Dayforce Financial Wellness: Rethinking Payroll as a Financial Wellness Engine
Transforming legacy rigid pay cycles into an intelligent, AI-guided employee financial mobility and earned wage access (EWA) ecosystem reaching 6.4M+ users across North American enterprise workforces.
Lead Product Designer
UX Strategist
Information Architecture
Design Systems (Polaris)
User Research
Persona Development
Search & Discovery
Data Visualization
Cross-functional Collaboration.
Dayforce saw an opportunity to rethink payroll as part of a broader financial wellness experience. I helped shape Dayforce Wallet into an integrated ecosystem that brought together earned wage access, savings tools, payroll visibility, and personalized financial guidance.
Working across product, research, design, and leadership, we studied digital wallets, earned wage access, and employee financial behaviors to identify opportunities to make the experience simpler, more trusted, and more proactive.
The goal wasn’t to build another financial app. It was to embed financial wellness directly into the Dayforce experience and use data and AI to help employees make better decisions in the moment.
The result was a platform that gave employees greater control over their finances while also supporting employer goals around engagement, productivity, and retention.The experience ultimately reached 6.4M+ users and 41M+ sessions.We weren’t just changing how employees got paid—we were helping them feel more confident and in control of their financial lives.
How it came togehter
How I Think
I started by looking beyond payroll. The bigger question was: what role could Dayforce play in helping employees feel more in control of their financial lives?
Employees weren’t thinking about earned wages, savings, payroll, and financial guidance as separate features. They were thinking about everyday questions: What do I have available? What’s coming next? Can I afford this? Should I save now or wait?
That shifted the work from adding features to designing around clarity, control, and confidence.
How I Work
I worked across product, research, design, and leadership to understand employee behavior, study competing financial products, and identify where Dayforce had a unique advantage.
I mapped the experience around the employee rather than the product architecture, then used journeys and prototypes to test how payroll data, earned wage access, savings, and guidance could work together.
A big part of the work was deciding what not to show. In financial products, more information doesn’t always create more confidence. The experience had to surface the right information at the right moment.
How I got to my solution
The key insight was that employees didn’t need another financial app. They needed the tools Dayforce already had to work together as one connected experience.
That led to an ecosystem combining earned wage access, payroll visibility, savings, and personalized guidance. AI wasn’t treated as a separate feature; it was a way to use context and data to make financial decisions easier.
The result reached 6.4M+ users and 41M+ sessions.
The screen was the output. The real design work was understanding the system, finding the right problem, and making a complex financial experience feel simpler.