Deel and Basic Capital integrate payroll & retirement

Deel runs payroll, HR, benefits, and mobility for more than 40,000 companies across 150 countries, all on infrastructure it built and owns. When Deel started looking for a retirement savings platform that could seamlessly integrate with its infrastructure via API, there was truly only one choice: Basic Capital.

“The retirement industry has operated on a broken model for decades: payroll, retirement, and benefits as disconnected systems that make it nearly impossible for workers to see what they’ve earned or plan around it,” said Nick Thomson, General Manager of Deel Benefits. “At Deel, our goal is to dismantle those silos.”

The problem we set out to solve together

We hear an echo of Deel’s frustration from nearly every payroll platform and PEO we talk to. Retirement has long lived apart from the rest of the employment relationship, tethered to payroll by little more than file exports and manual reconciliation. Employers shoulder the tedium of syncing deductions across disconnected systems while employees inherit a benefit they configure once and rarely revisit.

Nearly 70% of working Americans doubt they’re saving enough for retirement, and a workplace plan ranks among the most coveted benefits, trailing only medical coverage. Those with access to a workplace retirement plan are 15 times more likely to actually save. Access is step one, but architecture and systems that turn saving from “set and forget” to something tended alongside every paycheck is the future.

How we built it: retirement on the same record as payroll

We didn’t stitch Deel Retirement together as a file-based bridge between separate systems. We built it so the plan is embedded via API within the Deel platform, on payroll’s own record.

For Deel’s HR and finance teams, retirement now surfaces as part of standard entity setup, no separate broker to wrangle. Every deduction settles onto a single ledger, retiring the manual reconciliation that once spawned support tickets each pay cycle.

For employees, retirement resides where they already glance at their paystub. Bumping a contribution rate after a bonus lands is as easy as checking that stub. They choose how to invest, set a rate, name beneficiaries, and revisit their savings whenever they like, all without a second login. We remain fully visible throughout, reachable by single sign-on rather than tucked behind Deel’s interface.

In place of a closed, proprietary menu, plan sponsors can draw from thousands of funds and asset managers, with an optional brokerage window opening that unlocks individual stocks and ETFs for those wanting a more tailored portfolio. High earners looking to save beyond the standard limits can put our Mega Backdoor Roth to work, routing after-tax contributions into tax-free growth. Recordkeeping and administration come bundled, and our AI Plan Assistant keeps compliance monitoring running continuously in the background, catching issues before they ripen into problems.

None of that flexibility comes at the cost of service. Every plan we power comes with the kind of white-glove support our own customers describe as leaving no room for error, the same standard we hold for the employers and employees now reaching us through Deel.

Why it works

Deel believes that payroll, HR, and benefits should never have been disconnected systems assembled after the fact; they should be one platform, built that way from the foundation up. We make the same case about recordkeeping. Modern, API-first infrastructure turns a neglected benefit into one people actually use.

Deel Retirement is what happens when two companies wagering the same bet from opposite ends of the stack build the bridge between them natively, rather than settle for a file feed.