With a Unified HR Data Layer Built for Scale
Customer: Plum
Industry: Employee Benefits & Insurance
Product: Tartan HyperSync (Unified HR Data API)
Primary Use Case: Enterprise onboarding, employee data synchronization, and policy lifecycle management
Executive Summary
As Plum expanded into the enterprise market, its onboarding process - once manageable with manual integrations and point solutions - became a strategic bottleneck. With each new HR system, engineering cycles stretched, partner expectations rose, and operational risk increased.
Enterprise business models cannot tolerate friction that grows super-linearly with scale. What took weeks at smaller volumes threatened to take months as client complexity grew.
By integrating Tartan’s HyperSync unified API layer, Plum eliminated dozens of bespoke data integration efforts. The result was an immediate 75% reduction in onboarding time, near real-time data accuracy, and onboarding throughput that scaled predictably with client growth - not manual effort.
This wasn’t just faster integration; it was a shift from custom engineering cycles to predictable onboarding velocity built as infrastructure. That shift transformed friction into a competitive advantage.
Background: When Growth Exposes Operational Drag
Plum is a modern insurance platform enabling startups and SMEs to offer comprehensive health benefits without legacy constraint.
But as Plum moved upmarket, the landscape changed. Enterprise clients bring not only demand but diversity - HR systems spanning Workday, SAP, Zoho People, Darwinbox, and more.
Every new HR software ecosystem introduced its own data structure, consent model, and nuance. Engineering teams were repeatedly reinventing the wheel - building and maintaining connectors for each client. Manual diagnostics, Excel dumps, and data reconciliation loops became routine.
This was not merely an engineering problem; it was a customer experience problem. Each additional dependency in the onboarding flow increased the probability of error, delay, and frustrated HR partners.
Insight: In enterprise-grade digital platforms, onboarding speed - and the predictability of that speed - is an economic force multiplier. Systems that scale onboarding with linear engineering effort do not scale revenue.
The Strategic Challenge: Complexity Inhibits Velocity
Every enterprise onboarding engagement had three core bottlenecks prior to adopting Tartan:
Engineering cycles tied to discrete connectors, each with their own debugging and edge-case handling.
Manual handoffs with HR teams, requiring Excel exports, audits, and labor-intensive cleanup.
Inconsistent data quality that led to incorrect policy issuance, mis-priced coverage, or delayed endorsements.
An onboarding process that requires weeks of custom engineering per client is, by design, unscalable. This was not a temporary constraint - it was a systemic limit on growth.
Insight: When operational processes require human synchronization - even imperfectly automated ones - predictable scaling collapses into reactive cycles. At scale, these cycles are not optimizations; they are debt.
The Solution: One Unified API, Zero Custom Builds
Plum chose Tartan’s HyperSync, a unified API layer that abstracts integration complexity behind one stable, standards-compliant interface.
Within just 48 hours, Plum stood up a real-time data sync flow that automatically retrieved verified employee and dependent information from the client’s HR system - without bespoke engineering efforts.
HyperSync replaced:
Weeks of engineering per HR system
Complex data normalisation pipelines
Manual audits and reconciliation loops
CSV exports and offline coordination
It also embedded compliance and consent handling into the workflow, making each data transfer secure by default - an operational and risk mandate for enterprise insurance clients.
Insight: Scalability is not achieved by stitching more connectors; it is achieved by abstracting variability out of the system. A unified syncing layer turns delta work into repeatable throughput.
Operational Impact: From Weeks to Days
The transformation was dramatic:
A process that had taken up to six weeks for a single client onboarding was reduced to less than two days.
Engineering no longer reinvented connectors for each client, freeing up team capacity for product innovation.
HR teams no longer manually coordinated exports, enabling self-serve onboarding experiences.
Insight: Operational leverage increases when engineering effort becomes orthogonal to throughput. In other words: more clients no longer meant more engineering cycles - a defining characteristic of scalable systems.
Business Impact: Speed, Accuracy, and Trust
The shift to an automated, unified API had measurable business results:
75% faster enterprise onboarding - an outcome that directly accelerated revenue recognition and reduced time to policy issuance.
100% accuracy in mid-term policy updates, eliminating error-driven support cycles.
Faster onboarding did not simply improve operational KPIs - it changed the economics of growth. HR partners experienced a frictionless process, meaning Plum could win deals where onboarding velocity was a competitive differentiator.
Insight: When onboarding is predictable and reliable, it becomes a selling point, not a negotiation liability. Enterprise buyers value certainty as much as raw functionality.
Customer Perspective
“Tartan helped us automate what used to be a painful, manual process. We now onboard enterprise clients in days - not weeks.”
- Head of Operations, Plum Insurance
This is not a testimony about technology; it is a testimony about capacity unlocked and growth risk removed.
What This Enables Going Forward
With a unified HR data layer in place, Plum has fundamentally changed the economics of enterprise onboarding.
Enterprise growth is no longer gated by integration complexity or engineering availability. New clients can be onboarded predictably, regardless of the HR system they use, allowing Plum to scale sales without introducing downstream operational risk.
More importantly, Plum has insulated its core platform from future variability. As new HR systems emerge or enterprise requirements evolve, integration complexity is absorbed by the data layer - not pushed onto product or engineering teams.
This creates long-term strategic optionality:
Faster entry into larger enterprise segments
Reduced onboarding risk in sales cycles
Greater confidence in policy accuracy and lifecycle events
The ability to launch new benefits products without re-architecting integrations
Insight:
When onboarding infrastructure is standardized early, growth compounds cleanly. Plum’s investment ensures that future scale increases throughput - not complexity.
About Tartan
Tartan provides verification infrastructure for financial institutions - covering identity, income, and employment - designed to operate at scale, reduce friction, and improve conversion across onboarding, underwriting, and compliance workflows.
Tartan helps teams integrate, enrich, and validate critical customer data across workflows, not as a one-off step but as an infrastructure layer.
