- April 16, 2026
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Workforce digital payments platform Branch may be one of the fastest-growing companies in America, but it didn’t start out that way. It didn’t even start out with the same purpose.
The remote-first company — where its largest and centralized office is in downtown Tampa — was founded in 2015 in an effort to offer workers and employers from a variety of organizations the ability to easily schedule and pick up additional shifts. But as the firm became more entrenched, an underlying issue emerged: why did these workers need more access to cash and more cash flow in the first place? Waiting every two weeks for their salary to clear was clearly too long.
So by 2017, Branch had morphed into a different product: a platform that allows employees to access their wages as they earned them. There were some initial challenges right out of the gate — starting with the fact that founder and CEO Atif Siddiqi had, in his own words, “absolutely no background in fintech.”
“What we saw with the demographic that we focused on, low-to-moderate-income workers, was that they really struggled paycheck to paycheck,” says the Austin-based Siddiqi. “So any untimed bill or any type of expense that just pops up really derails their financial lives and just provides them a lot more financial stress. And so they’re having to rely primarily on more predatory measures, whether it’s payday loans or overdraft fees.”
Branch was instead able to offer an “equitable” solution, Siddiqi says, by providing workers a way to get their wages upfront. He uses the example of a restaurant employee: instead of a paycheck every two weeks, they can now access tips every day, sent directly to their Branch account through a debit card.
This money isn’t a loan or income provided in advance — the total is based on hours worked and the employee’s pay rate. The only penalty they’ll see is when their official payday rolls around, at which point there will be a deduction for whatever money they have already used. (Branch makes money from a portion of a fee, on the merchant’s side, every time a Branch user swipes their debit card.)
Branch has taken this model far.
The company was No. 78 on Deloitte’s annual round-up of quick-scaling technology firms in North America last year, with a 1,236% growth rate. The firm has made the Inc. 5000 list of fast-growing companies four years in a row, and was No. 220 in 2020 and 317 in 2025. The company declines to disclose specific revenue figures but a report last August from one of its investors, Great North Ventures, detailed some of its financial metrics. Great North says Branch's milestones include:
Branch, notably, is growing in a rapidly-growing segment of the payment solutions market: Embedded business-to-business payments are projected to handle $16 trillion in transactions by 2030 and the global earned wage access software market is projected to to hit $173.33 billion by 2032, according to a report from Verified Market Research. That would be up from $28.24 billion in 2024 — a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.5%.
Within the labor force, Branch has managed to target a few specific niches in the market, including hospitality, marketplaces, staffing and gig economy platforms like Uber and Instacart. “Most of the industries we work in are really high turnover industries,” Siddiqi says. “Anything they could do to slow down that churn is a huge win for them on the bottom line.”
While Branch considers itself a remote-first company, its Tampa office has become a sales hub for young employees who want to learn how to market. That was the “driving factor,” according to Tampa office leader Max Sakiewicz, a director of sales, for building the local team. The company opened the Tampa office in 2022 in Ybor City. It moved to a larger office in downtown Tampa last year, a spokesperson says, and now has some 40 employees there, with a capacity for 60.
“It’s much easier for them to learn and learn quickly when they’re in person with a little bit more senior leadership around them,” he says. “As we start to build the sales team from scratch, selling products that are new and going to market with products that are proprietary to Branch, it’s going to be a lot easier to build out a team that’s in person, at least for a couple of days a week, especially with a younger pool of talent.”
The Tampa office, which Sakiewicz says is part of a burgeoning tech market, has been an added bonus for prospective job-seekers. A new job posting can have almost 250 applicants within two days, and many are coming from out of state.
“We talk to them and say, ‘Hey, we have a little bit of an in-person culture here. Are you okay with coming to Tampa?’” he says. “They’re like, I specifically applied to Branch because I want to move to Tampa.”
The Tampa area has been fertile ground for potential clients, too. St. Petersburg-based 2BHospitality group, which owns prominent downtown Beach Drive restaurants Stillwaters Tavern and BellaBrava, started using Branch last December to pay out tips for all front of house employees. Controller Don Nguyen first learned about the company at a restaurant show in Chicago. When he stopped by Branch’s booth, he saw firsthand how the app worked — a representative sent a dollar on their end, and within seconds, up popped a dollar almost instantly on Nguyen’s account.
It still took him a number of months to decide to actually sign on to the service, but once he did, he was surprised by how receptive employees were. Rather than receive tips in cash, servers could now log onto their Branch app and see their payout directly in the app. They still receive their weekly hourly pay processed through payroll each week, separate and apart from Branch.
“Thinking about the logistics of it and how much money was being brought in, especially on busy days, it was a worry over time,” Nguyen says. “...Looking at Branch, we wanted to find something that was just very seamless and something easy for the employees.”
This story was updated to reflect that Branch isn't a global firm in terms of clients. Was also updated to reflect the correct value of total payments its handled.
