“The US is the richest country in the world, and in that country you have a third world country sitting there.” – Sabina Bhatia

Listen to the full interview here or read below.

Sabina Bhatia, Payactiv’s Chief Customer Officer, joins Chris Colbert’s Insert:Human podcast to discuss serving the essential workers, what Payactiv is, how our service improve employees’ mental health, the concept of Conscious Capitalism, how it came to be, various industries that have become aware of how they affect the environment, and how the pandemic forced many companies to treat their employees better. 

Chris Colbert speaks around the world on a range of topics including global innovation, technology stewardship, and the human truths of transformation. 

Sabina Bhatia:

The US is the richest country of the world, and in that richest country, you have a third world country sitting there, which is approximately-

Chris Colbert:

Hold on. I want everybody who’s listening to register what Sabina just said. Within the first world country, the super power of superpowers, there exists a third world country.

Chris Colbert:

Welcome to Insert:Human. I’m Chris Colbert. As the former managing director of the Harvard Innovation Lab, I realized many things. One of the things I realized is that the pace of technology-driven change is faster, far faster, than most organizations’ and most people’s ability to change. That gap equals risk, vulnerability, and eventually long-term viability. And it’s a particularly troubling gap in the three sectors that underpin modern society; banking, education, and healthcare.

Chris Colbert:

It’s the biggest existential threat they have and by extension we have. Closing the gap requires transformation and transformation requires a much better understanding of ourselves, because at the end of the day, all transformation is human transformation. That’s why I created Insert:Human, a weekly conversation with brilliant people about better understanding us, and in doing so, shrinking the gap and increasing the chances of a better outcome for all.

Chris Colbert:

Before we dive in today’s episode, an offer to all the listeners who are leading some sort of transformation effort. I’ve learned that the key to a successful transformation, organizations big or small, begins with adopting seven critical habits. While most of the leaders I’ve met have nailed some, rarely have I seen any hone to an innate really effective level. To find that how you’re doing with the seven habits, you can get my guide, The 7 Habits of Highly Transformative Leaders, at chriscolbert.com.

Chris Colbert:

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all of the Insert:Human listeners around the world. Welcome to another episode and another great interview with another brilliant person trying to make the world a little better. With me is Sabina Bhatia. Sabina was introduced to me several weeks ago. She is a C-suite leader, customer champion. She comes from the belly of the beast, Wall Street, and has learned a lot about the world of finance, the world of economics, and the world of people trying to make a living.

Chris Colbert:

Today, she is the chief customer officer at Payactiv. And I love this. She’s a daily advocate and amplifier for the needs of thousands of corporate clients, and as importantly, maybe more importantly, millions of lower income workers. We’re going to talk, I think, a bit about those lower income workers and how her company, Payactiv, and others are trying to support them in their life. Sabina, welcome to Insert:Human. Thank you for taking the time to chat with me today.

Sabina Bhatia:

Thank you, Chris, for having me. Excited to be here. And I must say, belly of the beast.

Chris Colbert:

It was the belly.

Sabina Bhatia:

That’s the first time I heard that about Wall Street. I love it. I don’t know if I love it or hate it, but I love it. I’m so proud of being part of it.

Chris Colbert:

But we’ll probably talk a little bit about that too. I think I mentioned to you earlier that I just finished writing my book, Technology is Dead. My poor listeners have heard about my book probably too many times over the last year or two. But I’m really thrilled that it is finished.

Chris Colbert:

The reason why I bring it up is because part of the book covers the topic of… It’s a bucket of topics that were related to each other; conscious capitalism, ESG, purpose-driven, B Corp, this apparently growing movement within the corporate world to do more than deliver shareholder value, to potentially be more broad-minded, more purposeful, dare I say more caring? I don’t know. That’s a pretty radical statement. But I’d love to get your two cents on what’s going on there, why is it happening? What’s B Corp versus purpose-driven? Are they related? Are they different? Ultimately, we’ll talk about Payactiv because it was started as a conscious capitalistic organization, why the founders did that. That’s a lot to process, but let’s give it a shot.

