Video: The Product Update with Merge: Fall 2024 | Duration: 1764s | Summary: The Product Update with Merge: Fall 2024

Transcript for "The Product Update with Merge: Fall 2024": Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Irene Hu, and I'm a product marketer at Merge based in San Francisco. Today, we're gonna highlight some amazing features we've built over the past year and some incredible ways that our customers are using Merge to power their product integrations. A few housekeeping before we get into it. This is our first ever product release webinar where we're really focusing on our newest features and capabilities. We are planning on doing this biannually, so definitely keep an eye out for those future ones. This webinar is being recorded and will be shared out afterwards, and we are gonna leave q and a for the end. Our customers have saved thousands of engineering hours, closed an incremental amount of more deals, and reduced customer churn all with using merge. But don't take my word for it. Let's hear directly from our customers on how they're using merge to really transform their businesses and products. Unified API, we can add additional HRIS and ATS integrations very quickly. Our customers themselves usually can add these integrations and it doesn't take any additional effort from someone like myself or our engineers. This makes it really easy to continue to scale quickly, to onboard new customers fast, and decrease our overall activation times with new customers, which is something that I definitely appreciate. I'm also able to use Emerge's integration observability tooling to detect any sort of integration issues or data fixes that that need to be made, and this reduces the time it takes for us to solve our own customer tickets. Great. And here's one more. We've been able to add 29 ticketing integrations through merge in a matter of weeks. If we tried to add and maintain the same number of integrations with our engineering teams, it would take them several months. So we have been able to save our engineers 100 of hours of work. We've also been able to close more deals, thanks to the integrations we've added with Merch. So companies want compliance tasks to fit as seamlessly as possible into their existing workflows. And so prospects often ask us about our project management integrations during the sales process. With Merges' comprehensive coverage of project management tools, our sales reps are able to say yes when asked if we integrate with a certain tool. And now the results speak for themselves. So roughly 17% of the annual recurring revenue that we've closed over the past 6 months can be directly attributed to the collaboration capabilities that Merge powers via these ticketing integration. Merge was founded by Gil Fieg and Shengsi Ding who met as freshmen in Columbia's engineering program, and they quickly became close friends. After graduating, though, Shengsi pursued investment banking while Gil went into tech, but they reconnected in San Francisco meeting for weekly Sweetgreen dinners where the idea for Merge was born. They were working at different start ups in different industries, but both faced the same challenge, integrating with third party platforms. Realizing how painful it is to build and scale integrations, they founded Merge in 2020 and created a unified API. Integrations, they founded Merge in 2020 and created a unified API. This allows companies to build once and integrate with hundreds of platforms. Today, Merge supports 6 integration categories powering use cases like AI search for Guru, compliance tracking for Vanta and Drata, and climate impact measurement for Watershed. Today, product integrations are expected by your customers. According to Gartner's most recent global software buying trend report that they do every year, 34% of software buyers list the ability to integrate with other technology as a top three decision factor, and this has increased from 20% in 2023. And then during the evaluation stage, 44% of software buyers really prioritize ensuring that the vendor can support their integration needs and process. But the problem is that even though this criteria has become increasingly important to buyers, b two b SaaS companies are failing to build these product integrations at scale. There's a huge opportunity cost when it comes to building and maintaining each integration and think, as you grow as a company, you'll need to add more of these integrations. This cost just exponentially scales. And this is why b2b SaaS companies today are turning to a new solution when it comes to building and maintaining their product integrations. Merge, the leading unified API platform, is the fastest, most seamless way to add hundreds of customer facing integrations to your product with a single API, and we've seen this need for product integrations in the market reflected in our growth, our customer growth, and our product growth. Since starting 4 years ago, we've launched 3 offices around the world, have raised $75,000,000 in capital, and have expanded into 6 different categories of in integrations. Most importantly, we've grown along with our customers. Just this past year, over 4,000 new organizations have signed up and started using merge, including industry leaders such as Handshake, Ramp, Remote, BambooHR, and Electric, bringing us to a total of 13,000 customers. We're also the most comprehensive unified API in the market. We've shipped hundreds of new features, thousands of updates, and solved so many thousands of issues on behalf of our customers, saving them countless of hours that would have been spent debugging every integration. In the last year alone, we've built 26 new