At Kota, we support core benefits for over 45,000 employees across the globe. What we’ve learned is that the best benefits experiences are engaging for employees 

, we’re extending that simplicity to flexible spending allowances.

Flexible allowances - whether it’s a WFH budget, a wellness stipend, or a learning fund - have become a standard way for companies to support their teams. Indeed, a quick search reveals 

76,000 job descriptions across the UK & Ireland where an ‘allowance’ or ‘stipend’ is highlighted as an employee benefit.

The issue, however, is that HR and Finance teams across the world are losing their lunch breaks to manual reimbursements, payroll reconciliations and all the other admin that comes with offering these allowances.

Working with hundreds of HR and Finance teams, we’ve found two major frustrations with how flexible allowances are done today.

First: managing these allowances often means spreadsheets, manual reimbursements and employees simply ignoring budgets. Finance teams lose visibility and control; employees lose interest.

Second: the process often involves implementing a whole new platform for yet another point-solution. People teams end up juggling one tool for allowances, separate tech for pensions, another broker for private medical cover, and so on.

One of the things our customers tell us consistently is that they want 

: insurance, retirement and flexible allowances. They don’t want to manage multiple systems for pension, wellness and stipends. They want one benefits platform that does it all.

Based on our experience supporting benefits for over 45,000 employees globally, we know what great looks like: it’s engaging for employees, effortless for employers. With 

, we’re extending that simplicity to flexible, category-based budgets.

Employers create an allowance category - e.g., WFH Office Allowance or Learning & Development and issue a virtual card tied to that budget. Employees use the card easily and Finance knows exactly where the spend went.

Each card carries merchant category controls (MCCs) via Stripe Issuing. A wellness budget works at wellness merchants. A learning budget works at learning services. Every purchase is automatically on-policy.

They log in, see their allowance and card, check their balance and use it. No receipts. No claims.

Admins get real-time visibility, clean reports and simple alerts when balances run low. Everything sits inside the same platform they already use.

The moment an employee is added to your HRIS - like HiBob, Personio, Humaans, etc. - they’re onboarded onto the comprehensive benefits package you’ve set up, with the pre-defined eligibility rules you’ve set for them.

Spend Cards sit alongside insurance and retirement within Kota, offering companies one place to manage all their benefits and one place for employees to view everything they’re being offered.

Employees want to spend their allowances easily. 

Finance teams want clarity and peace of mind. 

Kota Spend makes all this possible without creating new workflows or extra admin.

Kota Spend now available in early access. 

 for a live demo and explore how flexible allowances can enhance your benefits offering.

This is not part of Kota’s regulated activity.

🇪🇺 Cards are issued by Stripe Technology Europe Limited, an electronic money institution authorized by the Central Bank of Ireland (firm reference number: C187865). Cards are issued under the Visa card scheme pursuant to a license from Visa Europe Limited.

🇬🇧 Cards are issued by Stripe Payments UK Limited, which is an electronic money institution authorized by the Financial Conduct Authority (firm reference number: 900461) for the issuing of electronic money. Cards are issued under the Visa card scheme pursuant to a license from Visa Europe Limited.

Introducing Kota Spend: Flexible Allowances, Made Simple. 

Introducing Kota Spend: Flexible Allowances Made Easy

We are excited to announce that today, we are now offering life assurance to companies on Kota, with Ireland being our first available market.

Since Kota’s origins, launching life assurance has been a key milestone on our roadmap. Alongside health insurance and retirement benefits, we see it as an 

 part of the employee benefits package. 

Today, after a huge amount of effort by our product and expansion teams, we are delighted to make life assurance available to companies on Kota.

In Ireland, 95% of companies offer some form of life cover to their teams. This is a high proportion, but it comes as little surprise when the benefits of life assurance offerings are understood.

Having life assurance cover gives peace of mind that in the event of your death, your loved ones will be looked after. Many employers not only see this benefit as a fundamental component of employee well-being but also know that attracting and retaining talent would be challenging without it.

