How BetterUp Can Pay around 4,000 Coaches in more than 70 Countries, in Local Currencies

Life with Wingspan

• A payments platform built for global scale, with capability to facilitate payments to contractors in 70+ countries
• Coaches paid directly in their local currency, with significantly lower FX fees to BetterUp
• A self-service coach portal with itemized invoices and payout tracking, backed by a dedicated help desk
• Payables generated automatically through an API connection to BetterUp's billing system.
• Support for BetterUp’s coaches and operations team

Overview

BetterUp is the leading professional coaching network, partnering with enterprises to deliver personalized coaching and development programs to their employees. Behind that experience is a network of thousands of independent coaches working across 70+ countries, receiving payments monthly.

For years, BetterUp ran coach payments, onboarding, and tax compliance through a previous provider. As the network grew, especially overseas, increasing FX costs, limited local-currency and self-service options became more significant. BetterUp's network operations and finance teams looked for a partner that could support its global growth and provide coaches the same reliable payment experience, wherever they lived. They landed on Wingspan and moved their full network onto the platform in late 2025.

Challenge

BetterUp sought a more cost-effective platform to support its growing global coach network with solutions for processes that were requiring increased manual effort as they grew. They needed a more scalable solution to match their current business and future goals.

FX costs became more significant as BetterUp's international coach network grew. A fee structure that had been manageable at lower payment volumes became a larger expense as cross-border payments scaled. BetterUp's VP of Finance, said "Our global coach network has grown over the years. At the start, handling a small number of contractors was not a big issue, but scaled to our current size, it ballooned into a larger need to find efficiency in our payments process to meet the demand for 1:1 coaching."

They also sought solutions to operational processes which were manual on their end, such as the process involved in 1099 filing.

Solution

After evaluating several vendors, BetterUp chose Wingspan for its multi-currency infrastructure and scalable model that could support BetterUp's growth. "It covers all of the use cases that were top of mind for us, with some additional interesting onboarding elements" BetterUp's head of coach network operations said.

The solution rolled out in stages rather than all at once. In October 2025, about 30 coaches came on as a pilot cohort, testing onboarding, payouts, and tax verification end to end. In November, the rest of the network followed in batches, with dedicated webinars walking US-based coaches through W-9 collection and IRS verification, and global coaches through the W-8 flow and their local-currency payout options. The first full-network payroll ran through Wingspan in December 2025.

BetterUp’s engineering team worked with Wingspan to build a direct integration with Wingspan’s Payables API, mapping fields from their internal billing system into Wingspan. Wingspan's platform came packaged with direct IRS verification functionality for 1099 tax filing, which solved for growth related impact on BetterUp's finance team.

Underneath it all is Wingspan's global payments infrastructure: disbursement in 70+ countries, the ability to fund payment in coaches’ respective currencies, and one flat FX rate across BetterUp’s operations.

Impact

Global pay network, in local currency

BetterUp now pays roughly 4,000 unique coaches across 70+ countries, spanning North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Latin America, and the Middle East. With Wingspan's support of BetterUp’s global coaching network, Coaches are able to select which currency denomination they wanted to receive their payout in, and that currency landing directly in their bank account seamlessly.

Self-service coach experience

Coaches have a self-service portal: itemized invoices, payment history, tax document downloads, and payout method management, backed by a dedicated help desk as the first line of support. Coach questions to BetterUp's team are minimal, because the portal allows coaches to self-serve.

A faster close, a faster tax season

BetterUp's finance team now gets richer reporting and a more direct path to reconciling the general ledger. Custom payable fields, line-level FX reporting, and pre- and post-payment reporting were configured specifically for BetterUp's monthly close, and the team uses them to accrue FX impact accurately and reconcile against internal systems like Looker (a business intelligence and reporting tool) without a brittle payment-ID mapping holding it together.

The first tax season on the new platform moved just as fast. Within weeks of the December 2025 migration, Wingspan generated and filed BetterUp's 2025 1099-NEC forms directly with the IRS: auto-generated for eligible US contractors, verified against the IRS in real time, and filed electronically. Coaches outside the US were automatically excluded from that flow, cutting a manual filtering step that used to eat time and introduce risk.

Looking Forward

Support didn’t stop at launch. Biweekly syncs, a dedicated Technical Account Manager, and a product feedback loop that actually goes somewhere. With migration and the first tax season behind BetterUp, the focus is shifting to what's next: deeper API automation, expanded compliance workflows including periodic background checks in the countries where they're needed, and continued work on self-service as local payment rails evolve in the markets where BetterUp's coaches are concentrated.

What’s new

Wingspan can now connect to Claude and other AI tools via MCP. Instead of exporting data from Wingspan and cross-checking in Sheets, operations staff can ask Claude for payment statuses, pending approvals, or contractor details in plain language. Anyone on the team can get a quick answer without waiting for the person who pulls the Wingspan reports. Questions such as 'which coaches are still unpaid for September?' will now only take seconds to answer.

BetterUp's head of coach network operations sums up the partnership simply: “it's a rare vendor relationship that feels like collaboration instead of a support queue.”

See how Wingspan helps the world's largest contractor networks pay coaches, providers, and agents across 70+ countries with reliable multi-currency payouts, automated 1099s, and a contractor-first experience. Request a Demo →