integrations, expanding our reach across different categories and markets. This includes a very focused effort on serving our European customers. Almost half of these new integrations are based in the EU. And each of these integrations is really aimed at making it easier for you to connect with the tools that you truly rely on seamlessly and securely, helping you scale faster and reduce the build and maintenance burden on your teams. Lastly, our partnerships with industry leaders like Workday, Just Works, BambooHR, and Paylocity allow our customers to integrate more easily and scale faster. Our ultimate mission is to make secure data access easy, and when we say this, we truly mean any data, whether that's through an API or other means. We're now going to go over the 5 pillars of how we've expanded and grown our product this past year. I'm now going to pass it over to Anuj. Thanks, Irene. I'm Anuj. I'm a director of product here at Merge. So at Merge, our mission shapes everything we do. When we think about new use cases, it's not just about expanding into new areas, but also deepening our expertise in the ones that we already support. Our goal is pretty simple. We wanna make it easy for our customers to pull data, do something meaningful with that data, and then securely push it wherever it needs to go. Whether it's adding new use cases or finding existing ones, our focus is to always deliver what our customers need quickly and securely. Let me highlight a few exciting developments here. First up is financial reconciliation, powered by our new bank feeds feature, which has been one of our most requested additions. With bank feeds, customers can now post bank fee transaction data directly into the major accounting systems like NetSuite, Xero, and Sage. This is a game changer for a number of our top use cases including expense management, credit card reconciliation, and vendor payments. We've also expanded into AI search, a critical tool for companies that needs event managed vast amounts of customer data securely. AI platforms require a reliable and seamless way to pull in data and merge provides the infrastructure to make that happen effortlessly. Next, let's talk about financial planning and analysis or FP and a. We're excited to introduce our new general ledger transaction endpoint, which is unique in the market. This endpoint makes it easy for FP and A tools to pull every transaction that hits the ledger, helping customers forecast their financials more effectively. With seamless access to transaction data, finance teams can now gain deeper insights and provide more accurate predictions into their futures. We also view global expansion as an integral core part of our strategy. Customer needs, cultural contacts, regulatory requirements are gonna vary around the world. But ultimately, the need for seamless access to cons customer data is a constant that doesn't change based on where you are. Wherever you're doing business, MERGE is there to support you. In that vein, we've expanded our physical presence with our brand new Berlin office providing a direct line of sales and customer support in the EU, complementing our existing presence in San Francisco, New York. One note, while our physical presence in the EU is relatively new, we've abut divided by GDPR and other regional privacy regulations from the very beginning, allowing you to focus on building your product without worrying about data privacy. Our multi region support also allows you to store data alongside your customer base, whether it's in the US, EU or APEC. This ensures that wherever your customers are located, you can meet their needs without sacrificing performance or security. Localization is also key to our global expansion. Merge link is already available in German German, and we're adding more languages including French and Spanish to ensure all of your users get a seamless experience no matter where they are. Take Qualtrics, a global experience management company. They needed to offer HRIS integrations to automate engagement surveys for new hires. With customers worldwide, they required support for 30 plus languages. It was important for them to provide a consistent experience across regions to ensure that all users receive the same guidance on how to connect their HR platform to Qualtrics. And lastly, merge is also built for scale. Every day, our unified API handles 8,600,000 requests, executes a 170,000,000 API requests and performs over 2,000,000 data syncs for our customers. We've synced a tremendous amount of data supporting more than 19,000 linked accounts across the globe. Whether you're a one person startup or a fortune fortune 500 company, Merges built for scale, making it easy for you to access your data. And now I'll hand it off to Pritak. Our goal is that when you and your customers onboard onto Merges, we make it as easy and seamless as possible. Easy for your teams to build, and easy for everyone to use. I'll spend some time talking through improvements we've made to the onboarding experience. For almost every use case merge serves, we have detailed use case guides that let new customers follow on the successes of our existing customers. This includes fields that are commonly needed and a step by step data flow to bring the use case to life. We hope this makes it really easy for you to launch a new use case that you may not even know is possible today. For the developers out there, you'll appreciate we have thorough SDKs in virtually every language, including Python, Node, Java, Go, Ruby, and c sharp. This year, we've invested into building our advanced SDKs, ensuring that they're high quality, easy to use, and cross category. If you use multiple merge