Making corporate giving easier: Finix & Change case study
Businesses increasingly want charitable giving to be part of the customer experience, but turning that ambition into reality requires navigating legal compliance, nonprofit verification and complex money movement behind the scenes. Change partnered with Finix to help solve this, combining its single compliance API with Finix’s sophisticated payout infrastructure.
Delivering donations requires more than moving money. It requires trust. Charities need confidence that unexpected funds are legitimate, businesses expect a seamless branded experience and developers need infrastructure that scales without becoming an ongoing engineering burden. By partnering with Finix, Change built a white-labeled payout experience that disappears into the background, allowing businesses to focus on launching impactful charitable giving campaigns while ensuring nearly 10,000 nonprofits in the U.S. receive funds quickly, securely and with confidence.
Background
Change helps businesses like Lyft, Hasbro, TaylorMade, and Charitybuzz embed charitable giving into product experiences and checkout flows through a single API. These programs are supported through Our Change Foundation, an independent 501(c)(3) public charity that sponsors donor-advised giving programs. This structure allows businesses to offer charitable giving without establishing and managing their own foundations, while simplifying fund administration, nonprofit disbursements, and reporting across participating charities.
Behind the scenes, Change helps manage the compliance and operational requirements of corporate giving, including nonprofit verification, applicable state registrations, donation processing, and reporting. Businesses can focus on building meaningful customer experiences while Change handles the operational heavy lifting.
The challenge
While Change simplified the legal and compliance side of corporate giving, payouts presented a different challenge.
Unlike traditional marketplaces where recipients proactively sign up before receiving funds, charitable giving often works in reverse. Businesses launch donation campaigns first, while many nonprofit recipients have never interacted with Change. When unexpected funds arrive from an unfamiliar payment processor, confusion can slow distributions and erode trust.
Change's previous payout provider required nonprofits to complete an externally branded onboarding experience and displayed the processor's name on bank statements instead of “Our Change Foundation’s” name. For organizations receiving unexpected donations, that experience often looked more suspicious than reassuring.
At the same time, Change needed infrastructure capable of supporting rapid growth. Large customer campaigns regularly created sudden spikes in payout volume, and the engineering team wanted a payments platform that would scale alongside the business rather than require constant maintenance or development resources.
The solution
Change partnered with Finix to build a payout experience that felt entirely native to the Change platform.
Using Finix's white-labeled payout infrastructure, Change embedded nonprofit bank onboarding directly into its own application and customized statement descriptors to display "Our Change Foundation," giving recipient organizations immediate confidence in the legitimacy of incoming funds.
The partnership extended well beyond product capabilities. During implementation, the Finix engineering team collaborated closely with Change to refine the integration, incorporating customer feedback and helping solve technical challenges as they arose. Once live, the platform required virtually no ongoing engineering maintenance, allowing the Change team to focus on building new capabilities instead of maintaining payment infrastructure.
That collaborative relationship continues today. As new customer wins create significant increases in payout volume, Finix works directly with Change to quickly review and adjust operational thresholds, ensuring donations continue flowing without unnecessary delays.
“We collaborated closely with the Finix team from day one of onboarding to get things up and running smoothly,” said Steven Traversi, Head of Engineering at Change. “Now, we haven't had to touch this code in years. That lack of ongoing developer maintenance is reason enough to switch to Finix. Beyond that, the platform scales with us, the white-label flexibility protects our brand trust and, if we have questions, knowing someone from Finix will respond quickly gives us total peace of mind.”
Results & impact
Today, payments have become reliable infrastructure rather than an operational challenge. Instead of spending engineering resources maintaining payout systems, Change can focus on expanding its platform and helping more businesses launch charitable giving initiatives.
The partnership has delivered measurable business outcomes, including:
Roughly 10,000 nonprofits successfully onboarded and paid through the Finix platform.
Consistent 24-hour bank account verification, helping nonprofits receive funds without unnecessary delays.
Rapid operational support whenever payout volume exceeds established thresholds, keeping large giving campaigns moving.
Zero Finix-related customer support inquiries from nonprofit users over the past year, reinforcing trust in the payout experience.
A scalable foundation that continues to support Change's long-term growth without becoming a bottleneck for engineering or operations.
Looking ahead, Change plans to continue expanding its platform and deepen its relationship with Finix, including exploring additional payment workflows that further consolidate financial operations within a single platform.
“Change is making it dramatically easier for businesses to build charitable giving directly into their products,” said Richie Serna, CEO and co-founder of Finix. “Our role is to make sure payments never become the limiting factor. By giving the team flexible infrastructure that scales with their business while staying invisible to the end user, we’re helping them focus on expanding access to corporate giving instead of managing payment complexity.”