The Access Group’s PeopleXD Payroll clients, in partnership with Experian, have the option to provide even greater digitisation of their payroll processes while employees keep control of their data and personal finances.
Experian’s Work Report service will enable employees the option to consent to share their payroll information with another organisation digitally for a range of financial services, including mortgages.
Each time your employees initiate a credit application (e.g., credit card, mortgage etc) they will need to consent to Experian Work Report to access payroll data. Once your employees have consented, Experian Work Report can then access employee’s specific payroll data from PeopleXD Payroll.
Experian Work Report then passes the data to that single consumer service provider (e.g., a bank) on a transaction-by-transaction basis. As an employer and PeopleXD Payroll client, you control whether this feature is enabled for your employees or not.
What is the Experian Work Report?
The Experian Work Report service is the UK’s first digital employment and income verification service that will enable employees getting paid via Access PeopleXD Payroll, the option to consent to share their payroll information with another organisation digitally for a range of financial services, including mortgages.
What does it mean for your company?
A recent Experian survey of 230 HR and Payroll professionals shows that many large organisations receive an average of 150 requests a month from employees to source and share their payroll data. This equates to 11 hours a month of HR and Payroll team’s time devoted to managing these requests.
Experian’s Work Report lifts an administrative burden from employees, who chase employers for copies of their payslip, and from HR and Payroll, who have to find and share the data with employees. It also helps smaller employers sharing paper-based payslips to reduce their carbon footprint.
What does it mean for your employees?
Employees who are applicants for a credit application with their Consumer Service Provider (e.g. bank) are given the option to upload evidence of employment or payslips manually, or to use Experian’s Work Report.
If they choose Experian’s Work Report, the service automatically accesses – with your employee’s consent - the required records from you the employer and passes it to the service provider. By allowing connectivity to payroll data, it can provide direct confirmation of a consumer’s gross and net income, as well as employment status and tenure, in a matter of seconds.
How do employees know they can benefit from the Experian Work Report service?
Experian has the list of opted in employers supplied by Access Group for those companies that have opted in to this service. If the Consumer Service Provider (e.g., a bank) uses Experian and if their employer is on the Experian list, then they will be given the option to use the service at the point of transaction.
What is required from your company to provide this service?
As an Employer and PeopleXD Payroll client, you can control whether this feature is available for your employees, by enabling the integration in the XD.
Once you enable this, your employees will have the option to consent to a financial institution using Experian to digitally share the relevant Work Report data. We will be enabling this for all UK XD Payroll customers from 21st November 2023.
How does the integration work?
When the integration is enabled for your People XD Payroll instance, the relevant data for your employees is shared with a central database, within the Access Group UK, with the sole purpose of being available for employees who opt in to the service.
Only when an employee opts in to using the service with their Consumer Service Provider (e.g., a bank), and provides consent to that provider to use the service, will Experian be able to access the data via API for that employee only.
Payslip data is held in the holding database for a period of 12 months. Data older than 12 months is automatically deleted. Should your company decide to discontinue using this service, this can be disabled via a customer controlled system parameter, and all corresponding data will be deleted from the holding database.
Will there be any changes in the People XD Payroll application visible to end users?
No. There is no employee facing changes in the XD Payroll application. Admin users will see the parameter in Admin Settings that is used to configure whether the feature is enabled or not.
Can employees use Experian Work Report if the integration is not enabled?
No. The only way for your employees to benefit from the Experian Work Report with their Consumer Service Provider, is for your organization to enable the integration on PeopleXD. This ensure at the point in time they need to use this, their data will be available to Experian. It is not possible for the integration to be enabled on an employee by employee basis.
Data Privacy
What data is shared?
Full details on the data that is shared from XD with Experian is available in in the Access Digital Employment Verification Product Factsheet.
Employee information such as name and date of birth, along with a unique identifier (National Insurance (NI) number), is submitted by the employee as part of an application (e.g., for a loan or mortgage) and is used, with their consent, to locate their information in PeopleXD Experian Work Report, which then accesses that specific employee’s income and/or employment data and shares it on a one-time basis with their chosen Consumer Service Provider (e.g., a bank).