categories as most of our customers do, you can also stay on the same SDK throughout. In tandem, all of our docs pages also include detailed code snippets for each language. It's as easy as copying pasting to get going. Today, we support Python and Node with Java, Go, Ruby, and c sharp coming very soon. Most of our customers are able to get live through SDKs and snippets within a couple of hours. One of the most important parts when using a unified API is being able to easily understand which integration support what data fields and functionality. We make that a breeze including an easily searchable and filterable matrix of all the fields and features. You'll never be left in the dark trying to figure out what is supported versus not. As you test and launch your integrations, you'll probably spend lots of hours sending hundreds of API requests, and we make that super easy using our API tester. You can send requests to merge to get normalized data and send requests directly to third party providers. Merge handles all the authentication for you, so it takes just seconds to get going. Typically, when integration issues occur in production, it's extremely hard to get to the root cause. It often involves customer success getting information from the customer and working internally with engineering to debug. We've reduced that pain significantly by exposing issues and immediate resolution steps right in your dashboard. So in many cases, customer success never even needs to involve engineering. The dashboard also includes API logs for every request and response so engineers find it valuable as well. Customizable merge link was one of our most requested features. Customizing the user experience ensures our customers' products stay consistent and have a seamless user experience. MergeLink now supports font and color changes with more more customization on the way. We've also made huge strides in improving MergeLink's user interface, streamlining your customer's experience when authorizing an integration to merge. So you've customized fonts and colors in merge link, but what about those links to merge help center? We've created this clever solution that's entirely self serve and requires no work from IT teams to set up. In your merge dashboard, you just enter your subdomain and logo. And within seconds, all links in merge link are updated to point to a new site with your logo. Here's a live example from one of our customers, grayscale. Those are a quick snapshot of some of the many improvements we've made to our customer experiences this fall. All of them are live now with many more improvements coming soon. Now I'll pass it on to Abe to talk about some new API functionality. Thanks, Pritak. My name is Abe. I'm a product lead here at Merge. And today, I'll be taking you all through one of the greatest aspects of Merge, normalize data. Merge was built on a core principle of normalization. One unified API and one set of column models per category. This means you get to skip the hassle of managing hundreds of integration specific nuances. We've also heard from you all. The biggest questions we get for our unified approach is how much flexibility do you have with custom data? Maybe your users' HR systems are highly customized or your CRMs have dozens of essential custom fields. Well, merge offers a complete data platform that puts you in the driver's seat when it comes to custom fields. I'll highlight just a few features that merge offers to provide complete flexibility and extensibility of our API. If the data you need isn't in our comb models, no worries. You can access it in its original format through remote data. Remote data fuels advanced features like field mappings too, letting you extend Merger's API to fit just about any use case without writing any code. But don't take my word for it. Let's hear it straight from Nathan from 155. They're a top performance management software system that uses Merger to pull in custom fields that power their product. Thanks, Abe. I'm Nathan Baldwin, and I had the privilege of leading the team responsible for overhauling 15 5's HRIS integration platform. 15 5 is designed to help HR leaders drive better outcomes for their employees and their business. We help you measure key areas like performance, engagement, and retention. And then we actually take that data and turn it into valuable insights and recommended actions that help you drive better outcomes. We chose to work with Merged because we were becoming a truly data driven platform. In order to do that, though, we knew we needed a really seamless and flexible and scalable way for our customers to get their data from their HRIS, their system of record into 155. This HRIS data is crucial for powering our insights and actions recommendation engine. There are dozens of HRIS platforms our customers use, and so we knew that building each integration in house or relying on third party contractors was just not gonna give us the scalability or flexibility or really the level of support and responsiveness that we needed to provide our customers. We did have to learn some of those lessons the hard way, unfortunately. Since working with Merge, though, the results have honestly been tremendous. Our outstanding but small product team launched integrations for 12 of the most commonly used HRIS platforms in less than a year. We are up to at least 22 and counting now. And most importantly, we've seen win rates and customer retention increase dramatically for customers with these integrations, and we've seen the manpower needed to get customers and keep customers activated in our system decrease dramatically as well. Merger's field mapping feature has been one of