Bitwage has announced the release of its API, integration with Hubstaff and enabling of Credit Card payments.
In its latest press release, Bitwage states that facilitating international wage payments is quite painful. Bank wires and traditional financial technologies are slow and costly. It is however, prepared to tackle this problem.
Offering Payment Solutions
When sending wage payments to the Philippines through an international wire for instance, it can take up to 5 days to arrive. In addition to this you can often lose over 10% in fees and bad exchange rates when compared to Bitwage rates.
Our source at Bitwage emphasizes that globalization is integrating the economies of countries all over the world and with it is the growing trend of the distributed workforce. He says that it is not unusual to find US employers working with employees and contractors in Europe, Brazil and Philippines or for European companies to employ workers from eastern to western Europe, and even Asia Pacific.
Call centers and outsourcing companies from the Philippines are finding more and more work from US and European companies. However, he claims that much of the payroll innovation of the past 30 years has focused on paying domestic employees and that this trend can be seen in the offerings of old established payroll players, such as ADP, or newcomers, such as Gusto and Zenefits.
Bitwage says it focuses on helping companies manage their international workforces by offering faster and easier wage payment solutions.
A focus that has necessitated the announcement of three new releases.
Bitwage Releases the API Tested by Hackathons
Bitwage has announced the release of its API which will enable companies to integrate the full range of Bitwage solutions, with the ability to offer their customers more value added services. According to our source, this API includes all of Bitwage’s fund receiving methods, mass payouts, and seamless integration with their full set of last mile partners. Bitwage also claims that this API has been tested by various partners and hackathons, including the blockchain university halloween hackathon.
“As the Bitcoin ecosystem continues to thrive and grow, new use cases for the technology will emerge. Bitcoin’s blockchain has been famously touted as a more efficient payment rail for sending payments faster and cheaper across borders. Some interesting use cases we have seen are paying micro-workers, affiliate payouts, and payouts to contractors and distributors all over the world. We are excited to see what will come next and how the Bitwage API can help turn business model ideas into concrete use cases, while also facilitating and enabling current worker management technologies with faster, cheaper payments.” Said our source.
Time Tracking Software Integration
Hubstaff is a time tracking software that supports Mac, Windows and Linux. It helps teams manage their remote workforce more efficiently. They focus on showing how long specific tasks are taking, providing in-depth time reports, and proof of work through screenshots and application monitoring.
According to our source at Bitwage, with the new Hubstaff and Bitwage integration, managers and payroll administrators can set up automatic employee payments using their credit/debit cards. Employers can pay their employees on an hourly basis based on their time tracked, or they could setup a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly fixed rate.
Bitwage outlined the basic procedure of integration as:
- Link a credit/debit card to your Bitwage account
- Connect your Bitwage account with your Hubstaff account
- Invite your employees to setup their Hubstaff and Bitwage accounts
- Start tracking time on Hubstaff
With claims that not only does this integration reduce the hassle of managing employee payments, it also ensures faster payments to clients/ employees because Bitwage is able to transfer the money within one business day and in some cases, within hours as soon as the funds hit their Bitwage account.
According to our source, Hubstaff also has additional capabilities like setting a budget per employee and idle time detection (the timer automatically pauses if there is no activity on your computer for more than 5 mins).
Bitwage Releases Credit Card Payments
Bitwage claims to have identified the classic payroll problem for employers, figuring out how to send payments to workers in other countries. With the observation that sometimes banks require employers to do international payments in person, or maybe they do not let them do international payments at all. Various services require employers to load funds into accounts before they can send a mass payment.
The claim at Bitwage, is that they are constantly looking for ways to make it easy and simple for employers to pay their international workforce, whether it be through their faster payments, real-time mass payment system, or the funding methods by which employers can fund their payrolls.
Our source from Bitwage said that the feedback from customers revealed a desire by most customers to be able to build credit and credit card benefits while paying their international workforces. And this has motivated the announcement that Bitwage now allows employers to fund their payrolls with credit and debit cards.