Keep

Keep Financial Technologies, Inc. ("Keep") is a financial technology company whose platform enables employers to offer flexible compensation to their workforce. Its core product is the vesting cash bonus: an employee receives a lump sum of cash upfront, the bonus is earned over a vesting period set by the employer, and the employer pays down the balance for as long as the employee remains at the company. At each vesting milestone, the vested portion is no longer owed by the employee. Employers configure the bonus amount, the length of the vesting schedule, the first vesting cliff and the subsequent vesting cadence, then send a bonus contract to the employee.

The platform covers onboarding, employee loading via HRIS integration or spreadsheet upload, bonus creation and funding. Employers transfer funds to Keep via ACH within 48 hours of an employee accepting a bonus. Keep positions the product as a substitute or complement to conventional compensation instruments, marketing use cases including signing bonuses, spot bonuses, annual bonuses, performance bonuses, M&A retention bonuses, poaching defense, tuition reimbursement, severance and equity alternatives. Stated administrative benefits include automating bonus tracking and clawbacks, avoiding corrected W-2 forms and amended payroll tax filings, and outsourcing collection from departing employees.

Founding story

Keep Financial was co-founded by Rob Frohwein and Kathryn Petralia, who had previously co-founded Kabbage, a small business fintech acquired by American Express in October 2020. Drawing on their own experience with lengthy recruiting cycles and high attrition, they set out to build a retention and recruiting product that would also provide financial benefit to employees, exploring what HR leaders needed that employer-forgivable loans did not deliver. According to the company, HR leaders responded that they would adopt such a program if it were available but found it hard to execute, so the founders built Keep to remove the execution burden.

Business model

Keep sells its compensation platform to employers, who use it to create, distribute, fund and administer vesting cash bonuses for their employees. Employers fund bonuses by ACH transfer to Keep after employee acceptance, and Keep handles administration including tracking, clawbacks and collections on unvested amounts from departing employees. Pricing is not disclosed publicly; prospective customers are directed to schedule a call to obtain pricing information.

Pricing information is provided to prospective customers through a sales conversation rather than published on the company's site.

Traction

The platform is marketed as supporting onboarding and management of vesting bonuses for thousands of employees, and the company states that businesses ranging from startups to Fortune 500 firms use it. Specific customer counts and volumes are not disclosed.

Latest developments

The company continues to expand its solution set beyond hiring and retention bonuses into performance bonuses with attached challenges, tuition reimbursement, annual bonus acceleration, M&A retention and severance use cases.