Sabina Bhatia:

Sure. Great question. Something that we are asked repeatedly, the whole idea behind conscious capitalism, the whole idea behind B Corp. Why did Payactiv decide to do what is going on there? We can go over definitions like conscious capitalism. We believe that business is good because it creates value. According to us, business is good. So it creates value and it must create value, right?

Sabina Bhatia:

The power that organizations have, it is driven by that purpose and it is driven by the value that you create in a more of a trifecta impact. I see it as a trifecta impact and we use our technology for that trifecta impact. So what is comprised of that trifecta? We take care of our users. If you take care of the users, it takes care of the impact that we can make in communities. And who benefits from it? Businesses. But it has to start from your people, from your employees.

Sabina Bhatia:

That’s where we fall when it comes to conscious capitalism. That is really our compass, that we want to make an impact, and we are a purposeful organization, to change the lives of those 60, 70 million Americans living paycheck to paycheck, the low wage workers, but are in the front line of industries that you and I touch every day. We’ll go more into that. That is where we lie with the whole idea of conscious capitalism. Now, B corp-

Chris Colbert:

Can I interject? Can you reiterate? Trifecta, meaning three audiences, three beneficiaries. The three are employees, users, and companies or businesses? Is that right?

Sabina Bhatia:

Employees are our users. That is one part of the trifecta. If you make a difference in their life, you will impact the community as a whole. But who benefits from that? Businesses also benefit from it. But I cannot start from the business. I need to start from their people. Through the pandemic, businesses are recognizing that even more and more, “I need to take care of my people first.”

Chris Colbert:

Wait, their people? Wait, you said their people?

Sabina Bhatia:

People. People. We say people versus employees versus users versus associates. These are my people who touch my clients every day. Chris, you and I are going to walk into a Safeway or a ShopRite or a Whole Foods or a Target at some point today or this week to grab groceries or whatever it might be. You go and pay for whatever you bought. That person who checks you out is the people we want to make an impact in their life. How we make an impact in their life is really to get rid of the financial stress that they come to work with.

Sabina Bhatia:

That has really become our purpose. We feel like if we cater to those 60, 70 million Americans, low wage workers in the front line of the industries, touching you and me, their client, every day, we could make an impact on communities. The better community, more financially stable, and the business will benefit from it. So, higher engagement, easier to recruit, better benefits across the board, all that comes from there, but you have to impact the people first.

Chris Colbert:

Right. Right. Conscious capitalism, if you break that apart, what is the consciousness? Conscious of a higher purpose? What do you think that’s attached to? Why that word? Why does the industry use that word? I’m not sure there’s a right answer to that. I’m just curious what your answer would be.

Sabina Bhatia:

I think it is the recognition of the state of the world, of the sign of times. The US is the richest country of the world, and in that richest country, you have a third world country sitting there, which is approximately-

Chris Colbert:

Hold on. I want everybody who’s listening to register what Sabina just said. Within the first world country, the superpower of superpowers, there exist a third world country. That is heavy. Okay, keep going.

Sabina Bhatia:

You coming from Harvard, right? The Harvard Business Review actually just published a report and the number is specific. 44% of American workers are employed in low-wage jobs at the front line of industries with a median wage of less than $39,000. So they’re making less than $20 an hour. How can you ignore that community? Now, what is even more important is how you and I understood the essential workforce before the pandemic and how we understand it today is a little different, right?

Chris Colbert:

Oh yeah.

Sabina Bhatia:

The guy and girl who come and drop off my Amazon package, the person who checks me out at Safeway, the person who serves my coffee in Starbucks, the person who gives me my COVID vaccine at CVS, these are all essential workers. Why? Because they are the ones who helped us run the economy during the pandemic. Could you have survived without them? No way.

Chris Colbert:

No.

Sabina Bhatia:

You could not have.

Chris Colbert:

No.

Sabina Bhatia:

So how can you ignore them? When it comes to purpose, the purpose of our organization hasn’t changed, but it keeps growing and has become more relevant, that we want to serve them because this community of workers are helping us build our economy. They should participate in the growth of the economy too, right?

