Another kind of bank overdraft, but at no cost to the employee. This would be the definition of the application through which you can earn an advance from your salary through the digital platform offered by Salarium. The employer has to pay around 2-3 euros per month for each employee who installs his application. The employer does not use his own money, which relieves his cash flow. The employee pays absolutely nothing and can receive a free advance of 50% of the value of the days worked until the advance is requested. There are two reasons that do not allow the strat-up to offer more: the Romanian salary law and the desire to offer the employee a comfort zone that does not allow him to owe too much.
“First of all, the company he works for must have an integrated payroll system. We integrate our solution with that payroll system, and employees can claim up to 50% of their pay for days already worked – days already worked, but no more than 50% of the total amount of salary. To do this, they must download the Salarium application, create an account and enter an IBAN code or attach a bank card “, explained Alina Ştefan, Salarium CEO. By integrating the Salarium solution with payroll systems, the application can extract the information needed to complete the employee’s profile, and then he sees the available amount that he can access.
In the pandemic, the decision was made to build this platform, and the initial investment was one million lei, money that has been rolled so far. The first customers were small and medium companies with 50-1000 employees. Alina Ştefan says that such companies were also chosen to test the effectiveness of the software platform and what can be improved on it. Now, Salarium has reached contracts with 15 companies, including Edenred and Benefit Online. The areas from which the companies that integrated their employees in the application were chosen are the production of furniture, accounting, financial services, architectural houses, etc.
Future plans
“Now we are ready to go to retail – large chain stores, couriers, construction, gaming, IT … and almost any type of company that generally has young employees. Because young people have a different conception of money now: they want everything instantly, I worked, I want to be paid now, not in 2-3 weeks “, says Alina Ştefan. At present, the start-up has 500 users, but with a larger number of employees for whom they have costs of less than 50 lei. Experience gained since February shows that employees start the series of advances with small amounts, to probably test the application, then go to larger amounts, depending on the salary of each.
The average of the requested advances is currently 3-400 lei. The start-up pays the employees’ advances through the application directly in the card account of each one, following that on the salary date it will actually close with the employing company. ”The average advance is increasing because there are holidays and December January several transfers are made. That is why we expect to end the year well and with a higher level of the required advances “, says Ştefan.
The company’s CEO says that they aimed to attract 6,000 employees in the application this year, but as things look now, this figure will certainly be exceeded, and for next year, the target is 35,000 employees enrolled in the application. “For now, we offer advances from our own sources, but we are in talks with banks to obtain short-term financing products in less than a month or we can raise a round of investments to other shareholders, companies, funds or web investment platforms,” explains Alina Stefan.
Salarium is a software platform that integrates with payroll solutions, giving employees the opportunity to receive a paycheck through a mobile application. Currently, the Salarium application is launched in the BETA version, and will be launched in January when the start-up will enroll the first companies in the platform. “For us, the first relationship we want to develop is with payroll companies, because with their help we will integrate our solution into companies. Of course, we also have discussions with large companies in Romania, mentioned Alina Ştefan, adding that Salarium has already concluded contracts with some of the payroll companies, one of the largest being UCMS.
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