The following interview is a conversation we had with Matt Pierce, CEO of Immediate, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $15 Million Raised to Eliminate the Costly Price of Financial Stress in the Workforce

Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode. Hey everyone, and thanks for listening. Today I’m speaking with Matt Pierce, CEO and Founder of Immediate, a financial wellness platform that’s raised more than 15 million in funding. Matt, thanks for chatting with me today. 

Matt Pierce
Absolutely glad to be here, Brett. 

Brett
Yeah. So before we begin talking about what you’re building at Immediate, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background. 

Matt Pierce
So Matt Pierce, like you said, Founder and CEO of immediate we’re headquartered in Birmingham, satellite offices over in Atlanta. And it’s interesting. I’ve been a healthcare technology guy most of my career, and until I started this in the Fintech and the HR tech, it straddles both lines. And I started this in September 2018, and I’ve been building it ever since, but took a lot of what I learned in my early career of just going out, being part of high growth tech companies. The first company I was in had a rapid growth and ended up having IPO in 2012 and we exited for about $650,000,000 a few years later to a big private equity firm. 

Matt Pierce
And so kind of took some of those learnings and then started investing in myself and what I wanted to go do and always had a dream of becoming an entrepreneur. And so here I am. 

Brett
Amazing. Well, let’s talk about that entrepreneurship. So to dive into Immediate, in simple terms, what does the company do? 

Matt Pierce
The easiest way to explain what Immediate does is that we allow employees to access earned but unpaid wages in between paydays. The idea here is that we’re giving them a financial safety net, right. Unexpected things happen and bills don’t always match up with payday. And so we seamlessly connect with time tracking and payroll systems. So at the end of a shift, they can see how much money they’ve earned and access that for a nominal transaction fee. 

Brett
Interesting. And are there specific verticals that you’re focused on? 

Matt Pierce
It’s funny, as the company continues to grow and mature, I mentioned we’re about four years old. It took us about a year to get the first company going, jumping through legal regulatory compliance hurdles, writing the code, and getting the proof of concept out there. So we’ve been at this for about three years, and in the first year or so of selling, we really took anything, right? Let’s just figure out what makes sense and let’s make sure that we’ve got a scalable platform in place. And then what we started doing was evaluating the data and seeing areas, verticals and individuals and demographics that were enrolling and utilizing the platform the most. And so in the past year, we’ve really started to zero in on two industries that we feel like are the best fit for us and for our platform, and that’s healthcare and hospitality. 

Matt Pierce
Those are places where because of reference ability, of course, we can move pretty quickly through a sales process and we can also go in and see pretty high enrollment where in some cases as much as double or triple what we see in non healthcare, non hospitality companies. 

Brett
Got it? Interesting. And can you walk me through what it looks like if I were an employee at one of these companies using Immediate? 

Matt Pierce
It’s a really straightforward process which is obviously by design. The less barriers you can put in place when you’re rolling out a new benefit like this, the better. And so an employer comes with us and they sign a quick two page agreement that essentially says, we’re going to give you access to our data, time tracking and payroll data so you can provide this service. And as an employee you get an email that tells you, here’s a new voluntary financial wellness benefit called Immediate Pay. And you simply click here and input an activation code that’s unique to you and it essentially ties your instance of Immediate Pay back to your company. So once you do that, there’s about a five minute video that they watch that teaches them how to download, install, activate, and add a wallet and start making transactions. 

Matt Pierce
And the really cool thing here is that we’ve seen people in as little as ten minutes from the time they open that email, log in and start making their first transaction. And so it’s a really cool, seamless process. And ultimately, for us, when we go sit down with companies that we’re partnering with to explain that to them and say, you’re not going to get an influx of your employees calling and asking how to make this work or how to download and saw, we do all that for you. And so it’s made it a really good scalable way to roll a business out and get a lot of people on board and utilizing the platform. 

Brett
Interesting. And I was looking through your website earlier today and I saw that you had a report on the cost of financial stress in the workforce. Can you talk us through the findings of that study? 

Matt Pierce
Yeah, absolutely. I think we’re all feeling it, right? In late 2022, we experienced some stress through COVID-19 with job uncertainty and physical health uncertainty. And then you come out of that and we start seeing this inflation historic rates, highest since the late 70s, early eighty s. And we’re all kind of feeling the pinch, right earlier this year when the conflict overseas broke out and we see gas prices skyrocket. Every single person in the country is feeling it. Every time they fill up their tank. And what we don’t think about in a lot of cases is the trickle down that has an impact on somebody’s work life, right? 

