How we access and deliver income and employment data to businesses like yours
For financial service providers, background check companies, and other businesses, Argyle provides real-time, ongoing access to the consumer income and employment data needed to assess risk, make decisions, and perform essential functions.
At the crux of our technology is the principle of consumer permission. In other words, we make it possible for your customers to grant you secure access to the robust income and employment data stored in their payroll accounts, so you have the information you need to deliver them beneficial services.
So, how exactly do we obtain the data you need, and what does that output look like? We’re glad you asked.
A well-oiled data network
If we think of income and employment data as moving along a metaphorical railroad network, then you can think of Argyle as the party responsible for supplying the rail cars and laying, maintaining, and securing the tracks. Meanwhile:
Consumers (i.e., your customers) own the data on the trains and decide where the trains can and can’t go.
You and businesses like yours receive the data from the trains and sometimes send data back.
Argyle also provides consumers with a “switchboard” for managing the transmission of their employment data. We call it Argyle Link.
What is Argyle Link?
Argyle Link is the easy, low-friction module consumers interact with to grant you access to their income and employment data. You simply embed Argyle Link in your web page or app, or send it to your users via email or text message.
Argyle Link will ask your customers for permission to access their data. The process for giving consent is easy:
Your customers simply find and select their employer or payroll provider from our comprehensive database. (Browse our coverage here.)
Then, they log in to their account, just like they would at work.
Once a consumer completes these steps, our secure technology takes over, pulling the income and employment data you need and sending it to you in a matter of seconds.
Like Fort Knox, Argyle takes security seriously
When consumers grant Argyle permission to access their data, they are authorizing Argyle to serve as their designated data transfer agent. That role comes with a lot of responsibility, including a steadfast commitment to never aggregate, resell, or re-use their data under any circumstances.
We’ve also achieved and are committed to maintaining the highest levels of security standards. We’ve undergone SOC2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, GDPR, and CCPA audits and follow military-grade encryption and secure storage protocols to protect user data and credentials.
Scrubbed and sorted
What makes Argyle such a valuable partner to you isn’t just that we securely transfer income and employment data, it’s that we clean it and organize it in a meaningful way that’s standardized across all employers and payroll providers. We also set up our data structure so that you receive easy-to-use information. Basically, we make order out of chaos.
When your customers log in to their employer or payroll account and grant us access to their income and employment data, we organize all data retrieved by category, We call those categories datasets.
Our datasets are:
Identities, which includes data attributes like your customers’ full name, address, phone number, birthdate, and email address
Paystubs, which provides all of the data of a traditional paper paystub, including pay period, deduction, and tax withholding information
Payroll documents, which allows you to retrieve PDF copies of your customers’ paystubs and tax forms
Deposit destinations, which provides information on where your customers’ pay is deposited and in what amounts
Shifts, which includes data related to actual hours worked
Gigs, which retrieves data specific to gig work like status, type, timestamp, and total count of gig assignments
Vehicles, which specifically applies to work vehicles and includes data like make, model, vehicle identification number
Ratings, which provides achievement and task summary details related to gig work
In total, Argyle offers access to dozens and dozens of data attributes, which you can draw on to inform your business decisions and perform the tasks that achieve your business objectives.
But don’t worry if you don’t have use for all of the attributes we offer. We’ve designed our system so that you can pull or look at only the attributes that fit your needs.
Accessing the data
Once your customers make account connections via Argyle Link, you can view their data from your secure account in Argyle Console, our no-code, web-based interface.
If you choose to integrate with our API instead, you can have the data you need streamed to you directly. Our API documentation provides detailed instructions for incorporating the data we pull into your existing systems or applications.
Regardless of how you are consuming it, the data connection we provide is continually updated directly from the source (i.e., consumers’ payroll accounts), ensuring you are always working from fresh and accurate information.
Compare that to the alternatives: paystubs, which are high-friction, easy to manipulate, and quickly become out of date; and employment record aggregators (like The Work Number) that supply sometimes weeks-old information at a steep price.
Really, really real-time
When we say our data is real-time, we’re not exaggerating. Our initial data pull occurs the moment your customer connects their payroll account, ensuring you have access to the latest information directly from the source. Beyond the initial pull, you can also subscribe to webhooks, which notify you of any added, updated, or deleted data as it happens.
The sky’s the limit
But the real thrill of Argyle may be its uniformity. No matter your customers’ income source, we’ve come up with a single way to organize the data stored in their payroll records, making it usable and useful to businesses in verticals as wide-ranging as mortgage, personal lending, background checks, banking, the gig economy, and more.
The power and potential of having highly consumable—not to mention, fully consumer-permissioned—data at your fingertips can’t be overstated. The question for you shouldn’t be, “Do I need this?” but “What amazing things can I do with this?” Income and employment verifications are only the beginning.
If you want to learn more about leveraging income and employment data to meet your business objectives, reach out to our team for insights and advice.
