Workday
“Can the enterprise system of record for HR and Finance remain the indispensable platform as AI-native challengers attack from below?”
Founded in 2005 by PeopleSoft's Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri after Oracle's hostile takeover, Workday built a cloud-native HCM and Financial Management suite for the enterprise. It IPO'd in 2012 and has steadily expanded from HR into financials, spend (via acquisition of Scout RFP and the more recent VNDLY), planning (Adaptive Insights), and analytics. Workday is not itself an embedded-finance provider — it is a system of record that other embedded-finance vendors (Avalara, Vertex, Betterment, Vestwell, Ramp, Apideck, Rutter) integrate INTO to power tax, retirement, spend management, and accounting connectivity for Workday customers.