Chris Colbert:

Absolutely.

Sabina Bhatia:

They should not be victims, right?

Chris Colbert:

Absolutely. I haven’t really connected the dots until you just said what you said. I have had a palpable… somewhere between appreciation and sadness for all the roles that you just mentioned, that in my daily life, when I interact with the Amazon delivery person or the person behind the counter or whatever… It may be sadness is inappropriate, but there’s a sense of, I guess honestly, unfairness that here I am gallivanting around and not particularly worried about paying my rent or anything else and yet there’s this entire group of people that are just doing really laborious jobs and not getting compensated sufficiently.

Chris Colbert:

I mean, I live in Boston. The cost of living in Boston is absurd. A one-bedroom apartment in this town, rent is like 2,000, $2,400. So 2,400 times 12, I think, is close to what you said the 44% of the people make. So they don’t have any money for food. So how does that work? Yeah. Also, I think the other thing you’ve said that is really interesting to me, I think, is this purpose. You read a lot about purpose-driven companies and the Business Roundtable came out a couple years ago. It was like, “Hey, we need to be more purpose-driven.”

Chris Colbert:

But I think the natural translation by people of purpose-driven is purpose as it relates to environment, sustainability, ESG, governance stuff. I don’t know that most people translate purpose into, “Are we doing the best we can to support the people who work for us that are minimum wage or lower wage, to support the people in our community that are… ” It’s just interesting how Payactiv and you have looked at purpose through the lens of a particular population, which is a significant population, an underserved population, and what do we do as a society or as a company to better support them.

Chris Colbert:

So I think that’s also, I guess, for me, really a great clarification, that it’s not always macro purpose, like how do we save the world? It can be, how do we better support the people within our own country, our own society?

Sabina Bhatia:

Well, I’ll tell you, I get this question a lot, that I spent more than 20 years as a hedge fund analyst on Wall Street serving institutional investors, serving big banks, and today I’m serving the hourly workforce, where is the connection? I’ll tell you where the connection is. I was part of the 2008-2009 crisis also. I was in New York then. You’re from Boston, I’m from New York. So getting a one-bedroom apartment for $2,500 in New York, I don’t know where you would find that. You’re probably paying 3,000 plus, right?

Chris Colbert:

Right.

Sabina Bhatia:

During the crisis, I saw some of the largest banks getting bailed out by us. Now, how do I connect that to the community I serve today, that same community that has an hourly rate of less than $20 an hour? Because of the lack of liquidity that they have between pay periods, they are paying 35, $40 in overdraft fees. And if you actually add up overdraft fees, payday loan fees, disconnect fees, reconnect fees, all those fees put together, every year, it’s close to $250 billion that go in fees because of the lack of liquidity. Think about the money that is being wasted. Chris, you and I are not paying those overdraft fees.

Chris Colbert:

No, we’re not.

Sabina Bhatia:

Right?

Chris Colbert:

No. No. No. No.

Sabina Bhatia:

Even if you and I are a penny short or a second late, we’ll call our bank and say, “Hey, can you excuse me.” They’ll see that we have liquidity in the back. “No worries, Chris. We’ll let go of the overdraft fee this time.” But when you’re making $20 an hour and you have to wait for two weeks to get access to your liquidity to pay for food and shelter, those are the fees that you get exposed to.

Chris Colbert:

It reminds me of years ago, back in the late ’90s, I ran a company here in Boston. Not big, 300 people. We acquired another company and we got into this whole debate about benefits. I was pushing that the people that made the least got the most benefits. So I was like, “The parking, free parking, should go to the people that don’t make any money. Why do the executives get a parking spot? They’re the ones that actually can afford it?” But I think the hierarchy of life has made it so you get more when you get further up to the top. And it’s counter moral or something. I don’t know.

Sabina Bhatia:

Well, I say it as, it’s very expensive to be poor. Right?

Chris Colbert:

Yeah.