the keys to giving us the flexibility we needed to achieve these results. We quickly learned that each customer uses their HRIS slightly differently, and the ways they wanna bring their data into 15:5 can vary just as much. With Merges' field mapping feature, though, we're now able to support almost any customer request that we get. To give you a few simple examples, a customer may be storing job titles in the job description field in their HRIS, for instance. And even though merge pulls from the title field by default, they make it really easy to go in and override that default mapping and pull from the description field instead. Another really common scenario we see is that customers have created completely custom fields in their HRIS. So they may be tracking whether an employee is full time or part time, whether they're they they may have a company code or some other piece of information as as simple as their t shirt size. And they wanna bring that data point into 155 to enhance our reporting and analytics and filtering. With field mappings, it's really easy to go in and find that data point, and we can map it to a custom attribute in 155 without writing any code at all. And those are just some of the most simple examples. With Merges' advanced custom mapping feature, we are actually able to support a lot more complex scenarios as well. So for instance, for those who are tech savvy, you can tell we actually have a list of fields here from Paylocity. And with the advanced field mapping syntax, we're able to say, search this list of fields, find the field with the label of level, and then map its value, which is p 5 in this case, to a custom attribute in 155. So this allows customers to bring in almost any data point they want from their HRIS into 155 to enhance the insights and recommended actions that we can generate for them. So as you can see, merges default mappings aren't a constraint. They're a great starting point that field mappings then enable you to extend and customize to meet each customer's needs. As a result, when current or prospective customers ask us, can you support this scenario, or can you bring in this custom field? We're almost always able to say, yeah. We can do that. And it's really satisfying to be able to support customers like that. Thanks so much. Back to you, Abe. For more advanced use cases that require both reading and writing data, we have remote fields and custom objects This lets you use Merger's standardized metadata from the 3rd party to interact and write to any third party platform or third party custom object An additional layer of data access that we offer is called SFTP Using Merges SFTP, you can simply export a custom report of any data you need from the 3rd party and have that be normalized in Merges This report gets mapped to our common models and return in exactly the same way as any other API based integration that we offer. Heron will now share exactly how SFTP helped them onboard more customers. Thanks, Abe. Hi, everyone. My name is Harun, and I'm a technical integration specialist here at Thryv. So to give you some background on Thryv, Thryv is a, all in one LMS, product which brings together things like learning, upskilling, and comms, to help further career development or just for users to learn new skill sets. So why we chose merge? So we chose merge, because, of course, product integrations is a important part of our offering, and we wanna be able to provide our clients with a seamless integration between, Thrive Learning and their HRIS systems, ultimately. What we found is due to accelerated growth, high demand of Thryv with our clients, with the number of silence we're having, we just didn't have enough time to build our own internal integrations, quick enough to help service those clients in terms of an integration between Thryv Learning and the HIs platforms. So therefore, we decided to, invest in in merge. We also chose merge because of its simplicity, the clean UI, and ease of use when it comes to client integrations. Now one of, the big game changes for us quite recently has been the instruction of merge, releasing, SFTP connectors particularly for, the big HR systems out in the market like Workday and SuccessFactors. We have a number of clients, who may not have the technical resources to write against our APIs to build their own integrations. We have clients who particularly don't prefer using, API solutions, for for integrations. So therefore, they wanna use a a file based integration. So so therefore, for us now to be able to offer, more than one solution to integrate, HR, systems with fry learning, especially using the SFTP connector has been a huge plus. We are finding, a lot of our clients are very interested in in uptaking the solution as well, and they already have done so as well. And I'm also excited to see whatever new additions, Merge brings in in into this particular area in the future when it comes to SFTP connectors, broaden ex horizons, and also with the API solution as well. And, yeah, that's pretty much it for me. Thank you, everyone. Another key pillar emerge is privacy and security. We request the minimal levels of permissions and access to your customers' data. From early on, we were SOC 2, type 2, ISO 27,001, GDPR, and HIPAA compliant. Over time, we've invested deeply in flagship features that make it possible for our customers like you all to exercise fine grain control over your customer data. Selectasync for instance allows you to only pull the data that your users need. For For example, employees from a specific European office, candidates that are on offer stage for gifting to, or tickets that are recently modified. This year, we've rolled