The Future of Pay(day)
SHOUTOUT: DailyPay, the Remedy Diner in lower Manhattan, and a mission to modernize payroll
This week, our new friends and partners at DailyPay took over a diner.
That’s not a metaphor. They turned the Remedy Diner in lower Manhattan into "The DailyPay Diner" and convened a roundtable to chew on a deceptively simple question: why, in 2026, do we still pay people the way we did in 1938?
That's the year the Fair Labor Standards Act set the rules of the modern American paycheck, and nearly a century later the two-week pay cycle is basically untouched. Your team earns money on Monday and waits until Friday (or the Friday after that) to touch it. Rent, gas and the electric bill, of course, don't run on anyone's payroll calendar.
I was fortunate to be invited to a small roundtable with DailyPay's CEO, Nelson Chai, and COO, Andrew Brandman, alongside about a dozen executives from across industries. We ran it under the Chatham House Rule, so I'll leave the room where it was and just share the takeaway I can't shake: after health benefits, access to your own earned wages is climbing toward the top of the list of what employees actually want. Not a perk. A near-essential.
For our industry, that should land hard. Hospitality runs on hourly labor and lives with turnover that would give any other sector a heart attack. Every walk-out is a hiring cost, a training cost, and a service-quality cost. So, here's the pitch that's tough to argue with: letting people tap wages they've already earned, before payday, is one of the cheapest retention levers on the board.
DailyPay's own numbers back it up. 59% of workers say on-demand pay influences where they'll take a job, and at one large employer, turnover in the first two weeks on the job fell 58% among the people using it.
Best part for operators (b/c I know what you're thinking): it plugs into the payroll and HCM systems you already run, like ADP, Workday, SAP and Oracle. This isn't a rip-and-replace. It's a switch you flip.
The money your team earned is already theirs. In 2026, making them wait two weeks to reach it is a policy choice, not a law of nature.
Branded prides itself on being an operator-centric platform. That little bit of word-salad means that we focus on technology that helps operators take care of THEIR guests, THEIR employees, THEIR stakeholders. No wolves in sheep’s clothing. Tech that helps operators win b/c let’s face it, if operators don’t win, the hospitality industry fails.
Branded has partnered with DailyPay b/c we believe that as employee expectations continue to evolve and financial flexibility becomes an increasingly important part of the workplace experience, payroll needs to modernize.
We believe employers are looking for meaningful ways to support financial wellness, improve retention, and meet workers where they are and that On-Demand Pay is increasingly being recognized as a valuable workplace benefit.
So, if Branded is going to dive into this, we wanted to do it with our new besties at DailyPay, who also just happens to be widely recognized as the top-ranked and most adopted earned-wage access platform.
Hospitality is a people business, and it starts with the need to take care of our people.
If you’d like to discuss what Branded is doing with DailyPay or how you can get involved, you know what to do. Call me.
