Beyond Finance is a fintech leader helping individuals and families struggling with debt find a pathway to financial freedom. As the company entered a period of hyper-growth, the influx of new recruits overwhelmed the IT and HR teams due to the highly manual and lengthy onboarding process, and the business was feeling the strain.

“Every time a new employee was onboarded or offboarded, our HR, IT, recruiting, and procurement teams would be tasked with manual work such as replicating profiles across disparate applications. We even had a five-person team focused solely on building, receiving, and shipping computers, keeping them from other IT projects,” explains Theo Martin, Director of Support. “We couldn’t modernize because we were stuck in this cycle of highly manual processes.”

Attempts to semi-automate processes with PowerShell scripts were inconsistent and required heavy human involvement, creating bottlenecks. “As soon as we went from an organization that hired periodically to one hiring hundreds of people monthly, the PowerShell approach became completely obsolete.”

“End-to-end, the process was incredibly time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone, taking approximately 10 days to onboard a single user.” These inefficiencies caused operational costs to skyrocket, delayed new employee productivity, and increased security risks due to error-prone manual processes.

To overcome its growing pains and successfully scale its onboarding process, Theo and the team knew an AI-ready iPaaS would be the ideal solution, giving them the ability to connect their cloud directory, JumpCloud, and HR directory, ADP, without building a custom solution.

After a thorough evaluation, Beyond Finance chose Tray.ai and its Universal Automation Cloud for its ease of use, large library of connectors, and strong support. Providing a user-friendly interface and the ability to handle complex, multi-step workflows involving multiple systems and teams, the Tray platform was the perfect fit for addressing Beyond Finance’s intricate onboarding and offboarding needs. “No matter what challenges we ran into, we felt in good hands with the Tray team, and that gave us the confidence to tackle our onboarding/offboarding challenges head-on,” Martin said. 

Key features included the integration of ADP with JumpCloud, making ADP the single source of truth and allowing for automatic provisioning of access to applications.Tray.ai’s large library of connectors allowed Beyond Finance to integrate other key HR and IT systems such as Monday and Greenhouse without custom coding. “Tray lets us automatically create access for applications that either don’t support SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) or don’t integrate well with JumpCloud, ensuring seamless provisioning across all our systems.” Additionally, integrating Tray with the team’s ITSM, Freshservice, allowed for further automation of service tickets and requests, significantly improving overall IT operations. 

With this flexibility, the team could scale their onboarding process efficiently. “With Tray, we can onboard new employees in minutes and be confident that they have the right access to the right tools for them to do their job right out of the gate.”

With Tray, Beyond Finance completely transformed its onboarding/offboarding process, successfully onboarding up to 100 employees per week. “Now, to onboard someone from recruitment to being fully operational takes maybe four or five minutes,” Martin remarked. “We’ve automated nearly every HR scenario related to onboarding, whether it’s hire, rehire, internal transfer, contractor onboarding, or retire. Doing so has completely eliminated manual work for our IT team and removed them from the onboarding/offboarding equation. They can now focus on more strategic and impactful projects instead of getting bogged down by these routine manual tasks.”

During its period of hypergrowth, Beyond Finance scaled smoothly from around 800 employees to 3,000 within 18 months without any onboarding or offboarding bottlenecks. “Not only have we saved our IT, HR, recruitment, and procurement teams countless hours, we’ve also reduced operational costs, mitigated security risks, and improved the overall employee experience by ensuring our new hires are productive from day one.”