Dive Brief:

• Earned wage access services provider DailyPay said Monday that it would offer services outside the U.S. for the first time later this year. The services are due to start in October, a spokesperson said by email.
• The company will extend its reach to the United Kingdom, servicing existing clients that have operations in that country, DailyPay said in a press release.
• "Many of our clients and partners are multinational, and they have increasingly expressed the need to offer this valuable benefit to their employees beyond the U.S.,” Josh Durodola, DailyPay’s vice president of International, said in the release.

Dive Insight:

The company didn’t immediately have any particular U.K. clients to announce, according to the spokesperson. At least one of the clients listed on its website, Duracel, has multinational operations.

DailyPay won’t stop with just the U.K. The company “will have more countries to announce very soon,” the spokesperson said.

The New York-based DailyPay is reaching for international clients as it settles in with a new CEO. The company appointed Stacy Greiner as interim CEO in May after Kevin Coop exited the job.

The move also comes as DailyPay and other providers of earned wage access, also known as on-demand pay, face increased regulation and competition in the U.S. There are dozens of EWA providers that have sprung up in the U.S. over the past decade, all with slightly different approaches to providing workers, mainly hourly employees, with access to their wages before a regularly scheduled payday.

The EWA providers, some of which don’t charge employees, seek to make their services more easily available via digital tools. Generally, EWA providers seek to disrupt the payday loan predators that impose high interest rates on workers who access their pay early by taking out loans from street corner vendors. The services can also help workers avoid high interest rate credit cards and bank account overdraft fees.

Among DailyPay’s other clients are Wendy’s restaurant owner Calhoun Management and Torchy’s Tacos chain owner Success Food Management Group.

DailyPay targets those workers who may be having financial difficulty paying their bills. “More than 16 million U.K. workers have missed payments on key household bills in 2023, the release said. DailyPay contends its services help reduce its end-users’ payment of late fees.

Despite such EWA companies’ pitches, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is concerned that some of the companies are imposing fees. In July, the federal agency proposed subjecting EWA providers that charge employees fees to U.S. lending laws.

DailyPay and other EWA providers have worked through a trade group, the American Fintech Council, to oppose the CFPB’s proposal, arguing that the companies shouldn’t be treated like lenders.