About

We spent twenty years on the wrong side of this problem.

Patch Systems was built by operators who kept running into the same thing from opposite ends of a business, and could never find anyone who had solved it properly.

10 to 15%

of my workforce was asking for a pay advance at any given time. When I said yes, the money came out of my own pocket. When I said no, I watched good people fall into a debt spiral or leave.

Alan Chang, Founder and CEO

The story

Every piece of the answer existed. None of it was built for a business our size.

I spent five years looking for something better than a manual advance out of my own account, and never found one worth putting in front of my team. Everything built for this was built for companies with a benefits department, or it solved one piece and left the rest.

Meanwhile the same business was waiting 60 days to get paid for work it had already delivered, and paying a year of insurance in one go. Two sides of one operation, both squeezed by timing, and nobody serving either properly.

I built this with Eric Smithers, an attorney and economist who spent his career inside the insurance broker channel and the regulation around it. He understood the business side as well as I understood the workforce side. Between us we had seen the whole problem.

This is what I wanted when I was running Lighthouse, and what Eric wanted when he was working with brokers. It is six products now, covering cash for the business, pay for the team, and care for their households. Now it exists.

How we work

Three things we decided early and have not moved on.

Built for businesses where payroll is the biggest line

This is not a general purpose finance company with worker tools bolted on. It was built for small and mid sized businesses in construction, trades, transportation, staffing and service, where the workforce is the operation and the money problems come from timing rather than from profit. Everything is calibrated to that, and nothing is calibrated to impressing a company with a treasury department.

Honest about the model and the math

We say what things cost, who pays, and how the money moves. The tools for your team cost the business nothing. The tools for the business carry a cost, and you get the number before you sign anything. Where we cannot pay a partner, we say why rather than going quiet, and where a product is not the right answer we say that too.

Delivered through licensed, regulated specialists

We are not the bank, the lender or the doctor. We connect specialists who do each of those things properly to your payroll and your people, so the products run on real infrastructure rather than on something we improvised. That is also why we are careful about what we claim. The specialists set the rules, and we follow them.

The people behind it.

Alan ChangFounder and CEO

Twenty years across quick service restaurants, technology and rental marketplaces. Spent all of it on the wrong side of the problem this company was built to fix.

Eric SmithersCo-Founder and COO

Attorney and economist with deep insurance industry experience. Built his career inside the broker channel and the regulation around it, which is the foundation this model runs on.

Aaron LevinHead of Product and Technology

Leads engineering and product. Builds the connection layer and the architecture behind delivering six products through partners without it becoming a mess.

Brendan RutledgeHead of Operations

Leads operations, funding, servicing and delivery, plus the brand and positioning work that keeps this sounding like operators rather than a finance company.

Where to go from here.

If you run a business

How the cash side and the team side work, and what turning them on involves.

How it works If you advise businesses

Brokers, CPAs, payroll companies and associations. The channels these businesses trust.

Partner with us Anything else

Press, vendors, investors, or a question that fits neither. We read everything.