ADP Developed an Innovative and Secure Digital Wallet in a Few Months Using AWS Services

Founded in 1949, ADP serves one million customers in 140 countries with its human capital management software. As the source of pay for one in six Americans, ADP saw an opportunity to help enhance the employee experience through financial wellness offerings. The company wanted to move quickly to provide a socially responsible option for its existing customers and lead the way with a modern industry solution. The company’s digital wallet includes on-demand access to eligible workers’ earned wages before payday, support for online shopping, and many other cutting-edge features.

ADP had been using AWS services since 2015 and had worked with Nuvalence on other business initiatives since 2019, so it decided to enlist both companies as it worked on this strategic initiative. “The AWS team has been with us through thick and thin and is always responsive. By using AWS, we have incorporated best practices while building resilient systems that can handle our global scale,” says Lohit Sarma, senior vice president of product development at ADP. “Nuvalence has been a strategic partner of ours, delivering high-quality work. Its expertise in building large-scale digital solutions was an ideal fit for our needs, and we brought the firm in to provide high-quality performance.”

The digital wallet development started in early 2022. Teams from ADP, Nuvalence, and AWS first aligned on the architecture and security requirements. AWS then made service recommendations that were based on the use case and the existing architecture. Nuvalence paired with ADP engineers to design and build the solution, maximizing the effectiveness of features from AWS services and providing the glue to connect to ADP’s infrastructure and existing set of services. Although similar projects often take several years to complete, ADP released the first version of its digital wallet in a few months.

ADP met its goal to release the digital wallet quickly using AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that customers use to run code without thinking about servers or clusters. The digital wallet uses AWS Lambda to create a variety of different functions, minimizing the compute footprint of the service. “The team used AWS Lambda to provide an efficient and scalable approach to handling authentication, authorization, and other key functions for the wallet,” says Abe Sultan, partner at Nuvalence and executive sponsor of the Nuvalence team working with ADP. Using serverless technology, ADP could both go to market quickly and leave room to scale for future growth as the needs of the solution evolve.

Because ADP manages employee and financial services, the company needed the solution to meet rigorous compliance-quality standards, including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. To bolster the security of its digital wallet, ADP uses services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service built to retrieve virtually any amount of data from anywhere. Using Amazon S3, ADP can securely store flat text files involved in money movement. The solution also uses tokens for the card number to keep transactions secure. Because the payment credentials were loaded securely into the digital wallet, customers could use the digital card for purchases and make payments immediately without waiting for a physical card to arrive in the mail. “Data security and privacy are critical to everything we develop,” says Lohit. “Using AWS services, we could uphold our company’s existing standards while innovating on the implementation.”

With its digital wallet, ADP accomplished its mission of making financial wellness tools more accessible to US workers. The digital wallet is a safe and simple option through which employees without a traditional bank account can access their pay, giving them freedom in spending their wages. The Earned Wage Access feature gives eligible members access to their earned wages before payday, creating a viable alternative for customers who urgently need access to funds and eliminating the need to take out high-interest-rate loans.

ADP needed flexibility and extensibility to offer a dynamic solution for a fast-moving market with many changing variables. ADP provides education for companies as they roll out the Earned Wage Access feature. With this support, companies can help eligible members make informed decisions while getting valuable access to earned wages when needed. “ADP takes great pride in being a company with high morals that is always there for its clients and their people,” says Lohit. “Using AWS services, we can give people tools to manage their finances and give them access to funds when they potentially need them the most.”