out over a 100 filters that give you much more granular control over what you sync. Finally, we've released the audit trail, a feature designed to keep a clear record of every action within your system. Whether it's tracking user actions or ensuring compliance, audit trail helps you maintain accountability with ease. That's a wrap. Today That's a wrap. Today, we've covered exciting updates from prioritizing the developer experience and extending the common model for custom data all the way to enterprise security and our global expansion. We've shipped dozens of new use cases like bank feeds and AI search, and we can't wait to see what you build next with Merj. Thanks for joining us. We'll be back biannually. So see you at the next one. Now let's dive into some q and a. Well, alright. We're gonna jump into some q and a. If you want, feel free to submit any questions, using the q and a function. We have about 5 minutes left or so. So I know we had already a few come in. I'll let Abe and Pretalk kind of answer them. Yeah. So one of them is what if I want another language outside of the currently supported languages? I'll let Abe take that one. Yeah. We have been rolling out our localization, which is awesome, especially our European, end users, and we are definitely going to be able to roll out new languages. We have a 4 week turnaround for our enterprise customers to request other languages. We're going after the most popular ones and even introducing different locales. So you can get not just American English, but also Australian and British coming soon. Nice. Alright. Next question. How often do you sync data? So this is a pretty common question we get from our customers. It really varies by integration and use case. So if we're talking about HRS data, for example, in most cases, that data is not updating as regularly, and so we don't need to sync data as frequently. And so you'll see for a lot of our integrations in HRS, the syncs are between an hour and a day depending on the model and the frequency it updates. We're also relying on 3rd party, rate limits. And so if the 3rd party rate limits are very stringent, we're not able to update data as frequently. And so it's typically those two factors, and we we kind of have a balancing act for every integration and every common model. All of the sync frequencies are available in our docs, under docs.merge.dev, so you can check out, each of those. Next question. Is it possible to hide the merge logo and merge link? Yes. Absolutely. So that's already available today. It depends on what plan you're on, so I recommend chatting with your CSM to see if, that's available for you. In addition to that, you can also, on the enterprise plan, white label all of our guides like we talked about today. And so, even all the links within merge link can be completely white labeled to your customer. We'll never know that kind of merge is in the loop here. Awesome. I see another question that's about our process of introducing additional HR platforms that are not supported by merge today or adding more fields to these HR systems. I'll answer these as two questions. The first of which is introducing new HR platforms. We do, we do try our best to have extensive coverage for a given market. For the US, we recently did a market share survey, and I think we're covering 90 plus percent of, usage by all the HR platforms, especially in our HR category. We're expanding our HR platforms in Europe as well. We generally support a 4 week turn turnaround time for those as well, granted that you're able to provide us with a sandbox. That's the sort of reactive thing we are able to, partner with our customers to provide, but we're constantly, like Irene mentioned in the beginning, adding new platforms. So we'll be looking at market demand, market share, new new, intel. And as long as we have a sandbox, we oftentimes set aside time to build and continue expanding. For adding more normalized fields, we do occasionally add more normalized fields as well. We want to make sure these are ones that are widely applicable to, everybody in a particular category. But like, Harun and Nathan mentioned earlier, we have a whole suite of tools, to help bring in fields that we perhaps don't support out of the box. Field mappings, remote data, and, remote fields are always you can pull in just about any field into merge and have it be normalized consistently. Looks like we've got another question. What about editing the default merge request to the 3rd party system? So this is typically managed by merge just because if we start allowing customers to fork this and create their own versions of requests, it's just it becomes hard to manage, what data is being normalized. And so we expose specific features that let you customize things such as field mappings, remote fields, custom fields, but we, don't allow you to edit this specific request directly to the 3rd party. If you'd like to make your own request to 3rd parties, we do support pass through requests, in which case it'll make a request directly to a 3rd party, return the data unnormalized. And so that is a way of going around the unified API if you'd like. Cool. I think that is all the questions. I know we're up at time here. So, again, really wanna just say thank you for showing up, for listening. If you have any other questions, you can also always reach out to your CSM or support at merge.dev. Like we said at the beginning of this webinar, we're doing this biannually, so definitely register for our upcoming one in spring. Thank you so much, and have a great rest of your day. Thanks for coming. There is a recorded link, by the way, and we'll be sending that out if you've registered.