Fairly Cash: the shift is confirmed, so the money is already earned

Here is a sentence that should be embarrassing and somehow is not: a dental hygienist can work a shift on Tuesday and wait until the following Friday to be paid for it. The work is done. The clinic confirmed it. Everyone agrees the money exists. It is just somewhere else.

Fairly decided that was silly, and today Fairly Cash is live.

What it does

A dental temp books a shift on Fairly. Once that shift is confirmed, they can request an advance against it, up to the full estimated value of the shift, and have the money before they turn up to work it. Repayment comes out of the final paycheck automatically. There is no invoice to chase and nothing to remember.

No credit check. No score impact. One flat access fee, no interest and no percentages, sized on their shift history and their record on the platform. Pay it back early and there is no penalty, because there is nothing accruing to penalise.

Temps unlock it after four shifts. That number is not arbitrary: it is the point where Fairly's own data says enough about somebody's reliability to make this a sensible thing to offer them.

The bit that makes it work

Fairly is not guessing at any of this, and neither are we.

They already hold the thing every lender spends three weeks trying to reconstruct: who works, how often, at which clinics, whether they show up, and what the shift is worth. That is not credit bureau data, it is better. It is a record of somebody doing their job.

So the offer is sized from the platform's own history and it appears at the moment it is useful, which is the moment the shift gets confirmed. Nobody fills in a form. Nobody uploads a bank statement to a stranger.

Whose product it is

It says Fairly on it, because it is Fairly's. The flow lives in their app, in their brand, and the emails come from their domain. Slate is underneath: we size the offer, put up the money, take on the credit risk, and handle the repayment when payday comes around.

Amir Reshef, Fairly's CEO, put it better than we would:

With Fairly Cash, our mission now includes flexible funding tied to their work and reliability on the platform. It has brought back temps who hadn't been active in months.

That last part is the one we did not predict and now bring up constantly. The financial product turned out to be a retention feature.

If you run a marketplace with workers on it

You are sitting on the same data Fairly is, and your people have the same gap between doing the work and being paid for it. Come and talk to us about it.