Employers - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is Employment Verification?

This feature enables your employees to share their employment data in seconds, with the organisations they choose.

Applying for credit, a mortgage or completing a tenancy application can be confusing, frustrating and slow for your employees without the relevant income and employment information to hand.

This is when they come to you to help collect the relevant information - a time and resource intensive process for all.

By accessing income and employment data directly from your payroll platform, data can be shared instantly with the organisations your employees consent to share it with, and you benefit from reducing the day-to-day administrative burden on your Payroll/HR team.

When will this be available?

This service will be available from the 26th March 2025.

Do I need to sign up for the Employee Verification Service?

The service is included in BrightPay as a standard feature. Each employer are automatically opted in, with an easy self-service option to opt out from within the product.

What does it cost?

Employment Verification has been added to BrightPay as standard resulting in no cost to any employee in BrightPay. 

What information is obtained?

Information is collected and shared with consent from an employee during an application.

Some of your employees’ information such as their name and date of birth, along with a unique identifier, is submitted by the employee as part of an application (e.g. for a loan or mortgage) and is used, with their consent, to help our external providers locate their information in BrightPay.

Only the minimum data is collected for what is needed to enable a successful match and retrieval of the employee's payroll information from your payslip portal. Data is only requested once.

 If an employee begins any other applications in the future, they will need to provide consent for information to be shared for each application.

What data is held during the verification process?

Employees’ personal data and a unique identifier is captured in the verification process.

This is used to authenticate your employee’s identity and to ensure that our external providers accurately matches the correct payroll data to that individual. The PII is deleted and not stored or kept by our external providers once payroll data has been provided to the employee's chosen finance provider (e.g. a bank or lender).

The Employee Verification service simply facilitates the transmission of the employees’ own data between their payslip platform and the finance provider of their choosing. Only the necessary income and/or employment fields that are required to inform the specific finance provider use case are shared with the relevant provider. This is in accordance with GDPR’s data minimisation principle.

Do I need to tell my employees about this service?

As a data controller of your employees’ data, you will need to determine if a notification is required to your employees’.

By opting into Employment Verification, you as an employer and data controller are simply enabling your employees to make the choice as to whether they would like to use Employment Verification.

How do I opt out?

Employers are automatically opted in by default. If an employer wishes to opt out at any time please see our guidance here. You can opt out and remove the service anytime. Or opt back in anytime.

What if an employee leaves the company?

If an employee leaves your company, they are no longer active on your employer payroll and so will no longer be able to share their payroll data from their ‘old’ employer. Our external providers may hold your employee’s data for up to six years for audit purposes and for answering consumer enquiries only.

Would it be possible for the wrong data to be pulled for an employee? How do you avoid this?

We have a sophisticated matching system that factors the National Insurance (NI) number as a unique identifier that must be an exact match. If an NI number is matched, we do secondary validation based on additional PII (e.g., name, address, etc.).

We also perform field-level validation for each data input, giving the consumer attempts to resubmit if the data could not be matched. To minimise fraud risk, we do not play back the data item that caused the no match to the employee.

Can the lenders run an application for our employee without their consent?

No. Employment Verifications cannot be carried out by lenders without the explicit consent of the individual. Lenders must capture consent and keep a record of how and when it was obtained. We also retain the right to audit them for evidence of their consent capture and the process used to obtain it.

Where can I access your Privacy Policy?

Bright Software Group's Privacy Policy can be accessed here.