In this week’s blog LACE Partners consultant Alex Oliver summarises what innovations in payroll 2022 has seen for key industry players. As a technology-agnostic business we make it our business to keep our finger to the pulse of all shifts so we can best advise our clients – read on to learn what developments we’ve seen in 2022 what our payroll lead Chris Kirby says we can expect in 2023.
Just as it started to feel like things were on the way back to normal, businesses are once again navigating choppy waters as global economic shocks slow the tentative post-pandemic recovery. In the face of continuing challenges, the complexity of global payroll has remained firmly under the spotlight this year.
Looking ahead there is a risk that the momentum behind the payroll industry will slow as economic uncertainty radically reshapes business priorities. Payroll functions are under pressure to deliver increased efficiency and effectiveness by pivoting quickly to simplify, streamline and consolidate services.
As well as optimising operational effectiveness, improving the employee experience remains a top priority for payroll. We have continued to see payroll teams and providers leveraging technology support the financial wellbeing of employees through pay-on-demand and real-time payments. Looking ahead, it is important to remember that employee experience applies to the back-office employee population as much as the end customer employee population. Payroll should continue to fight for a seat at the table to drive strategic decision making, ensuring that transformation delivers concrete benefits for payroll processing teams.
As the role of payroll grows, I think we will continue to see the profile of payroll professionals rising in business. Internally, payroll leaders are crucial in championing the status of payroll in their business. Competition for talent is still fierce but the predicted rise of internal marketplaces offers an excellent opportunity for payroll functions to recruit internal talent to help smooth the transition as long-serving team members step down. We will continue to see a shift in the market as payroll leaders rethink and rebrand their functions. This will inevitably require a new set of core skills for payroll professionals.
So, what innovations in payroll have there been in the marketplace this year and what should we look out for in 2023? We asked payroll providers for their thoughts:
activpayroll
Over 2022 at activpayroll we’ve been actively listening to our clients and the wider market about the most important global payroll outcomes and three themes have emerged:
- Recognition of the critical role and expectations of global payroll professionals are both rising in businesses. Internal payroll teams are now expected to have broad expertise and support a growing range of business questions, from tax calculations to workforce data queries – That’s why activpayroll continues to expand our global mobility capabilities
- Automation supported by proven partner integrations are key to unlocking greater efficiency and effectiveness for global payroll teams and, in enabling businesses to move into new territories with ease – This is another activpayroll strength that we have continued to build on with our great partners over 2022
- The need for experienced global payroll support will increase. Clear global trends show businesses will continue to invest and expand geographically – meaning more complexity and more data to control, interpret and take action from to enable successful payroll. Our focus at activpayroll continues to be on delivering expertise, payroll process visibility and confidence to our clients that their complexity is managed, and their teams are able to focus on their business needs.
ADP
2022 marks the year that ADP reached the milestone of surpassing one million customers globally, and continually proves how it’s innovating and adapting to the evolving landscape of global multicounty payroll. Today, the company boasts global payroll, and outsourcing services in more than 140 countries, and across several industry verticals in the likes of IT, hospitality, manufacturing and logistics among other high-growth verticals.
New consumer driven payroll experiences are helping achieve market growth, enabling clients to unlock the value of their data, scale and expand their businesses, and optimise processes. Better integrations help to ensure payroll accuracy with time and leading HCM platforms, and administrative tools simplify and automate interactions with ADP implementation and support teams. Through innovation in ADP’s DataCloud technology, companies will be able to access all their workforce metrics from all their countries in a single portal, helping them to analyse where to focus their efforts. They can access the most up-to-date data in each country, to consolidate and translate into insights that are highly visual and easy to understand.
Alight
Alight recently announced the global expansion of Alight Worklife, its employee experience platform, with the addition of its new payroll solution helping employers manage the complexities of global payroll. The Alight Worklife platform harmonises payroll and HR into a single, automated solution to help clients process, review, report and analyse payroll in 188 countries.
In addition, 2022 saw Alight announce two further payroll innovations, Alight Digital Wallet, an earned wage access and pay card solution as well as Alight Payment Services, a treasury service that streamlines global bank transaction management within a single settlement account. The latest solutions from Alight help to deliver a simplified and standardised payroll experience for clients, while elevating the employee experience and putting financial wellbeing at the forefront.
