Before Wingspan:
- Challenging payout cycles that required significant time and effort from their small back office team
- Lack of transparency created a high volume of support tickets
- Payments and 1099 tax compliance became cost-prohibitive and difficult to manage
After Wingspan:
- A seamless, intuitive process for payments that allows them to run five pay cycles per week so agents get paid right away
- A 1099 process that made it easy to catch errors before filing—so they could address them without penalties
- Peace of mind that payroll can run automatically
Overview
Global Financial Impact (GFI) is a platform that connects individuals and organizations with the resources and expertise to unlock their financial potential and drive positive change in their lives and the world. GFI has recruited over 60,000 individuals to join their organization in a little over 2 years.
Challenge
To continue to grow their pool of insurance agents, GFI needed a partner that could support bulk payments in an efficient and cost-effective way. With only two full-time employees supporting back office administration, the team regularly spent hours making payments.
In addition to the administrative burden, Joe Justice, CFO at GFI, also felt they had a payments and tax compliance workflow that wasn’t designed with independent contractors in mind. “It felt like we had a solution that would be great for W2 employees, but that isn’t our agent base. It was primarily a cost issue as we would be charged per agent every single month, whether or not we paid them. So if we had 1,000 people in our network, and only 400 generated commissions in a given month, we still got charged for the 1,000 people, and that became very cost prohibitive as we grew,” he says. “We were also charged on a per agent basis to process 1099s at the end of the year, which added up very quickly.”
GFI knows it’s important to pay their contractors quickly, which is why they make payouts as often as five times per week. But due to the cumbersome manual processes, every payment cycle felt difficult. “We relied on our previous vendor’s support team almost every day, and the maintenance was just so onerous,” says Justice.
Solution
GFI started small with Wingspan, and after six months expanded to use Wingspan across four divisions processing 28k invoices. With Wingspan, GFI consolidated contractor payments across US, Canada, Puerto Rico, and international locations into a single platform and created dedicated entities for each region to comply with local legal requirements. “Their flexibility, their ability to handle bulk payouts, and really meet us where we wanted to be for our rapid pay cycles, it just felt right,” he said.
Beyond payments, Wingspan helped smooth their 1099 process. “This was our first year doing it, and it was so much easier,” said Justice. “It was much more intuitive, and much easier to identify issues ahead of time with 1099s where information didn’t match so we could fix it before filing.”
Impact
All of this means GFI’s small back-office team can focus on more important, strategic work than managing payroll every single day. GFI leveraged Wingspan to automate contractor onboarding at scale, moving from manual bulk uploads to programmatic invitations as they grew past 15,000+ agents. Automating these steps allowed GFI to process over 28k invoices and grow quarterly payment volume by 70x since launching with Wingspan.
“It’s straightforward and so much more seamless,” says Justice. “From start to finish, the process just makes so much more sense. And it’s easy to pick up. I just cross-trained another person on our team because I was traveling this week on how to run Wingspan, and they were able to run a payroll cycle without my involvement with no issues, which is such peace of mind for me.”
The experience has been so positive that Justice plans to migrate their entire suite of companies to Wingspan more quickly than originally planned. Agents are more satisfied as well, for example international contractors now receive payments in local currency without incurring banking fees. “We’ve had such a good experience that we’ve expedited these transitions, because we can see the value right away,” he says.
Final Thoughts
GFI hopes to expand their agency force in the next few years, and Justice is confident that Wingspan is the right partner for their continued growth. “Each individual agent doesn’t always sell every month, but the more we add, the more we grow,” he explains. “As we onboard more agents, we’re finding it’s easier for them to get started more quickly. Wingspan is well positioned to absorb our growth.”