Matt Pierce
And so when you take a vertical that we do very well in, like healthcare, and you have someone who’s a nurse who’s making X amount of dollars a year or X amount of dollars per hour, that is now having stress outside of the office. And they’re going into the workplace, and they’re seeing patients. And in the back of their mind, they’re wondering, how am I going to pay this bill? That’s due Wednesday when payday is not till Friday. Or what am I going to do to make sure that I’ve got food on the table for my kids this weekend? And so those are things that we’re tackling and we recognize that they’re huge issues that compound obviously, in healthcare. 

Matt Pierce
It can result in poor outcomes for those patients in hospitality and hotel setting or a restaurant setting, I think, going to result in poor customer service. There’s all sorts of things that this can kind of trickle down into in the workplace. And that report you mentioned there on our website is something that really digs into some of the specific details and percentages and engagement and things of that nature that we’re all facing. And that a lot of people that are in the demographic that we see, the most of which to be really straightforward, 87% of our users are earning less than $60,000 a year. So when you look kind of in this pay demographic, those are the people that are having a really difficult time paycheck to paycheck living and making sure that they’re taking care of their families. 

Matt Pierce
A lot of what that report is doing is helping people open their eyes to the fact that just because I may be a C level or ahead of HR, who’s a little bit removed from that and feels comfortable has some money put aside for savings is making a good salary is really trying to help them understand the plight of the paycheck to paycheck worker. 

Brett
Nice. I love that. And it seems like this would be a no brainer for companies. Do they have any objections for why they wouldn’t want to use immediate I’ve. 

Matt Pierce
Been selling for almost 20 years professionally, and this is the first time in my career that I get that regularly, right? Oh, this is a no brainer, right? And so those are usually the we love hearing that because we just send a DocuSign and get going. But we do have pushback. I get asked a lot, who’s your biggest competitor? And I always say our biggest competitor is priorities. Because when you’re in HR or payroll and you’ve worked with a lot of different vendors over time and time tracking payroll or some of the other benefits that are out there, when people tell you that this is a really seamless, easy thing to roll out. Red flags go off in a lot of cases because they go, I’ve heard that before. And then went through an eight month implementation process with so and so. 

Matt Pierce
I do really feel like a lot of what we’re up against is experience that has shown people that rolling out a benefit is not easy. And then what happens is usually after we’ve rolled a benefit out, they come back around and goodness gracious, that was so much easier than I ever thought. We actually have a quote from one individual who said, this was the easiest software that I’ve ever rolled out my entire career, which obviously makes me really happy. And so the big pushback we get is, hey, there’s priorities that I have around other opportunities and projects that we’re working on from HR payroll perspective. And then when you get a little nuanced, you start getting into people at a high level, they think about what we’re doing and they go, oh well, no, we’re already doing this, or we’re already doing that. 

Matt Pierce
Maybe we offer a pay advance program, or some people that say, I don’t think our team would actually use this. And when you can go in and start to share with them some of the data of what we’ve seen and what we’ve experienced and the way that our user community has kind of come together and leveraged this platform. And the service that we offer to make ends meet and to stay ahead of the debt curve. Those are things that we’ve done that we can share with them that has really started to help us move more quickly. And I definitely think that especially over the course of the past few quarters, again, with the rising cost of living, those objections have become smaller, and we’ve seen sales cycles shorten, and we’ve seen people jump to wanting to work with us a lot more quickly. 

Brett
Got it. Interesting. That makes sense. Now, to switch gears a bit here, let’s talk about market categories. So how do you think about market categories? Are you transforming an existing one or creating a totally new category here? 

Matt Pierce
I hit on it a little bit earlier in the intro. I think we’re kind of in this hybrid between fintech and HR Tech, right? And so when we think about that from a category, I think if you ask most of the people that are here at Immediate, most of them say we’re a fintech company because we’re moving money. We’re helping people from a financial perspective, and we’re providing them with technologies that are a responsible alternative to the predatory lending services that are out there, like Title and Payday loans or running up credit card debt. And so I do think that at our core we’re fintech. But when you really look at what HR tech is doing, is it’s really moving forward and helping companies provide better benefits to their team. We always talk about trying to meet people where they are. Right. 