The data shared is specified by the Consumer Service Provider, selected by the employee. It is only ever the minimum amount required to process their application.
Work Report™ only collects the minimum data needed to enable a successful match and retrieval of the employee's payroll information from your payslip portal. Data is only requested once.
If an employee begins any other applications in the future, they will need to provide consent for information to be shared for each application.
Will Access be sending all of our employee data to Experian to support this integration?
No. Access has designed this integration with data privacy at its core. An additional separate database has been created which Is hosted in the Access Group network. Only the data required to support the Experian Work Report is integrated with that database, for all active employees. Only when an employee elects to use Experian Work Report with their Consumer Service Provider and provides consent is Experian permitted to access their record in that holding database, on a one-time basis.
How long is data held by Experian, and what data is held?
Your employees’ PII and a Unique ID such as National Insurance (NI) number is captured in the verification process. This is used to authenticate your employee’s identity and to ensure that Work Report™ accurately matches the correct payroll data to that individual.
Work Report™ simply facilitates the transmission of the employees’ own data between their employer’s payroll or HR platform and the Consumer Service Provider of their choosing. Only the necessary income and/or employment fields that are required to inform the specific Consumer Service Provider use case are shared. This is in accordance with GDPR’s data minimisation principle.
Experian may hold the data for up to six years for audit purposes and for answering consumer enquiries only.
What if an employee leaves the company?
Once an employee is made a leaver on People XD, their data is cleared from the integrated central database and can no longer be shared with Experian.
If an employee has used the Work Report™, Experian may hold on to their data for up to six years for audit purposes and for answering consumer queries only.
Do employees need to consent to using this service?
Yes. This is done at the point of the credit application with the Consumer Service Provider. The employees consent to the information to be requested from People XD Payroll via the Experian Work Report service.
Does the employer need to consent to the transfer of employee data?
As an employer, you can control whether this service is made available for your employees. This is managed by a system parameter in People XD. Full details of how the employee data is handled as part of the integration is detailed in the Access Digital Employment Verification Product Factsheet.
Work Report™ is consistent with the spirit and intention of GDPR, which supports consumer choice and control. An employer that has opted in to Work Report™, is not responsible or required to promote its use. By opting into Work Report™, you as an employer are simply enabling your employees to make the choice as to whether they would like to use Work Report™ as use of the service requires explicit employee consent every time it is used.
Do I need to tell my employees about this service?
As a data controller of your employees’ data, you will need to determine if a notification is required to your employees.
By opting into Work Report™, you as an employer and data controller are simply enabling your employees to make the choice as to whether they would like to use Work Report™.
Can the employer see when an employee has used the Work Report™?
No. The employer will not be notified or be able to report on employee usage of the Work Report™.
Is the data secure?
Yes. The data is held on a single multi-tenant database on Access Group’s infrastructure. Full details of this are provided in the Access Digital Employment Verification Product Factsheet.
Data is shared using secure Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that connect directly to The Access Group. Experian is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and is required to manage data under the governance of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) guidelines and best practice. API access to that database is restricted to Experian by IP address.
Is the integration available in non-production People XD environments?
The service is available only in the Live system and not in test environments. Clients do not have access to test this service due to restricted access to work reports and the need for explicit employee consent for data access. We have thoroughly tested the API for security and data validity.
Where should my employee submit a “subject access request” related to this?
A SAR should be submitted to the data controllers, which in this case is the finance provider (e.g. the bank they have chosen to share their information with) or Experian.
This is also outlined to all employees when they agree to the privacy policy. Check this policy guide for more information.
Where does Experian store the data that they capture, once the employee has consented to the service?
The solution is cloud based, using AWS London Region and Azure Dublin / Amsterdam.
Feature Roll Out
When will this be available to People XD Payroll clients?
This feature will be enabled for all People XD UK Payroll clients from 21st November 2023. Access will enable this by default. You do not need to take any action to make this available.
Can I opt out from using the Experian Work Report service?
Yes. If this service is not something that you wish to offer to your employees today, you can opt out of using it. This article provides guidance on how to enable or disable the feature.