On a rainy spring day in 2039, you wanted to go to the café where an ML- and AI-supported productivity app determined you worked more focused and efficiently. Your Level 4 autonomous car, which you bought with all your savings, took you to that café and then drove off to work for ride-hailing and car rental apps. By evening, your workday was done, your coffee order had arrived, and while waiting for your car, your smart headset notified you that the salary from today’s work had been deposited into your account. When you asked for details, it listed everything: the total hours and income you earned, the health amortization expense calculated based on your biological data, your individual health and retirement insurance deductions, the taxes paid—every single item.
Then your car returned, ready to take you to the rental home it had chosen for you for the night. On the way, it reported how much money it had earned that day, how much electricity it had consumed, and finally told you it was due for routine maintenance next month. It calculated that in order to cover the exact maintenance fee, it would need to do 14.5 hours of taxi work or you would need to spend 6.5 more hours working at the café. When asked which option was more reasonable, it recommended extra taxi work for your overall financial health. After all, doesn’t everyone now live more stable lives by trusting AI with financial decisions, instead of making them on their own as in the past? Nobody soars too high anymore, but nobody crashes either.
The above was an attempt to describe an ordinary day in your life 15 years from now as an ordinary white-collar worker. Some of you may find this very familiar, since we can already see small hints of such a life today. These hints mostly come from our technological practices and our ability to guess where they may lead. But once we actually reach these technologies, how will they affect our working lives?
Over time, I think we will see the phrase “I got a job at a company” replaced more often by “I got work from a company.” In theory, this is already the case today, but many of us forget this awareness because of legal practices. At its core, each of us has labor to sell, and we go to the labor market to put it up for sale. Then a company decides that our labor will be useful to them and signs a purchase contract with us. In reality, the employer uses labor as a raw material so that its product or service can exist in the market. Afterwards, instead of issuing us an invoice, they issue a payroll slip, and we call this payment a salary. Yet the concept of salary has taken on a different perception: especially for many white-collar employees, the salary doesn’t change even if they provide their labor at a minimum level. For workers, the comfort of not measuring what they give versus what they receive indirectly prevents the development of financial awareness. On the employer’s side, who have stronger financial muscles, this comfort of employees creates discomfort, and performance management systems—whose use has been increasing in recent years—try to address this discomfort.
One of the main factors in developing financial awareness in individuals depends on the democratization of finance. According to Yale University finance economist Robert Shiller, the democratization of finance is possible by increasing ordinary people’s access to financial tools that enable them to build wealth. The more access people have to investment opportunities with their own money, the greater the democracy. But being able to access opportunities to invest with one’s own money first requires individuals who are aware of their own money.
If we continue with salaried white-collar employees: for workers who do not have access to their own payroll—or who, even if they do, only care about the net pay—there can be no talk of democratizing their finances. Piecework models, periodic employment, and sole proprietorships—which are trending and increasingly common—will change the way we get paid. In this transformation, APIs, fintech, and wallet applications that carry payroll beyond just the bank and the employee provide many new options for accessing salaries. For example, in the U.S., where these options have been adopted more quickly, the market size of HR and payroll software has grown faster than the overall economy and the tech sector. The transition to cloud-based HR and payroll software not only provides companies with a solution against cumbersome spreadsheet programs, but also helps their employees gain access to their finances. In our country as well, we see more and more sole-proprietor couriers providing services to instant delivery and e-commerce platforms. In such temporary jobs, individuals are paid on demand or in real time. This creates a need for payroll software providers that can offer instant or near-instant payments. In the future, software developed to meet this need will include integrations we cannot even imagine today. And payroll will become accessible to everyone, democratizing further.
In conclusion, mobile applications are making payroll more accessible to employees. In a world dominated by phones, where information is always instantly available, mobile applications for payroll, benefits, on-demand payment options, and HR services will raise financial awareness across society. This, in turn, will place greater pressure on employers to provide intuitive, user-friendly, employee-focused, and integration-rich online, budget-friendly systems for their workforce.
For now, I believe creating this financial awareness—and democratizing finance and payroll—is crucial. But in the future, when even our cars can manage our finances, will the price we pay today—just like our grandparents once having to call a switchboard in Ankara to connect with a loved one by phone—be noticed? I’m not sure. I hope it will.
