Smile API Weblog

We have been working hard to greatly enhance the value we are bringing to you, our customers and partners, in our commitment to being your trusted source for employment and income information that we hope will make you smile! In this latest round of product enhancements this quarter, we are excited to announce that we have made great progress in providing you: greater worker coverage greater data coverage tools to more easily test the product means to make it easier for your users to share their data with you Greater Worker Coverage Phillippine Labor Force Worker Coverage Wage and Salary Workers Self-employed - To start, we are releasing several new features, to greatly widen our coverage in the Philippines! We are now moving beyond just covering gig workers, to now include workers who have regular employment as well! This potentially gives you access to majority of the population in the Philippines of working age, as much as 65%! We achieve this by providing: Data from their contributions to the country’s social insurance systems - we are now able to cover and link accounts from employees’ social insurance data in the Philippines via our Wink Widget. Social insurance contributions are mandatory for most employees and their employers in the Philippines, whether those in the private sector (through the government-owned Social Security System), or the public sector (through the Government Service Insurance System). Employers are required to maintain current information about their employees, and remit their contributions to the social insurance system along with the contributions of their employees, which are typically automatically deducted and withheld by the employer on a monthly basis. Support for file uploads - for most employees in the Philippines, we recognize that their on-hand employment and income data will likely still be in a document: either as a digital file, or printed on a piece of paper. In our latest release, we now support the ability for these employees to upload files—such as a PDF (Portable Document Format) file; or a photo, scan or screenshot of a paper document. They can use this to more readily share proof of their employment—such as their social insurance information, or their company ID. They can also use this to share proof of income, such as copies of their payslips, or to upload a copy of their latest BIR 2316 tax certificate—a certificate issued by employers to show amount of income they have paid and amount of tax withheld from that income given to their employees. This is just the beginning though, as soon we will be allowing the upload of more file types. - Automatic recognition and digital conversion - for certain types of documents, we also support the automatic conversion of the photos, screenshots or scanned copies of these documents into a machine-readable format via Optical Character Recognition or OCR. We are able to do this specifically for screenshots or photos of employees’ records in the government’s social insurance website, or via copies of their latest 2316 tax certificate. We use the latest in machine learning and artificial intelligence to automatically recognize the data and convert it into JSON (Javascript Object Notation), which can then be retrieved via our API. For easy review and comparison, we also provide you a link to the original uploaded file, which we are able to store temporari

It’s been barely three months since our official launch, and already we have launched dozens of improvements and refinements to our product: including a more robust API, expanded employment data coverage, additional data points, additional developer implementation resources, and enhanced end-user experience. - When we launched, our focus was clear: be the trusted source for employment and income data in Asia, with the aim of enabling financial access and inclusion. We decided to initially start with gig workers, who tend to be underserved in this regard. Starting with the Philippines, we also started expanding our coverage into other countries such as Indonesia. Below is a summary of most notable enhancements in our product releases this quarter: Employment Data Coverage We have now expanded coverage to 26 employment data providers for gig workers. - Professional Services: - Transportation and Delivery: - Ecommerce Marketplaces - Disclaimer: All trademarks, trade names, company/product names, brands and logos appearing on this page are the property of their respective owners. Use of them is only for identification purposes and does not imply any association or affiliation with, or endorsement by the respective owners. Available Data Points for Each Platform Identity: we support various data points related to a user’s identity in the platform. The available data varies from platform to platform, but it can include the user’s full name, gender, birthdate, contact information (phone and/or email), and address. Transactions: if supported on the platform, we are able to share the user’s financial transactions on the platform, including the date of the transaction, currency, amount and description. Income amounts are positive, while expense amounts are negative. Ratings: we have also started rolling out the performance ratings users may have received on their employment platform. This can be a great leading indicator of the stability of employment of a gig worker. Ratings include the user’s aggregate score, the maximum possible score on the platform, and a calculated percentage score to provide a uniform basis of comparison across the different platforms. Implementation Resources We have added the following implementation resources to make it easier for developers to get started: Interactive documentation, with mocking services and sample code. A downloadable copy of the Smile API specification following Open API standards version 3.0 in Github A downloadable copy of our Postman Collection in Github Quickstart open source code to launch and try out our Wink Widget in any web app or in a local machine (find out more about our Wink Widget below). - End-user Experience - To make it easier for users to share their data, and for API developers to get started with our API, we have provided the Wink Widget Javascript SDK. The SDK allows the easy instantiation of our Wink Widget, which is a mechanism by which users can give their consent to have this personal data collected and transmitted to you or any party they trust on their behalf. This is all done in a simple, secure and seamless way. All of the different ways for the user to be able to successfully authenticate to their accounts, including dynamic support for the login credentials required (eg username, email, phone) on each platform, or any multi-factor authentication methods required by each platform are handl