to all providers.

Data Privacy

What data is shared?

Full details are available in the Access Digital Employment Verification Product Factsheet.

Employee information such as name and date of birth, along with a unique identifier (National Insurance (NI) number), is submitted by the employee as part of an application (e.g., for a loan or mortgage) and is used, with their consent, to locate their information in the Paycircle Digital Employment Verification feature, which then accesses that specific employee’s income and/or employment data and shares it on a one-time basis with their chosen Consumer Service Provider (e.g., a bank).

The data shared is specified by the Consumer Service Provider, selected by the employee. It is only ever the minimum amount required to process their application.

The verification provider collects the minimum data needed to enable a successful match and retrieval of the employee's payroll information from your payslip portal. Data is only requested once.

If an employee begins any other applications in the future, they will need to provide consent for information to be shared for each application.

Will Access be sending all employee data to Experian or Equifax?

No. Access has designed this integration with data privacy at its core. An additional separate database has been created, hosted within the Access Group network. Only the data required to support the verification service is held in that database.

Only when an employee elects to use the service with their chosen financial institution, and provides explicit consent, will the verification provider (Experian or Equifax) be permitted to access that individual employee’s record, on a one-time basis only.

Do employees need to consent to using this service?

Yes. Consent is required at the point of the credit application with the employee’s chosen financial institution. The employee explicitly consents to their information being requested from Paycircle via the verification service. If an employee begins any other application in the future, they will need to provide consent again for each new transaction.

Does the employer need to consent to the transfer of employee data?

As an employer, you control whether the service is made available for your employees via a system parameter in Paycircle. By opting in, you are simply enabling your employees to make the choice as to whether they would like to use the service; each use requires explicit individual employee consent.

Do I need to tell my employees about this service?

As a data controller of your employees’ data, you will need to determine whether a notification is required. By enabling Digital Employment Verification, you are simply making the option available to your workforce and giving your employees the choice to use this.

What if an employee leaves the company?

Once an employee is recorded as a leaver in Paycircle, their data is cleared from the integrated central database and can no longer be shared with the verification provider. If the employee has previously used the service, the provider may retain their data for the applicable audit period.

Where should an employee submit a Subject Access Request (SAR)?

A SAR should be submitted to the relevant data controllers. This will be with either the financial institution or the verification provider directly. This is also outlined to employees when they agree to the privacy policy of the service.

Is the data secure?

Yes. The data is held on a single multi-tenant database on Access Group’s infrastructure. Full details of this are provided in the Access Digital Employment Verification Product Factsheet.

Data is shared using secure Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that connect directly to The Access Group. Experian & Equifax are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and is required to manage data under the governance of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) guidelines and best practice. API access to that database is restricted to Experian by IP address.

Where does data get stored?

The Access holding database is hosted at Telehouse North, London Docklands, UK. The Experian Work Report solution is cloud-based, using AWS London Region and Azure Dublin/Amsterdam. Equifax operates cloud infrastructure with advanced security controls. All data processed as part of this service is subject to UK GDPR.

Is the integration available in non-production Paycircle environments?

No. The service is available only in the live production system and not in test environments. This is to prevent test or dummy data from being shared with the holding database. The integration should only be enabled once your payroll is live.