Sabina Bhatia:

That’s really how it is. The less you make, the more expensive it is for you to survive. See, when you talk about stories and you talk about numbers, that’s what people remember, that’s what people tend to believe. Is it cheaper for me to walk into a Costco and buy 10 gallons of milk, and if you actually see the price per unit? Versus someone saying, “I can’t afford to pay $65 a year for the Costco membership. I cannot afford to go and buy bulk of gallons of milk from Costco, but I can pay $7 for half a gallon of milk at this mom and pop shop.”

Sabina Bhatia:

But I actually pay three times the amount I should have because I can’t afford to pay the $65 membership or buy in bulk. Essentially, it’s very expensive for me to be poor. I have to pay so much more for things that could be a lot cheaper for you and me.

Chris Colbert:

Yeah. I’m thinking of Amazon Prime, $85 a year in order to get free delivery. And if you can’t afford the 85 bucks, you’re not getting the free delivery.

Sabina Bhatia:

Well, and with that also comes, if you don’t have a card sitting inside of Amazon, how will you even pay for things for Amazon? You need a card that has cash in it to even pay for an Amazon thing. So it just escalates to so many other problems.

Chris Colbert:

Yeah. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about this concept of earned wage access and connect it to the work that Payactiv is doing more functionally. And maybe start with just… for the audience, two seconds on what Payactiv actually does, the business that Payactiv is in.

Sabina Bhatia:

Sure. Payactiv invented the earned wage access category. The purpose was, we go back to purpose, to free the American worker from the two-week pay cycle. That is really important to understand. What we are trying to get rid of is the pain that comes from that two-week pay cycle. Going back to a story, think about the Albany worker that comes into work in the morning, they clock in, they work a certain number of hours, and then they clock out. So they’ve earned those hours.

Sabina Bhatia:

Do they get paid for those hours? No. They have to wait for two weeks to get paid. Now, do their bills and emergencies and their basic expenses just for livelihood purposes fall every two weeks? No. They fall between pay periods. So if I’m making less than $20 an hour, I’m putting in my work every day, so I do have earned hours every day, but I have to wait for two weeks to get paid while all these expenses and costs and emergencies are coming through. And that cost could just be for paying for gas to show up at work.

That’s the basic. For me to actually earn a living, I have to spend money to get to work to earn a living. So they have to wait for two weeks to get paid. Now, that causes a lot of stress, absenteeism, just not showing up at work. It’s just a very chaotic life. One, they should not have to wait. If you’ve earned it and you need it, you should be able to access it. But the employers are having the same problem. They’re saying, “We want to help them, but how do we help them, because we have to go by that two-week pay cycle?”

That is exactly when Payactiv comes in to help both the worker, their people, and the business solve the problem. What we do is we give the employees access to a percentage of the hours that have already been worked. It’s not a loan, it’s not debt, nothing. It’s the hours they’ve already worked. It is no cost to the business, and when payroll is processed and employee has other deductions, whatever the employee accessed from Payactiv comes back to us.

The result of this technology solution really is that you have a happier employee, they are more attentive at work, they take care of their business, they love their employer. And for the employer, they use us as both a recruitment and a retention tool. But enough about me talking about us. We actually recently ran a survey that went through two million plus users of ours. Here are the results, Chris. You’re going to love it. 95% of our hourly workers are interested in working for an employer who provides earned wage access.

Number two, 89% were willing to work a longer period, so grab an extra shift, work longer hours, if their employer offered earned wage access. Three, and not the last one, 79% would be willing to switch to an employer who offered earned wage access.

Chris Colbert:

Wow!

Sabina Bhatia:

The numbers are there. You cannot ignore it. Going back to the number I gave you from the Harvard Business Review, 44% of our labor force is there to be catered to, to be… We need to be caring, right? That’s the word you used, caring.

Chris Colbert:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s so much in there that I want to unpack with you, but I want to actually go to a slightly… Well, it’s related, but different. Do you know the genesis of the biweekly pay period? I assume decades ago that people were paid daily and then at some point there was a decision that it was more cost efficient on the part of the employer to not pay people daily. It was lots of labor, lots of calculating, whatever, and we would move this to a biweekly… Maybe you don’t know. I’m just curious, what was the motivating force to… And the presumption in that was people did have enough savings that they could weather a two-week period until they got to the next payday?

