Rho is the all-in-one banking platform purpose-built for startups. Its mission is to simplify the financial operations of early-stage companies, from expense management to budget oversight.

To support these workflows, Rho needed to connect with customers' HRIS platforms.

“Since HRISs are the systems of record for employee data, connecting to them would allow our customers to automatically add new hires to our platform on time and with all the right data populated, such as their department, job title, and address,” explains Jackson Hanssen, a Product Manager at Rho.

But as they began scoping all the HRIS integrations they needed to build, they found that implementing them in-house wasn’t tenable.

"The HRIS software market is incredibly fragmented," explains Jackson. "We would need to build dozens of HRIS integrations to meet all of our customers’ and prospects’ requirements. That would involve hundreds of engineering hours, which wasn’t an investment we wanted to make."

In addition, the administrative identity data being synced—like names, emails, and job titles—was consistent across HRIS platforms. 

This crystallized their decision to outsource their integrations to an API aggregator that provided comprehensive HRIS coverage. 

Their team ended up evaluating Merge against another unified API solution, Finch. Jackson explains why they chose the former:

“We needed enterprise-grade, API-based HRIS integrations. We found that Merge offered more than twice these integrations than Finch, which made the decision on who to partner with easy.”

Rho built to Merge’s HRIS Unified API within a week. From there, they were able to launch 50+ HRIS integrations; this includes everything from Workday and BambooHR to Breathe and Factorial.

Here's how their HRIS integrations work:

1. A user would log in and click on the Integrations tab to view the available HRIS integrations. 

2. Once the user selects the HRIS they want to connect to, Merge Link, a UI component, appears with instructions on authenticating to the HRIS solution.

3. As soon as the HRIS connection is successfully authenticated, employees are automatically imported into Rho, which include fields like first and last names, corporate emails, and direct managers.

Once the HRIS connection is set up, Rho stays in sync with the HRIS system as employee changes occur. This ensures new hires and updates to existing employees are reflected in Rho over time.

From there, Rho’s admin users can quickly take a variety of steps, such as provisioning new hires with the appropriate set of cards with the right spend limits; and updating the cards employees have access to based on changes to their profiles.

Rho has been able to offer a dramatically wider set of HR integrations without investing in dedicated integration engineers.

"Building all of these HRIS integrations would've forced us to hire at least 3 full-time engineers. And even then, it would take us several months to take the integrations to market. Merge allowed us to avoid this scenario and keep our engineers fully focused on our core products,” explains Jackson.

In addition, the HRIS integrations have a direct impact on sales. 

“Our sales reps no longer say that HRIS integrations are a key objection. In fact, the HRIS integrations added through Merge have enabled us to increase our close rate by 15%,” says Jackson.

So, what’s next in Rho’s integration journey with Merge?

We plan on automating additional workflows through the HRIS integrations. For example, we’ll  automatically terminate users when they’re marked as terminated in the integrated HRIS. This’ll enable our customers to prevent unauthorized spending.”

We’re looking forward to helping Rho and their team build even deeper HRIS integrations across their customer base.