Financial management platform Solo has launched two new financial tools in an effort to support independent contractors in the US.
With the goal of helping independent workers running ‘businesses of one’ embrace their professional flexibility, as well as automating the administrative element of their business and optimising their work schedule, Solo has launched new ‘Smart Schedule’ and ‘Pay Guarantee’ tools across California and New York City.
Solo’s ‘Pay Guarantee’ program looks to address both income instability and help independent workers earn more by working peak pay periods.
Meanwhile, its new ‘Smart Schedule’ is tailored to each individual user to highlight how much they’ll earn per hour across each job they have linked to the Solo app – to help them work the ‘right’ job at the right time and maximise their earnings. The company explained how this will enable workers to take advantage of New York’s newly implemented minimum wage for food delivery workers.
California’s ‘Prop 22’ law and New York’s new delivery driver bill are imposing a minimum wage for workers. Solo explained that it hopes to go a step further by providing a dynamic income floor that sometimes doubles during peak pay periods for different jobs. That guarantee includes the combination of base rate, incentives and tips that Solo says can be as much as half of a delivery driver’s compensation.
Helping independent workers “enjoy flexibility while also stabilising their income”
Bryce Bennett, CEO and co-founder of Solo
Bryce Bennett, CEO and co-founder of Solo, explained the need for the launch: “For too long independent workers have lacked the tools and resources to manage their finances; let alone increase their take-home pay. We built Solo to bridge the gap between W2 and 1099 work so that users can enjoy flexibility while also stabilising their income.”
In order for Solo to produce its earnings predictions, it uses over 175 million job data points directly from independent workers to provide the estimated earnings per hour workers see in the app.
Because past data isn’t always an accurate representation of how things could change in the future, Solo’s formula adjusts and accounts for both anticipated and real-time events that could impact estimated earnings amounts.
Using this methodology, the financial management platform tries to give independent workers both the consistency of historical trends and adjustments to reflect the reality of the moment. It has also pledged that if a user’s daily pay falls short of its predictions, Solo itself will pay users the difference.
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