Sabina Bhatia:

It’s a combination of a few things. One is just lack of technology, right?

Chris Colbert:

Right.

Sabina Bhatia:

Lack of resources, like how do I accommodate this on a daily basis? How do I track this hour? Who’s going to pay this certain amount. Where is that money going to come from to pay? Because if I’m a business, the money coming in is not necessarily just the money going out. Everything has the delays. So there isn’t a common platform to manage all that to pay someone on a daily basis. Then it’s also expenses. If I have expenses to manage on a day-to-day basis and if I actually pay employees on a day-to-day basis, how do I manage my expenses?

So it’s a combination of all those things. Today, businesses are competing with the whole gig workforce, instant gratification. But how do I make that happen? They can’t unless you have a solution like ours that’ll front the funds. But when do we get paid back from businesses? When payroll is processed, once again, in two weeks. So it’s a combination of all these things that has created that process.

Chris Colbert:

And how does Payactiv make money? How do you do that?

Sabina Bhatia:

Yeah. The benefit is of zero cost to the employer, although a lot of businesses now front the fee for their employees, they don’t want their employees paying the fee. We do have a fee model for the employees. We have a zero cost model where it’ll cost an employee nothing. Outside of that, we have a membership model for the employees where they pay a dollar on the day they access the funds. We even capped that for an employee that they would never pay us more than five bucks in a payroll period. So going back to caring and being fair and using technology for good.

Chris Colbert:

Yeah. So where do you see or where does the industry envision earned wage access going? I mean, based on the survey, why isn’t every employer adopting the model and/or Payactiv? I’m sure you have competitors. But why isn’t this universal now?

Sabina Bhatia:

I keep saying I don’t want to talk about the pandemic anymore because I just want it to become old. It’s just becoming exhausting, every conversation is about the pandemic. But the pandemic has taught us and these numbers are being thrown there all the time so that people in businesses recognize this. Roughly, 1.2 billion people, nearly a third of the global workforce, Chris, are freelancers. Now, in the US itself, approximately 60 million, or 36% of the workforce, consider themselves as freelancers.

Then there’s this whole thought around the gig economy. What do they want? They want instant gratification? So you have to compete in that economy. You cannot have them waiting for two weeks. You don’t want to lose one of your people to go work for Uber or another organization that’s offering access to wages anytime you want. So that flexibility is needed by the hourly workforce and businesses are stepping up to make that change. So we are actually seeing that change and I thank the pandemic for that.

Chris Colbert:

Is there a minimum size of company that you can support?

Sabina Bhatia:

Going back to who we serve and our purpose, our purpose is that labor force making under $20 an hour. Chris, we serve them. So bring me a business that has one employee, bring me a business that has a million employees, I will serve them. No, we will serve all businesses. Among businesses, we’ll see more businesses maybe in the retail sector, logistics sector, healthcare, senior living. So definitely, some industries are highlighted over others, but we will serve all businesses.

Chris Colbert:

Good for you.

Sabina Bhatia:

Yes.

Chris Colbert:

Talk to me about Payactiv beyond the earned wage access capability and its purpose of supporting the lower income workforce. How else you as an executive team have approached culture and values and how do you extend on the mission of the company in terms of day-to-day, what it’s like to work there, the kind of people you bring into the company? How do you run the business in a way that is aligned with your mission?

Sabina Bhatia:

Sure. Great question because who we serve, our purpose, all starts from within. Some people laugh at me when I tell them that whenever there’s a new employee at the organization, in the interview I always ask them, “Do you feel comfortable hanging out with an hourly worker?” And the person just looks at me like, “What’s wrong with her? What is she talking about? Does she understand what she’s asking?”

And I said, “No, this is a legit question. Do you understand who we are trying to serve? We are serving the hourly worker, so if you don’t understand the pain of the hourly worker, if you don’t understand the purpose of us serving the hourly worker and the difference that we are trying to make, you will not survive at Payactiv.”

