As cashless.pl has found out, the Patento brand, owned by fintech Soonly, has launched sales of its first product - a loan called pre-payroll. It is an advance on an upcoming salary. It comes in two variants: as a benefit offered to employees by an employer cooperating with Patento, or as a temporary loan taken out personally by an individual.

"We have launched a TV advertising campaign. Our main objective at this stage is to build awareness of the brand and, more broadly, the whole product category of pre-payroll. Currently, when considering employee benefits, most employers have gym passes, private medicine, and maybe lunch cards in mind. We have a lot of work ahead of us so that salary advances, or more broadly - flexible payments - are mentioned in one breath in this list", Dariusz Denziak, head of the Patento project at Soonly, tells cashless.pl.

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For an employee to take advantage of pre-payroll at his or her workplace, the employer must first establish a partnership with Patento. Implementation is supposed to be simple, as integrating the employer's and Patento's systems is done using a simple Excel-based program. The employer transmits to Patento, among other things, the list of employees eligible for pre-paroll, the maximum advance limit (up to 30 per cent of salary), payment dates (depending on the HR cycle), etc.

Once this step has been carried out, the employee only needs to set up his or her account in the Patento system and can then apply for pre-payroll without involving the employer. The latter can declare that it contributes to the costs of handling the advances (the employer's entry into the pre-payroll scheme is free). If he or she decides not to do so, the employee covers all the loan costs - that is, PLN 5 for every PLN 100 of the advance. The repayment obligation is settled between the employer and Patento after wages are paid.

Dariusz Denziak of Soonly also told us that the pre-payroll can be used by an individual whose employer does not cooperate with Patento. Such a person applies for the pre-pension personally via the Patento website. The service is available to employees with an employment contract or B2B agreement, including Ukrainian citizens. The service cost is a maximum of PLN 5 for every PLN 100 paid as a pre-payment. With a pre-payroll of up to PLN 200 - there are no costs, and the loan is free of charge. It has to be repaid within five days of receiving the salary. Patento estimates this deadline based on the transaction history of the customer's account at the bank.

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In all situations, the pre-payroll is handled completely online—there is no need to exchange paper documents. The advance is transferred to the customer's account within a few minutes.

We wrote about Soonly's plans to launch the Patento brand and salary advances on cashless.pl in June last year. Meanwhile, another Soonly service called Vivigo may soon follow.

Solutions such as pre-payroll are not a complete novelty on our market. As mentioned above, entities such as Flexee or Symmetrical have offered this type of service. Salary advances were also paid out by the fintech Cash, owned by PZU, which recently ceased selling.