[ucm_edge]

At my company they still initially failed to make payroll. Eventually around 6 pm Pacific on the 15th the direct deposits started landing for most people. Although not everyone.

I think they did it via some kind of one off point process since I didn’t get an email and the Rippling web app didn’t show me as paid until midday on the 16th. Normally those occur at the same time I see the direct deposit hit.

Very unhappy with Rippling here and will advocate my company change processors. They initially acted as if they would cut over to JPMorgan and be fully up on Monday, but as time goes on it becomes clear they had to do a lot more than just change the account they staged payroll through.

They also failed to have a secondary banking relationship in place, credit revolvers or other contingencies that let them handle this in house, etc. In 30 years of getting paid and working through times like 2008 when major disruption to banking and credit availability occurred, to me Rippling stands alone as the only company that failed to run payroll on time and it took a single point of failure to make them fall.

[RileyJames]

I mean, the bank failed on Friday. They managed to get payroll out delayed a few days. It was a fast moving situation for everyone involved.

Being told that JPMorgan is taking over the deposit, and knowing your payroll payment automations are going to work a different things. I imagine they had to test, and likely rewrite them. Wiring $300M of pay checks as a “we’ll do it live” scenario seems unwise.

You’ve every right to be upset. But how long do you think it would take another payroll provider to recover after losing all funds due to their bank going under? 2-3 days seems pretty impressive.

[travisjungroth]

If it's the 16th that's 4 business days. But I agree, going through all the trouble of switching payment processors because you hope if the bank they're using fails they'll get back up and running in less than 4 days is a horrible ROI.

[ucm_edge]

Most payroll process have relations with multiple banks. They have emergency credit revolvers in place. They are resilient to single point of failure. Rippling has shown it not.

[travisjungroth]

The bank died with payroll in flight. If they had alternates it would have been faster, but like Monday or Tuesday. 1-2 days instead of 4.

No payroll processor could have made payroll on time in this situation. If you overnight a letter from SF to NYC and the plane crashes on landing, the replacement letter is definitely going to be late.

[danenania]

Well, everyone supposedly has a plan until they get punched in the nose. I'm skeptical that any payroll provider would be fully resilient to their primary bank failing. They'd need to have a 100% reserve in a secondary account and have instant failover logic in place to update payment flows for all customers. Doesn't sound likely.

[borissk]

Used to work for a big payroll provider - eventually they bought their own bank.

[nrmitchi]

Advocating that a company change payroll processors over this single incident seems like a drastic over-reaction.

[ucm_edge]

I am advocating for the fact that Rippling was not transparent in their communication and was too complacent to have a Plan B in place despite having 300 million in play. It is not the single incident is the exposure of poor practices and dishonesty during their disaster recovery.

To put it another way, I have been paid via direct deposit for over 30 years and multiple fiscal crises. There is only one company that ever failed to get full payroll out on time

[noisenotsignal]

This isn’t necessarily a useful anecdote though. If your previous payment processors weren’t using a bank that failed during that time, then you getting paid on time isn’t a sign of redundancy; they were just fortunate!

It might be fair to say that Rippling failed by choosing the wrong bank, but that’s a very different argument than saying that Rippling didn’t have a good backup plan. If all you’re going by is that you’ve always gotten paid (vs say knowing who your payment processor banked with and what their Plan B in case of bank failure was), for all you know your previous payment processor had no backup plan either!

[yeahsure22]

Yeah I think ADP has one account at the East Piscataway Chemical Savings and Loan. If that bank failed the same thing would have happened to ADP. Rippling definitely didn’t expose themselves to excessive risk for no reason other than their inexperience.

[yowlingcat]

What you're advocating for could be cause unintended consequences, a case of potentially making for scar tissue worse than the initial wound. Rippling does a lot more things than just process payroll. Unbundling it would probably be a full time undertaking for your company's HR team depending on how large you are, and they may end up with a benefit and payroll stack that works a lot more poorly.

With that said, I am sure a lot of executive teams are reconsidering usage of payroll processors who aren't ADP for the same reason a lot of folks have moved funds to JPM. Flight to security and all that. It's not an illogical reaction to have from your end.