Matt Pierce
We don’t have any companies that have 100% enrollment, as you can imagine, but we do have some companies that have north of 50% enrollment. And that’s because you never know where a person is coming to from their own financial background. Finances are obviously a very personal thing for all of us. And so when we kind of go in and look at this, we’re helping people from a financial perspective, but we’re also helping companies in their recruitment and retention efforts. And so it’s a blend for us from a market segment of Fintech and HR tech. 

Brett
Got it. That makes sense. And since you launched in 2018, how much traction have you seen that you’re okay with sharing? 

Matt Pierce
We’ve grown considerably, and obviously, as I shared a little bit earlier, we’ve seen a gas port on the fire here in the past few quarters. We have six figures of eligible employees, which is really cool to say. I mean, our first customer was in September 2019. And to be into the hundreds of thousands of eligible employees is really exciting. And that’s, again, eligible, that’s not necessarily enrolled. And what we typically see right now is about 24% enrollment across the board. And so you can blend in there, as I mentioned earlier, some restaurant groups that are 50% to 60% enrollment. And then we’ve got biotechnology firms or education higher education organizations that are under 10% enrollment. And so it kind of blends out. 

Matt Pierce
But when we really start to look at where we’re focusing in our verticals healthcare hospitality, we’re starting to see that number really trend up and 25% to 35% of people are going to use this. And when I think back over the past quarter, we’ve closed nearly 60 deals in the past 100 days, which is a testament to, again, having a really great product and some macroeconomic factors that we can’t control but we can participate and be a part of. But also it’s a testament to the maturity of this organization, right? And going in and understanding our strengths and weaknesses, making sure that people are sitting on the right spot at this organization and then managing the metrics. 

Matt Pierce
I think our team’s done a really good job of identifying what our growth goals are back ending into what needs to happen on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis in order to hit those annual growth goals. And our growth organization has done a great job of doing that. And so growth is there and it continues to compound and we’re excited about what Q Four is going to hold for us. 

Brett
That’s incredible. I’d love to talk now a bit more about funding. So I believe the total funding was 15 and a half million, is that correct? 

Matt Pierce
Yeah. So when you layer in some of the debt that we’ve raised, debt for us is what we use to put money out into market. So if you came in today and said, I need $100. We actually fund your account with that and then are getting reimbursed through your standard payroll process. So a chunk of that is debt, and we’ve raised nearly 10 million in equity, and that debt that we have continues to grow as we continue to have success there. We’ve got opportunities to continue to expand that. I think our actual access to capital is north of 20 million now from a debt perspective, and so we continue to grow there. The capital markets for us are where we’ve typically received investment from in the past has been high net worth individuals and family offices. 

Matt Pierce
We have one or two institutional investors that sit on our cap table. But all of these investors have been people that come alongside us and believe in our mission, and they want to be a part of this. I haven’t shared yet, shame on me. But our mission is to positively impact the financial well being of a million Americans by the end of 2024. And so when we go in and we sit down with potential investors or existing investors and we talk to them about that and the track that we’re on and the path that we’re headed down, people that align with that mission and want to be a part of this are ones that we typically lean towards. And so we’ve done most of this, as I mentioned, in a non institutional capacity. 

Matt Pierce
And at some point in 2023, we’ll be going out to do a larger institutional raise from an equity perspective, to continue to pour gas on the fire and keep growing at the rates that we’re growing at. 

Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. And as you mentioned there in the intro, you’re not in Silicon Valley or New York City. Do you view that as a positive? Does that help you? Do you think it hurts you in any way? Or what are your thoughts there? 

Matt Pierce
I think there’s good and bad on both sides. Right. We’re headquartered in the largest city in the state of Alabama, and we’re a little over a million people in the metro here and actually moved this company here from Atlanta, which is nearly 7 million people. And we moved here because we wanted to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. And we felt like we’d have opportunities to recruit better talent and get some of what we would look at as some of the top talent in this community. And we came here because there’s been some successful exits and high growth companies in the Birmingham metro over the past decade, and we also still have a presence in Atlanta. So we’ve got this nice aspect of being able to hire in both cities and being able to go in and grow in both places. 

