Founding Year: 2016
Office Locations: New York City, Minneapolis, Belfast, Northern Ireland
Website: dailypay.com
In our interaction with Kevin Coop, CEO of DailyPay, he discusses how employers can transform their employees’ lives and businesses through modern and innovative pay strategies like DailyPay.
Below is an excerpt from our interaction.
Leading an organization toward growth and success is definitely not an easy feat. In what circumstances did you find your leadership spirit?
My leadership style is centered on accountability, transparency and action.
Tell us about your organization. How does it provide value to American workers and society as a whole?
DailyPay is reimagining the way money moves, from the moment work starts. For decades, employees were controlled by the invisible rules of money:
· Rules that only give you biweekly access to your pay even when you worked and earned your pay.
· Rules that say you can only start saving and investing after your employer runs payroll.
· Rules that decide who has access to the best banking services.
· Rules that say you pay your rent in advance but get paid by your employer in arrears.
These rules, written and enforced by an analog 20th-century payroll structure, have forced the majority of the American workforce to turn to predatory financial products when short on cash to make ends meet or to pay for an emergency expense. When tens of millions of households face financial hardship, it bleeds into work and ultimately the economy. People are less engaged at work, companies make less profit, families are less secure and there’s less money circulating throughout the economy.
To tackle these challenges, DailyPay built a new financial system that’s centered around the employee. Our first-of-its-kind technology platform gives our users a real-time accumulating balance of available funds as they work throughout the pay period. We have seen DailyPay users, who once relied on overdraft and credit to make it to the next payday, begin to save their hard-earned pay before payroll is even run. By putting money in the hands of the people when they need it and when they earn it, we can break the negative cycle of financial stress that has endured for too long.
Recently, in an effort to provide financial equity to the millions of Americans who are unbanked or underbanked, DailyPay created Friday, a new general purpose reloadable (GPR) prepaid card and app that makes financial transparency and control available to millions of hard-working Americans. Friday offers the benefits of banking with no minimum balance requirement and no maintenance fees. With Friday, card users have no-fee instant access to their earned wages which empowers them with financial control and allows them to avoid having to use expensive alternatives.
What are your responsibilities as the CEO of your organization? Please walk us through what a regular day at work looks like.
As a CEO, it’s my job to remove barriers for my team members at DailyPay, and empower them to do their best work. Every day, I’m working to best set up our organization for success by helping every DailyPay colleague serve our customers better than the day before.
At a high level, this looks like ensuring DailyPay’s leadership team, and ultimately the entire organization is aligned on a common mission, vision and set of goals as a company. By working toward the same common outcome rather than competing priorities, we’re a more efficient and collaborative team.
What was the toughest part of embracing a leadership role? How did you manage to overcome them and move forward?
The best way to embrace a leadership role is to embrace adaptability. In an always-on, digital world, all stakeholders of a business expect a much faster clock speed than a leader had to have just a few years ago. Expectations from consumers to employees have shifted, meaning leaders of today must adapt to this rapidly-evolving environment.
As a leader, this all culminates for me in more transparent and frequent communication to stakeholders.
How do you keep yourself and your employees motivated?
As a team, we are motivated by our ambitious mission of rewriting the invisible rules of money. Our products and services have a real impact on the users we serve; research shows that access to DailyPay significantly decreases the need for predatory financial products like payday loans and overdraft fees. Every day, we’re helping our users in their journey to financial wellness, literacy and freedom – and everyone at DailyPay takes this seriously.
Could you describe the values and work culture that drives your organization?
DailyPay prioritizes cultivating a workplace where everyone feels a sense of inclusion and belonging. To ensure everyone is encouraged to innovate and do their best work, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) is at the core of everything DailyPay does. One of the company’s core values is ‘We Win With Diversity,’ underscoring not only our commitment to fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce, but also the fact that we are better because of it. DailyPay is committed to building, developing and engaging diverse teams that are agile, innovative, accountable, decisive and resilient.
How crucial is the role of technology and innovation in any organization?
When it comes to technology and innovation – never be satisfied. Find how to incrementally improve your products and solutions, and how you relentlessly focus on delighting your customers with both operational excellence and quality.
Have you taken any steps to innovate at the technological level?
Just last year, Time Magazine featured DailyPay’s Pay Balance in its “Best Inventions of 2021” issue. We take tremendous pride in how seamlessly DailyPay integrates into all payroll systems and how easy it is to use for the customer. As an example, our new Friday card is truly a game-changer. Designed to help the everyday worker take control of their finances, Friday provides a no-fee option for transfers and creates an opportunity for the user to make in-store and online purchases, manage their money and track spending, all in one mobile app.
What one piece of advice would you give any aspiring business leader reading this?
The most successful people in business are problem-solvers, not problem-identifiers. It’s easy to point out what’s going wrong with a project or within an organization, but it’s much more difficult–and valuable–to drive actual solutions.
What are your plans for the future, and how do you hope to see your organization and team grow?
DailyPay is the market leader in on-demand pay and continues to grow at an incredible pace. 2023 is shaping up to be the biggest year yet for DailyPay as we look to expand our business on a global scale.
Thought Leadership
Kevin Coop
Kevin is the Chief Executive Officer of DailyPay, a leading financial technology company. Under his leadership, Coop plans to embark on international expansion and further into the consumer space following the launch of Friday, DailyPay’s new product enabling users to make no-fee instant on-demand pay transfers.
Prior to joining DailyPay, Kevin served as the President of North America at Dun & Bradstreet (NYSE: DNB). As part of the leadership team that identified and privatized D&B in 2019, he was initially asked to assume the role of Chief Commercial Officer, where he led the Firm’s commercial sales and marketing efforts, including sales, sales enablement, predictive analytics and insights, marketing and sales operations, marketing content and branding, demand generation, advisory solutions and business development. Subsequently, he assumed the role of President, North America where he was responsible for the profitability and growth of North America across all product lines and businesses, as well as leading the global teams responsible for eCommerce, Digital and enterprise common platforms. Kevin earned his bachelor’s degrees in history and political science from UCLA.
“DailyPay delivers the industry’s leading on-demand pay solution with modern pay strategies that help employers to activate their workforce by building stronger relationships with their employees so they feel more engaged, work harder and stay longer.”
