Validate your benefits package with our new benchmarking tool.
A heavy month of shipping at Kota: digital wallets and gift cards on Spend, seven new benefits across the UK, Ireland, and Spain, Auto-Enrolment automation for Irish employers, and Single Sign-On for enterprise customers.
.png)
.png)
.png)
May was a heavy month of shipping at Kota, but we have four specific updates we'd like to spotlight.
Kota Spend cards now work in digital wallets, with employee gift cards added as a new programme option. Our benefits library expanded further into Europe and deepened across the UK. Irish employers now have automated workflows and rules for the new Auto-Enrolment rules. And Kota now supports Single Sign-On for enterprise customers.
Watch Luke and Tadhg walk through the highlights:
If you'd rather read it, here's the longer version.
Until this month, Kota Spend worked well for online purchases but hit friction in the real world. Employees with a lunch allowance couldn't use it at the café next door. Finance teams could see card-level activity but had to assemble the bigger picture themselves.
We've shipped what's needed to close those gaps, and added a new programme type on top.
Kota Spend cards are now available to use in digital wallets. Employees add the card from the Kota app in about a minute, then tap to pay anywhere contactless is accepted.
That sounds simple, and it is. The point is what it unlocks. Lunch allowances, wellness budgets, and work-from-home stipends now work the way employees actually spend - cafes, shops, other points of service.
Finance teams see every transaction in one place. Opening balance, all spend, closing balance, exportable as a single ledger.
Per-card detail is still available when you need it. But the default view is now the bigger picture, the one Finance actually closes books from. Spreadsheets stitched together from card statements are no longer part of the workflow.
If Stripe ever needs information from your account to keep cards working, you'll now see a clear alert in the portal with a link to resolve it.
This is the smallest of the four launches and quietly one of the most important. Before, cards could be paused for Stripe-side reasons without anyone at the customer side knowing. Now you see it the moment it happens, with a clear path to resolution.
Every Kota Spend transaction triggers a push notification that takes the employee straight to the upload screen. They take a photo, OCR reads the receipt and fills in the details..
Companies can now issue digital gift cards to employees through Kota Spend. Birthday rewards, work anniversaries, end-of-year recognition, or just a thank-you for shipping something difficult. The card lands in the employee's Kota wallet ready to use, alongside any other spend programme they're on.
Gift cards run through the same admin dashboard and ledger as the rest of Spend. No separate platform to log into, no separate reconciliation at month-end. For Finance, it's one programme type among the others. For employees, it's one more thing their Kota app already does.
The benefits library expanded meaningfully this month:
Together with what was already live, this brings whole-of-market coverage to Ireland. It also deepens the options available across the UK and Europe.
We've been building toward something specific here. A benefits library that lets us ship any provider, in any country, fast. Each integration takes a fraction of the time it would take with traditional benefits-broker plumbing. That's why this month has seven new providers, and why we expect to keep that pace.
Ireland's new Auto-Enrolment rules have been in effect since January 2026, and they create real ongoing work for HR teams. Every new joiner has to be assessed, enrolled or excluded, and tracked. Opt-ins and opt-outs have to be managed. Eligibility changes have to be re-applied.
Most HR teams have been doing this with spreadsheets and reminders. That doesn't scale, and it doesn't audit cleanly.
We've now shipped workflows and rules within Kota. Set the enrolment criteria once and the platform applies them to every new joiner, eligibility change, and opt-in/opt-out. Kota flags any employee that is at risk for being enrolled in the government scheme, with actionable steps to adjust contributions and add the necessary data to avoid enrolment.
Kota now supports Single Sign-On for customers who opt in. Employees access the platform with their existing work credentials through the company's identity provider. No separate Kota login to remember, no separate user list for IT to manage.
For IT and security teams, this means central control over who has access. People joining, leaving, or changing roles flow through the company's existing identity workflows, and their Kota access updates automatically.
The four releases above look like separate launches. They're really one bet, played from four angles.
We're building toward a single platform where every benefit, every spend programme, and every piece of compliance work lives in one place. Effortless for the People and Finance teams who run the programmes. Engaging for the employees who use them. And ready to plug into the IT stacks of the biggest companies that use it.
Each release this month moved that platform closer to what it needs to be. Spend cards that work everywhere, with gift cards as a new programme option. A benefits library deep enough to serve any market. Compliance automation that takes the manual work off HR's plate. Enterprise SSO so larger customers can run Kota at the same scale as the rest of their stack.
A lot more to come.
This is the first edition of our monthly changelog series. Going forward, you'll see one of these every month with the work that's gone live and the thinking behind it.
For the May releases specifically, the video walkthrough is here → kota.io/changelog
If any of the above is relevant to your team, we'd love to talk → kota.io/demo
Tadhg is the Product Lead at Kota, with nearly 10 years of experience building products for HR and People teams at Workday and Lattice.
.png)
.png)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.webp)