We want to make it easy for companies to access and set up life assurance plans and pass the benefits on to their teams and families. 

Activating your life assurance plan with Kota can be done in just a couple of minutes. 

Once set up, you are covered so that in the event of your death, a multiple of your salary (usually x2 or x4) is paid tax-free to your estate and given to those per your Will (or to those by statutory inheritance rules).

, offering life assurance can actually be very affordable, and premiums can be offset against company taxes - an incentive by the government to encourage companies to prioritise offering the benefit. 

, there is no cost to the benefit, and you don’t attract Benefit in Kind charges, making it entirely employee-friendly.

 your Kota account and select Life Assurance in your benefits, then go through the no-obligation quote process.

Life Assurance is now available on Kota

Today, we are thrilled to introduce Kota Rewards, a marketplace offering deals from some of the world's leading HR & Finance platforms – exclusively for Kota customers. 

At Kota, our mission is to make your core benefits accessible. Your pension and health benefits are key to your wellbeing, and we are here to make setting up and managing these benefits seamless.

However, our team always goes the extra mile to enhance our offering and build new features within the Kota platform. Over the past while, we’ve been working closely with some of our favourite HR & Finance platforms, and we couldn’t be more excited to bring their offerings to our customers. 

We have hand-picked our partners and negotiated on our customers’ behalf to deliver exceptional savings with discounts ranging from a percentage off to completely free access!

Accessing these rewards is simple through the Kota platform, just navigate to our new “Rewards” tab. From there, you can find our offers and redeem.

Ashby is the only full-suite recruiting solution that combines your ATS, sourcing, CRM, scheduling, and analytics into a single platform.

Deel simplifies global team management, payroll, and HR so you can hire faster, streamline people processes, and stay compliant.

Equity compensation management for global teams. Easop helps US companies stay compliant in 70+ countries, incentivizing employees, contractors, and advisors while eliminating risks, costs, and data scarcity.

Hire global talent anywhere without creating foreign entities. Onboard and pay people in 170+ countries, and stay 100% compliant.

Lattice is the People Success Platform that brings together all of the tools, workflows, and data needed to help business leaders develop engaged, high-performing employees and winning cultures.

Personio's all-in-one software makes HR processes as efficient and effective as possible so organizations can focus on what matters: people.

Access Europe’s most comprehensive set of real-time salary and benefits benchmarks for tech companies. Build, develop, and manage a winning compensation strategy.

Remote is a Global HR Platform that helps companies hire, manage, and pay their entire team — and more effectively compete in the modern global economy.

One platform for all business finances. Scale – and save – with global payments, multi-currency accounts and smarter spending.

Workable is the world’s leading hiring and HR management platform. We provide in-house recruiters, hiring teams, and HR professionals with more ways to find more qualified candidates and help them work together to identify, hire, onboard, and manage the best.

Kara Connect provides tailored mental health and wellbeing solutions, where employees can engage with highly qualified therapists, counsellors, and coaches in 60+ specialty areas. 

If you're interested in learning more about Kota, and why people-first employers choose us for their insurance and retirement benefits, book a short demo and talk to our team 

Expect to see more partners and deals soon. If you have a product or service that our customers can benefit from, feel free to reach out to the team at 

Introducing Kota Rewards Marketplace

Introducing Rewards

At Kota, we are on a mission to make core benefits accessible to teams everywhere. In this mission, we are prioritising building robust security systems and data protection standards to ensure that your data is safe. 

Since our origins, we have taken seriously our commitment to reaching the highest compliance and data protection standards by adopting industry-leading practices. 

Our path to ISO certification has involved reviewing and refining our processes to ensure that they align seamlessly with global best practices, implementing new controls and measures to manage and mitigate information security risks, and continously improving our information security systems as risks evolve.

Our ISO certification is a significant milestone for us on our journey. We see this as not just a certification but a commitment to our continuous upholding and improving of our security standards and systems. 

Kota is ISO 27001 Compliant

Kota is now ISO 27001 Compliant

At Yonder, our mission is to increase access to core benefits for modern teams by providing a delightful way to issue and manage benefits internationally. 

