At 40,000 employees, an HR decision is also a compliance decision and a payroll decision, often both at once. That’s exactly why earned wage access gets harder to evaluate the bigger the workforce gets, not easier. The feature list looks similar across providers. What actually differs, and what large employers eventually have to reckon with, is how the money moves.
Financial stress hasn’t eased enough to make this optional. Fifty-nine percent of U.S. employees say they’re financially stressed right now, and 56% say that stress is hurting their work performance, according to PwC’s 2026 Employee Financial Wellness Survey. Among frontline workers specifically, 56% live paycheck to paycheck and 76% report burnout, per UKG’s 2026 Global Frontline Workforce Study. Industry analyst firm Valoir puts the cost to employers at $1.1 trillion in lost productivity a year, the equivalent of 3.3 hours a week per worker spent managing money problems on the clock. Multiply that across a workforce in the tens of thousands and the math moves fast.
Earned wage access providers fall into a few operating models, and the difference between them is architectural, not cosmetic. Some intercept the paycheck, rerouting direct deposit to a provider-controlled account and paying the employee the “remainder” after fees. Rain runs a deduction model instead. The employer stays the payer of record, a single line item shows up on the pay stub, and the deposit always matches what the stub says. No direct deposit gets touched, and payroll runs exactly as it always has.
At small scale, that distinction is a nice-to-have. At large scale, it’s close to the whole decision. A rerouted-deposit failure or a fee dispute at a 200-person company is a support ticket. The same failure at a 40,000-person hospital system or a national retailer touches multiple HRIS instances, multiple payroll cycles and a much bigger compliance surface. Large employers are, correctly, the ones asking the hardest questions about how a given model actually works under the hood.
How Ochsner Health approached the decision
Ochsner Health employs 42,000 team members across hospitals and clinics in five states, on Workday for payroll and UKG Workforce Central for timekeeping. When Sheena Ronsonet, Ochsner’s VP of Total Rewards, went looking for an earned wage access partner, she started with Workday’s own partner ecosystem and evaluated several vendors. “We looked at several vendors, one of which used an intercept model,” she said. “There were a lot of concerns about the various different models. We take the security of our systems and our team members’ information seriously, implementing rigorous safeguards to protect confidentiality, integrity and availability at every level.”
That evaluation is the point. A Total Rewards leader responsible for tens of thousands of employees isn’t shopping off a features page. She’s running a vendor security review, and the operating model is what that review focuses on.
Ochsner’s Payroll, HRIS and IS teams stayed involved from the initial evaluation through go-live, working with Rain to build pay codes and test file feeds before launch. One decision made a real difference in the rollout: launching mid-pay period, so employees saw an available earnings balance the first time they opened the app instead of a message telling them to wait for the next cycle. Within three months, 21% of eligible team members were active users and roughly 16% were using Rain regularly, a strong adoption curve for a workforce that mixes salaried clinicians and union staff in with its hourly team, the kind of composition that typically drags adoption down at large health systems.
Sheena’s own framing of the decision cuts against a common assumption in this category, that a benefit like this is a nice-to-have layered on top of the real work. “Health care is our business, and our business is helping people get healthy,” she said. “And we’re not just talking about physical health. Financially healthy team members, who are not stressing about money, provide better care to our patients. It’s that simple.”
Large-employer buyers don’t take a vendor’s word on security and reliability. They check it. Rain holds SOC 1 Type 2, SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO/IEC 27001 certifications, has never had a data breach, and collects a minimal data footprint at enrollment, six fields, with no Social Security number and no date of birth. Rain wins 90% of the RFPs it competes in and retains 97% of its clients annually, backed by 24/7 U.S.-based support with sub-60-second response times. None of that replaces the operating-model question. It’s what a compliance or IT team checks once that question is already settled.
Rain now works with more than 4 million employees across 1,800-plus employers, including McDonald’s, Marriott and Ochsner Health, and has delivered more than $6 billion in earned wages. The outcomes employers report agree with what Ochsner described anecdotally before launch: team members call out of shifts to pick up gig work for same-day pay. Employers using Rain see 35% lower turnover in hourly roles and more than 17 additional hours worked per employee per month, alongside 2x more applicants for open roles.
For a large employer, the honest way to evaluate earned wage access isn’t feature by feature. It’s the same question Ochsner asked first: what actually happens to the money, and who is really in control of it once an employee taps into a transfer. Get that answer right, and the rest of the evaluation gets a whole lot shorter.
You can read the full Ochsner case study here.
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