Chris Colbert:

I would layer into that respect for the hourly worker. I think our stance as a society is not respect. I’m not sure it’s disrespect, but I actually think we treat the hourly worker as an anonymous function, not as a human. We don’t seek to say hello to the Amazon delivery person. We view it as an extension of the technology and it’s really alarming, really alarming.

Sabina Bhatia:

That’s why I use the word people, right?

Chris Colbert:

Right.

Sabina Bhatia:

Let’s not put them in the 44%, let’s not put them in the 63 million, let’s not put them in the 250 billion paying those fees. Let’s not use words like them, those people. It’s people, it’s your people, it’s our people that are serving us every day. Let’s make a measurable impact in their life and that’ll take care of many other issues. Maybe there is a way to get away from taking a payday loan. Listen, if payday loans did not exist, good Lord! What would have happened to people who needed $100 to just get by? Just $100, Chris.

You can change their life by giving them $100 between pay periods, which is really the average access through Payactiv. So being able to use our technology to build a platform that is not just for survival, but the culture over here is, yes, let’s help them survive, get through that livelihood stage, and then let’s help them sustain to get to that level where they’re happy, there’s dignity. They can start saving, right? Because frankly speaking, if I’m spending $35 every payroll period in an overdraft fee, I just missed an opportunity to save that $35 because I was a second late or penny short.

Sabina Bhatia:

That has really become the culture of Payactiv. Now, what we are doing with earned wage access is it’s a given. We want to do that. But we are helping understanding the mindset of the hourly worker and building that sustainable stage of the platform, which is really described as Live, Grow, Connect in our platform. But it’s really for the longevity of the worker. Now, businesses also love that. And businesses are caring. We’ve always been worried about human resources. Human resources ask me to come and meet them in their office, put my ID on my laptop, I’m always worried, right?

So there’s always this negative connotation with human resources. But we realized that human resources is actually the source of betterment for the hourly worker. So they work with us very closely to say that we’ll give them EWA, but let’s give them more, let’s give them discounts on their basic needs. So today a user can get a discount on gas, their main need to get to work on our platform.

Chris Colbert:

Is that right?

Sabina Bhatia:

If we give them discounts, like prescription discounts, gas discounts, even movie theater discounts, get those discounts, don’t treat it as a discount, treat it as savings. Save your money and use it for your basic needs and for saving.

Chris Colbert:

Does the platform provide planning, education? Not that long ago, three years ago, before COVID, I was giving talks all over the world. Part of what I would talk about is the dynamic between the progress of technology and the importance of making sure that it’s being managed and delivered through the lens of human understanding. One example I would use is financial inclusion. I would talk about it’s really wonderful that the financial system and banks specifically are focused on trying to increase financial inclusion.

The asterisks is financial inclusion needs to come with an effort around financial literacy. My terrible example was the subprime mortgage situation back in 2000… whatever, ’08 or ’07 or whatever it was, and giving credit to people that didn’t necessarily understand what it meant. So I guess my question to you is, is financial literacy, planning capacity, budgeting, savings, is that part of what you’re… if not you’re doing where you’re headed with some of that?

Sabina Bhatia:

We are doing it right now. We have goal-based savings built into our platform that our users are using. We have financial counseling, we have financial literacy. But there’s a reason we have that. Going back to your comment about giving credit to citizens who didn’t necessarily need to have these subprime loans, let me ask you a question, Chris. Let’s say you are starving, you need a meal. What do you prefer? Do you prefer I give you a meal or will you react more positively if I give you a book on nutrition? Right?

Chris Colbert:

Right.

Sabina Bhatia:

You just want your food, correct? You just want your food. So going back to the culture of Payactiv, people that you bump into on a daily basis, come on, 63 million Americans are just bad people, they don’t know how to save? No, that is not what’s going on here, right?

Chris Colbert:

That’s not the core issue.

