Personal finance skipped the income part. That might be changing

It’s the other side of the cash-flow equation – the side that tends to take longer: finding work.

In late June, EarnIn, an earned wage access company, announced a new role for its app: helping customers land jobs. It’s called Earn Better and customers can use it for job recommendations, AI resume and cover letter builder support and interview coaching – for free. The five million job openings EarnIn says it is launching are a result of an acquisition the company made.

“We started EarnIn to help people control their earnings,” said Ram Palaniappan, founder and CEO of EarnIn, in a release. “The next phase is helping people get back to earning faster and improving their earnings over time.”

The rollout hints at another nice twist for crunching financial data: it can boost someone’s income, not just track their spending or flag the fraud alarms. As Palaniappan said in the release, the fintech company has real-time visibility into earnings across employers, jobs and locations. “We want to harness this data to help working Americans identify pathways to grow their earnings,” Palaniappan said.

This idea speaks to something spreading throughout consumer finance apps. To win the customer in an agentic age increasingly requires banks and fintech companies to help them with their money in ever-more ways.

The newest set of features from EarnIn exposes a gap that earned wage advance companies inevitably run up against. While EWA can solve a cash-flow timing problem, the fix kind of ends there. It’s like an oil change versus a brakes replacement. For many consumers, the need to build savings, access credit and so on remains critical as they manage the ebbs and flows of their cash flow as if it were a game of Chutes and Ladders. Budgeting advice is useless if step one requires making more money. Moreover, Earnin’s core product only works if someone receives consistent direct deposits.

Yet, whether or not helping users find jobs within a fintech app endures remains to be seen. Years ago, an app called Steady, and supported by Shaquille O’Neal, launched to help independent workers find work and track their income. The app did not endure.

The problem, however, remains persistent and is arguably heightened at a time when firms are attributing rounds of layoffs to AI. Moreover, Steady was designed for independent workers, while EarnIn serves the W-2 employee crowd who may also earn gig income.

In 2025, more than 20 million individuals experienced involuntary job separations due to layoffs and terminations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data. It’s something EarnIn feels directly: It said roughly one million customers experience income interruptions every year due to job loss.

In those kinds of critical moments, when paychecks are cut off, one human instinct is to log in to an app to check on their finances. Imagine the kind of loyalty someone might have for an app that helps untangle the pressing problem of job loss. That’s engagement at its best.

Years ago, Chime proved that offering consumers early access to their paychecks was a home run. While the industry didn’t see the benefits right away, consumers found the feature alluring and recommended the account to others, ultimately lowering the neobank’s acquisition cost. That kind of logic still applies here: solve a problem, earn engagement and lower the cost of acquiring and retaining someone.

Zoom in, and for EarnIn, offering these kinds of tools also gives their customers a reason to interact with the brand’s app even if they lose their job. It’s not a goodbye. It also shows how EarnIn is maturing to try to provide a more sustainable solution for its users: connecting them to more money. Zoom out and it’s clear that the best money apps offer features that solve consumers’ financial obstacles. In the years to come, winning the primary financial interface requires banks and fintech companies to continue to creatively find slices of financial tension for their customers and offer remedies, not just improvements.

In a recent Yours in Finance interview, Laurel Taylor, founder and CEO of Candidly, said: “We’re always going to have problems to solve. We want those problems to be higher quality over time.”

For more than a decade, money apps have helped people manage what they have. EarnIn is betting the next win is helping them earn more.