This communication was originally sent on November 13 from Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer Christine Lovely and University Controller Karen Mahalo.
In October, the university announced the availability of Earned Wage Access (EWA) services to employees through our selected service providers, DailyPay and Wisely. This new, optional service offering is intended to allow eligible employees options for accessing funds based on their estimated earned wages between pay cycles. However, we understand that the way in which this new service offering was rolled out and subsequent direct marketing emails from DailyPay have caused confusion and concern for some employees.
We are aware that many employees received one or more automated messages from DailyPay indicating that they had a balance available to transfer or inferring they were already enrolled. This marketing was misleading, implying that all employees were automatically enrolled in DailyPay, which is not the case. We are working closely with DailyPay to ensure that the content of future marketing emails appropriately communicates that participation is voluntary and that all marketing emails are posted on Verified Cornell Communications to allay concerns that these emails are phishing attempts.
Protecting the security and privacy of personal data is a principal concern for employees—it is for us, too. As we do with many of our third-party service providers, Cornell shares select data with DailyPay and only as needed to allow for performance of services required of the service provider. This data sharing is restricted and only used to enable eligible employees the ability to enroll in and have immediate access to the EWA services upon their decision to enroll.
We regret the concern that this new service has caused. We appreciate your patience while we work with DailyPay to resolve issues related to service rollout. For more information about this optional EWA service offering, please visit Earned Wage Access on the Payroll website.