Sabina Bhatia:

Exactly. So we believe our culture is that, let’s solve their day-to-day livelihood needs first. Once you take care of the livelihood needs, you’re just a happier person. You’re proud to pay your bills, to take care of your family, and because of the pandemic, your extended family that might have lost their job. So after the livelihood needs are met, hey, they have access to financial counseling, financial literacy. Now I can go into the goal-based savings and say for a vacation. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Save for an emergency, save for back to school, things like that. So once again goes back to the platform that’s been built first for survival, get through your business. As long as you’ve earned it and you need it, go ahead, access it, take care of your business. After that comes the sustainability part of the platform, we will let you sustain for a longer period. That’s why businesses want financial wellness as a whole. Financial wellness is not just EWA, it has to be more. We really want to see a long-term impact on the bottom line of your business.

Chris Colbert:

It’s a wonderful mission that you’re delivering on really effectively. Is there an industry emerging around EWA? I mean, do you have counterparts that are collaborators or is it not there yet?

Sabina Bhatia:

Yes. I mean, today there are more than 20 players in the EWA space. I think last year there were over 7,000 transactions per hour, every day, over 10 billion worth of transactions that occurred. It’s a big industry right now. But as I say, what you do is important, Chris, but how you do it is even more important.

Chris Colbert:

I agree. Agreed.

Sabina Bhatia:

Which goes back to how we started, right? Conscious, purpose for the good, to add value, that trifecta impact. That is what we are focusing on. Not just providing it, but how we are going to provide it to the people in a fair way.

Chris Colbert:

Yeah. Wonderful. And it’s global presumably. Are you guys global? Are you moving global?

Sabina Bhatia:

Yes, we are in countries outside of the US, but primarily the businesses in the US right now.

Chris Colbert:

Okay. Okay. Mindful of the time, I want to ask the… It’s a call to action question, which is, for the listeners, what can they do? Some, no doubt, are leaders of organizations, some are employed by organizations that potentially have lower income people, or some are just everyday citizens that care about making our world more equitable. What would you recommend for any of the above in terms of an action that they could undertake?

Sabina Bhatia:

We would love to grow our partner base. Please join us in our mission, help us meet our goals and purpose. It’s not about Payactiv, it’s about what we are trying to do. Our CEO and founder, he wrote a book, It’s about TIME. We actually have a film, a documentary, itsabouttimethefilm.com. You can actually go to that website and learn everything about what we are trying to do, who we are trying to serve, and how we are doing it, and the industry as a whole. I would encourage people to either grab the book on Amazon or just go to the website, itsabouttimethefilm.com

Chris Colbert:

Okay. That’s great. I would like to add, if I may, a call to action around this idea of removing the anonymity from the equation, which is to say that as we interact with these frontline hourly employees, people, we appreciate them and we acknowledge them and we say hello to them and may I be so radical as to suggest when appropriate introduce ourselves. Not that I’m a saint, but I’m trying on a regular basis to deanonymize my daily life, and particularly to connect with people in these roles whether they’re an Uber driver, an Amazon delivery person, a Starbucks employee.

Chris Colbert:

It doesn’t matter, but to show a level of not just appreciation, but humanization of the interaction so they feel valued. They are critical. I mean, I think you started out talking about how critical these… Well, did you say 44% of the workforce?

Sabina Bhatia:

Yes. 44% of the-

Chris Colbert:

Is making-

Sabina Bhatia:

They’re at the front lines.

Chris Colbert:

Front line, making $20 or less, really struggling to make ends meet, and I think the rest of us owe them respect and appreciation and an acknowledgement of them as people, not simply as functions. That’s my ask of everybody. Sabina, thank you so much for being on the show and for doing the work that you’re doing and to your counterparts at Payactiv for taking a critical role in our society, which others are not. My hope is the corporations out there are all looking at EWA as a critical capacity to build into their equation. So thank you. It’s wonderful to talk to you.

Sabina Bhatia:

Chris. Thank you so much for having me.

Chris Colbert:

Thanks for listening today. Wherever you are as a leader on your transformation journey, you’ll find more helpful resources at chriscolbert.com from more podcast episodes and my film talks from around the globe to my blog and books. And if you’re a CEO or leader interested in getting my advice, you can reach me there too. Just head over to chriscolbert.com. Thanks for listening.