Matt Pierce
But it’s definitely different when we’re going up against our biggest competitors in this market, which are Northeast and West Coast and where we know that they’ve got much more access to capital and they’ve got a lot more people to choose from. And so it does stretch you a little bit. But I believe that for us, one of the things that we talk about a lot is weaponizing hospitality. And to date, knock on wood, we haven’t lost a single customer. So hundreds and hundreds of customers, we haven’t lost a single customer. And by that I mean employer that has signed up and partnered with us. None of them have left to go to competitors or left just to turn it off, which means we’re doing a really good job of taking care of our customers and ultimately our end users. 

Matt Pierce
And so when we talk about weaponizing hospitality, it’s taking kind of this Southern mindset, this Southern hospitality that a lot of our team brings to bear from an implementation and customer success and customer support team. And I would put those teams up against anybody in the industry. I think that we have a team that goes above and beyond that works round the clock to make sure that our users are taken care of and when issues arise that we’re there to support. So those are things that I feel like are really positives about being in a community like Birmingham. And I’ll also add the other thing that I see and I find really valuable in a market like this is we want to see each other succeed. 

Matt Pierce
It’s rare that a week goes by that I don’t have a breakfast or a coffee or a lunch or a happy hour with another entrepreneur in town that may be ahead of us as companies or maybe behind us. As companies just from on their lifecycle. But being able to go in and sit down and impart wisdom or receive wisdom or ideally, do both. But doing that with other local entrepreneurs and leaders in this community, we’re all about trying to build each other up. And I think that’s something that’s really good about this tech community in Birmingham and something that not to say that doesn’t happen. I’ve worked for companies in Boston, I’ve worked for companies in Atlanta, I’ve worked for companies in California. I’ve seen that there. But I’ve also seen a lot more competition and kind of a dog eat dog world there. 

Matt Pierce
Whereas here I’m seeing a lot more of people going in and trying to build up and help everyone succeed. 

Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. That makes sense. And if we zoom out into the future, what would you say is the five year vision of the company? 

Matt Pierce
When we started this company, it’s funny that this is my second startup and I told my wife, I said, Just give me three to five years. And we’re four years into it. And we talked about this a few months ago. And she goes, you said three to five years. We’re at year four. And I said, Give me three to five more years. I don’t envy the spouse or significant other of an entrepreneur. I know there’s a lot that goes into it. I’m really fortunate to have a supportive spouse that really stands behind what we do and encourages me and supports me along the way. But so when I think about what three to five years is, I think we’re going to continue to build this and we’re going to continue to see the wild growth that we’ve seen. 

Matt Pierce
I look at the Financial Wellness earned wage access market of what we do and it’s still less than 15% penetrated. There’s 180,000,000 people in the US workforce and we’re sitting here in late 2022. I believe by 2030 every company in the US is going to be offering some form of earned wage access like what we offer. And so the next five years, we’ve got our work cut out for us to get as much of our share of this market as possible while at the same time continuing to evolve and continuing to innovate. To make sure that not only are we getting people in and helping them in their journey and helping them with what I think is kind of the first step is getting people unhooked from the predatory lenders and running up credit card debt and things of that nature. 

Matt Pierce
We can help them get over that hurdle and then continue to work with them on that financial wellness journey as they continue to grow. It’s a lifelong journey, right? And we know that all of us are working towards ideally retirement and some twilight years where we really get to slow down and enjoy the fruits of our labor towards the end of our lives. But we know that not everybody gets that and we want to help people along the way to not just get them unhooked from these predators out there, but also to give them a path to grow and start putting money aside for savings. So when the unexpected happens, outside of using Ewa, they can use that, but also to put things aside for retirement at some point or college or whatever it may be. 

Matt Pierce
So we really view ourselves as a financial wellness company and in the next five years we think we’re going to be able to put a really solid fingerprints all over the US workforce and improving financial well being across the country. 

Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today. If people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go? 

Matt Pierce
Join immediate is our website. You can also follow us on LinkedIn. We put immediate we put a lot of good content out there or you can connect with me, Matt Pierce, Founder and CEO of Immediate on LinkedIn as well. 

Brett
Amazing. Well Matt, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision. 

Matt Pierce
Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Brett. Really appreciate it. 

Brett
Yeah. Let’s keep in touch. 

Matt Pierce
All right. Thank you.