We do this by going the extra mile and taking a different approach than others. Like integrating with insurers and pension providers and removing the manual back-and-forth involved in policy management. Our approach is to offer instant quoting and enrolment for employees so they can go from quote-to-covered in a few taps of our app and provide localised and consolidated payroll reporting that saves finance teams hours of pain every month. This all makes life easier for Finance and People teams.

Now, we're launching HRIS Sync, so companies can connect with the world's leading HR information systems (HRIS) and make core benefits work on autopilot, no matter where your team members are—no more double entry. Bridging the gap between disconnected tools and benefits. Reducing the error risk and driving real efficiencies within the teams who manage benefits.

Speed up employee onboarding and keep employee data in sync with your benefits

Employee data flows seamlessly from tools like Personio, Workday, HiBob and others into Yonder to automate administration. Sync data such as name, email, date of birth, salary, location and national insurance/PPS number with your benefits – if it updates in your HR tool, it updates with your benefits provider. This means many of the key points of friction now happen in the background;

This culminates in companies being capable of scaling benefits more than 10x faster than the traditional way and helps People and Finance teams focus on what matters.

Connecting to your HR tool is straight-forward

You can now connect Yonder to the following HR tools

With so much more to come, this is just the start. We’re working on ways to automate even more missing pieces of the global benefits puzzle. More automation–– like rule-based employee enrolment, a Yonder Slack app, local payroll integrations and more. 

Would you like to learn more about how this could work for you and your company? Book a 30-minute demo with our team 

Introducing HRIS Sync: Automate employee benefits management 

LONDON – Kota, the all-in-one platform to automate health insurance and retirement benefits for growing teams, today announced it is working with Smart Pension, one of the UK’s leading workplace pension providers, to enable companies and their UK-based employees to easily administer and enrol in a workplace pension.

The partnership utilises both companies’ powerful APIs to provide international employers with an effortless, modern and digital way to set up and manage a workplace pension for their UK-based employees that’s compliant with UK auto-enrolment law. Meaning that no matter where the company is based, even if they don’t have a UK bank account, they can provide their UK-based employees with comprehensive employee benefits. 

Kota provides employers with one easy-to-manage dashboard that removes the headache of understanding different countries’ retirement legislation, that’s scalable and affordable to support firms of all sizes and growth ambitions. For employees, their benefits are available to access and control with the Kota app.

Financial benefits are timely and expensive. Let us help with both. 

 and find out why modern People and Finance teams are switching to Kota.

Kota (formerly Yonder) launches UK workplace pension, partnering with Smart Pension

Yonder partners with Smart Pension

We speak to teams daily who are either looking to make the first step into offering their people benefits or scaling teams who are more distributed and trying to manage multiple providers in multiple markets. What comes with both is costs and administration – some of these are quite tangible while some of them are harder to see.

These costs come in direct costs, like people and finance ops administering benefits or paying brokers to administer certain parts, which can add up. But, also, the indirect costs of poorly executed benefits and coverage options for team members can be more of a seismic issue resulting in employee discontent and turnover. An example of this is speed – promising something to your team, and it takes months actually to make it available.

By removing the direct costs involved from what is the 'traditional' way of offering core benefits, there is more time to focus on the people and the outcomes desired.

We've been able to do this at Kota, which is a first for this industry, and cut the direct costs involved in offering core benefits like insurance and retirement, also while doing it in multiple regions. There's a primarily technical element to what we do to make this possible, but also a thesis and vision of what startups and growing companies need vs what they are selling traditionally.

We built Kota this way because it results in an unbelievably good user experience while removing all of those direct costs that have previously been levelled as table stakes in this industry. Well, they don't have to be.

Seeing is believing, but quantifying the impact on your bottom line helps too, so we've designed a tool to show you the effect of us 

 the rest. Comparing the cost attributed to the people, the admin, the ops, and the brokers against our transparent €9 per active employee per month cost.

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