Wingspan vs. Unit: Banking Built for Contractors

Accounting pros don’t want to spend their days closing support tickets.

Your customers W9 employees know exactly who to call if something goes wrong with their paycheck. Because they receive it at a set time each month, every month, traditional payroll and HR systems rarely cause hiccups.

But with contractors, there’s a lot of uncertainty. You better believe they’re going to call…and email…and file a ticket anytime they’re not sure about where they’re money is coming from. The way income and information vary from month to month introduces opportunities for error.

You don’t want your customers to spend their time stuck doing contractor support. Adding banking capabilities to your platform is easy with Wingspan. With Wingspan Embedded, you can give them a complete contractor management system, including a robust banking platform that automates invoicing and accounts payable. 

Banking services that work for you, backed by the best

Wingspan integrates with your accounting and work management systems, and does all the work to calculate pay for each worker. Pay details go directly into an automatically generated invoice. Workers can simply approve or deny the invoice, or raise a dispute, all within the app. This makes it easy for contractors to get paid they way they want to, with free ACH transfers, or use the money directly from their free Wingspan Wallet card.

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With Wingspan Embedded Finance, you can:

• Drive more revenue. Enable a new revenue stream in weeks instead of months with an API-first platform that delivers a best-in-class service. 
• Get it done faster. Minimize impact on internal teams by eliminating the cost burden to build, maintain, or support users of the platform by partnering with us.
• Control the user experience. Embed Wingspan seamlessly into your existing software ecosystem with flexible, white-labeled UI components and customizable front-end.

Wingspan’s banking services are backed by strong infrastructure partners. We’re proud to be backed by JP Morgan and Lead Bank. These top-tier institutions make it possible for us to run domestic and international payments and securely manage financial assets for our customers.

Built with contractors in mind

Banking is just one area of the contractor management lifecycle that your customers need help with. While banking and payments are two of the most important elements, administrators also have to deal with the hassle of running background checks, verifying TINs or insurance, and 1099 tax compliance. 

This leaves accounting teams two options to try to stitch together contractor management:

1. Using a legacy payroll system that’s built for W2 employee benefits and payroll 
2. Working with account payable automation systems that manage invoicing and vendors
3. Building your own workflow with point solutions for e-signature, communications, support, and payments 

That’s a lot of manual switching back-and-forth for your customers, who would much rather use the payroll or HR software they’re already using to get the job done. With more than  41 million people in the United States doing some form of gig work in 2024 (up to a third of all workers!), it’s clear the gig economy is here to stay. Companies need a mix of W2 employees and flexible, scalable labor to make their businesses run—and you can help them do that with Wingspan. 

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In addition to banking services, Wingspan Embedded unlocks the 1099 with retention-driving features like instant payments, banking, financial management tools, and discounted health insurance. Handling everything from onboarding, to compliance, and payments, through taxation, Wingspan creates a fully-modular contractor management system.

“When I started freelancing in 2016, I was constantly trying to find a better way to handle things like contracts and invoices. And it’s not just freelancers that need help. Employers get stuck working with outdated systems that can’t reconcile the on-and-off cycle of contract work with traditional payroll,” said Anthony Mironov, Wingspan’s CEO and co-founder. “Partnering with Wingspan gives you the ability to create a super high-quality experience for contractors that helps with retention, it helps with revenue, and it helps make your product better, too.”

A partnership that works for you

With that, we offer flexibility on what the engagement looks like, based on the support you need:

Partners can take one of two different approaches:

1. Full platform access. Take our entire platform and embed it directly into your product.
2. Contractor-only access. Embed specific Wingspan functionality into your product. Pick and choose which features make the most sense for you. It’s your front-end infrastructure and user experience, but with Wingspan underneath.

With both options, you can choose how much you want it to look and feel like your brand. You can fully whitelabel the experience—where it’s powered by Wingspan behind-the-scenes, but your customers will see it as part of your overall product. Or, you can use an iFrame or API option, which gets the functionality up and running more quickly. We work directly with our partners to find the best option for their customers.

Partnering with Wingspan gives you access to our team of experts who are here to help you implement the best solution for your product and your customers. If all you need, for example, is the ability for your customers to have a Wallet account or a tax withholding account, we can make that happen in just a few weeks—instead of the months-long engagement that building from scratch or with a more traditional platform would require.

Bring Wingspan’s end-to-end 1099 payroll experience into your platform while keeping your brand front and center. See how we can work together >

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