the same way HR and finance people have for their functions. I couldn’t understand why payroll was always the cousin that didn’t get invited to the wedding. And I discovered there are two reasons for that. I saw that payroll people have such integrity; they never let payroll fail. That success creates the problem: If you request to the CFO a spend of $200,000 in equipment and technology that’s going to make our payroll fail-safe, they’ll just say, “But it never fails, so why do I need to do that?” And the second reason is, I’ve observed most payroll people don’t want to be salespeople. In setting up the company, the goal was to provide technology that would enable global payroll people to manage their operations in a standardized, global-first way. But the challenge comes in understanding that there’s lots of different specifics per country. Payroll is always locally defined. So, the first big problem to solve, which I had a lot of experience doing, was how do we standardize that management process? That’s what I call a horizontal, or process issue. The second question centers around
the data, and this is a vertical challenge in my mind. The data set differs for every single country. We first developed our place of control platform--which helps the customers standardize their workflow across all of the world-- and we have adopted a global-to- local methodology. This provides local flexibility as well as the global standardization needed to manage the differences in every country, if they need to, but also always feeds that globally. Then we did exactly the same with the data. All the data that is in our system we have is prevalidated, cleaned and standardized. GPA: How are you leveraging technology now to provide your services? I couldn’t understand why payroll was always the cousin that didn’t get invited to the wedding. And I discovered there are two reasons for that.
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ISSUE 23 GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE
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