InstantWage® Earned Wage Access (EWA)

What is EWA?

Give your employees easier access to their income with RocketKOR’s InstantWage® EWA service. Earned Wage Access (EWA) provides employees with access to their earned wages before their regular payday.

You can provide employees with their earned wages at scheduled intervals or allow employees to request funds on demand. On the employee’s regular payday, these disbursements are either subtracted from the employee’s wages or are repaid by the employee. No interest is charged on earned wage disbursements.

How Does EWA Work?

InstantWage EWA integrates with your payroll system and manages the entire EWA workflow, including onboarding customers, disbursing earned wages, and recovering disbursements. As part of this workflow, InstantWage EWA coordinates activities with key RocketKOR features such as:

Customer Accounts The employee is treated as a RocketKOR Customer and is given an Individual Customer Account.
Financial Accounts An external card Financial Account is created for the employee’s debit card. This Financial Account is used to disburse and recover earned wages for the employee.
Transactions Send and Request transactions are created for earned wage disbursement and recovery.

The InstantWage EWA workflow steps are shown in the following diagram.

RocketKOR InstantWage EWA Workflow

1. Set Up an EWA Program

The RocketKOR Team will create and configure an EWA Program for your Business Account. This program defines your EWA offering and contains details such as:

Employee wage data source (such as your payroll system)
Types of wage disbursement (for example: fixed amount, percentage of wages, or fixed amount plus percentage of wages)
Upper and lower disbursement limits
Disbursement timing and frequency
Repayment options
Recovery timing and frequency
RocketKOR solution used for disbursement (example: Push to Card, ACH) and recovery (example: ACH)

2. Onboard the Employee to the EWA Program

If you have approved an employee for EWA, they can be enrolled in your EWA Program using the RocketKOR Portal or APIs. The enrollment process includes the following steps.

RocketKOR creates a new Individual Customer Account for the employee. This account includes a RocketKOR Customer ID and an EWA reference number. The EWA reference number is used to identify the employee in both your payroll system and in RocketKOR. This allows you to easily locate the employee’s RocketKOR Customer Account.
RocketKOR captures account information for the employee’s debit card. RocketKOR will use this account to disburse and recover earned wages for the employee.
The employee is required to sign a pre-authorized debit agreement for their debit card account.
RocketKOR creates a new external card Financial Account for the employee’s debit card. This account is linked to the employee’s Customer Account.
RocketKOR determines the disbursement amounts for the employee, based on the parameters of the EWA Program.

3. Disburse Earned Wages to the Employee

Earned wages will be disbursed to the debit card linked to the Customer external card Financial Account. Wages may be disbursed on demand or according to a predefined schedule.

Wages are disbursed using the RocketKOR solution specified in the EWA Program, such as Push to Card or ACH. When a disbursement is initiated, RocketKOR creates a new Send transaction. This transaction will appear in the transaction history for both the Customer Financial Account and the Business Financial Account used as the source of funds.

4. Recover Earned Wage Disbursements from the Employee

Earned wage disbursements are recovered on the employee’s regular payday using one of the following methods:

The employee is paid their remaining earned wages, minus any disbursements.
The employee is paid their full earned wages. The disbursements are then collected from their debit card account.

To collect the disbursements, RocketKOR creates a new Request transaction. This transaction will appear in the transaction history for both the Customer Financial Account and the Business Financial Account used to recover the funds.

If the Customer Financial Account does not have sufficient funds to repay the disbursements, the Customer will become ineligible to receive any further earned wage disbursements until the amount owed is recovered.

5. Maintain Employee Eligibility for the EWA Program

The employee’s eligibility for the EWA Program is reassessed each time an earned wage disbursement is initiated. If the employee is no longer approved for EWA by the employer, or if the employee has previous wage disbursements that they have not yet repaid, they will become ineligible for future wage disbursements.

Also, because EWA is not a loan but rather provides income already earned by the employee, an employee may not be eligible for disbursements if they haven’t worked during the period in which the EWA request is made.

6. Offboard the Employee from the EWA Program

An employee can ask to exit the EWA Program at any time. Before they can be offboarded from the EWA Program, the employee must repay any outstanding earned wage disbursements or the disbursements must be marked as irrecoverable (bad debt).