EPI-USE
During 2022 the financial pressures on both employees and employers have increased due to the pandemic and the energy crisis and we have seen interest increase in earned wage access. The traditional requirements of paying people correctly and on time are still important, but employees are looking for more choice of how they can access pay, have a clear visibility of their earnings, when they can receive monies earnt and employees are seeing earned wage access as a benefit and employers as an additional retention tool.
We see earned wage access becoming an interesting option that employers can offer to help staff through difficult times and offer a potential differentiator to attract and retain good colleagues while improving colleague mental health. Feedback from our clients is that despite initial potential misgivings about encouraging employee debt and a ‘payday loan’ culture, the results have been very positive.
Neeyamo
Expansion was at the heart of Neeyamo’s strategic initiatives in 2022. This included our solution offering, base of operations, and ability to reach and satisfy more customers worldwide. Our commitment to providing a peerless payroll experience was possible thanks to the extension of our revolutionary global payroll engine. The capability of our single gross-to-net native payroll engine was extended to account for more than 70% of the 160+ countries we currently support, with the eventual aim to make it 100%.
In our bid to follow the sun to provide a fully integrated and holistic solution coupled with round-the-clock assistance, we spread our wings to France, Italy, South Africa, and Sweden. Improvements across all our platforms and doubling down on global payroll and employer of record stemmed from our desire to strengthen our solution portfolio continually. Our march toward the future of work also included the next evolution in a truly touchless payroll ecosystem – STP (Straight Through Processing).
PayCaptain
2022 has been a brilliant year for PayCaptain. Early in the year PayCaptain became B Corp certified, reinforcing their desire to be a business that not only is good for their customers but does good in the world too. Only businesses that perform with high standards of social and environmental performance attain B Corp status and they were delighted to be recognised as such.
PayCaptain was then awarded a large Innovation Smart Grant by the government to build out a new set of features in the employee app to support all PayCaptain users in building greater financial resilience, a project they are working on alongside the Money and Pensions Service, The Behavioural Insights Team and Nest Insight. The features- called SmartPay– will utilise AI and an in depth understanding of behavioural bias to present suggestions to employees around positive decisions they could make with their income at key points in their employment journey.
PayCaptain was also voted ‘Software Product of the Year 2022’ by the prestigious CIPP who recognised their commitment to providing a solution that pays everyone accurately and on time and has a unique focus on employee experience too. Engagement with the PayCaptain app has reached 93% on average across all customers which means that many, many more people are benefiting from the interactive payslips, access to emergency cash, savings pots, pension integrations, payment splitting and charity donations.
SD Worx
As organisations struggle to deal with the challenges of the new post-pandemic way of working, as well as delivering an effective people ecosystem, we have seen an increased focus in 2022 on ensuring that core back-office processes such as payroll are as run as efficiently as possible with a specific focus on achieving payroll proficiency. This has resulted in a focus on integration between payroll and other core business solutions such as workforce management and HR, to improve the accuracy of the data flow and to reduce administration time.
In addition, with the decreasing expertise in the payroll world, and the need to ensure legislation compliance, this has also driven an increase in payroll outsourcing to ensure compliance and to reduce inhouse management and cost of processing the payroll.
Wagestream
We’re really encouraged to see all the payroll providers we’re partnered with making big strategic plays around employee financial wellness. Whether that’s enabling employees they process payroll for to pay themselves flexibly, or, allowing those employees to super-charge applications for big life decisions, such as buying a property, whilst remaining in control of their own data. 2023 promises to be an exciting year for putting employees in control of their own finances and data alike.
Reflecting on the above, LACE’s payroll lead Chris Kirby has summarised our key themes for this year and looks ahead to 2023:
It is not surprising to see the key themes in the responses this year covering a drive towards simplification and efficiency, a focus on employee wellbeing and most importantly a genuine trend towards delivering products and services that employees need and expect. I love this as it fits with what our clients and the industry are trending towards. The most common question when it comes to Payroll has shifted toward ‘How can we support our employees better?’ from the prior focus on replacing technology with better technology to do the same job in a different way.
It is an exciting time for payroll, our future is far more outwardly facing and proactive. This will bring with it a new set of core skills for payroll professionals who will no longer need to provide heavy manual support for data and processes, will be far more involved with the employee, and will be expected to provide enhanced change, improvement, and engagement skills.
Rome wasn’t built in a day though and looking ahead to 2023 it is clear the landscape for many businesses may again be challenging. We will continue to see mergers and acquisitions commonplace, organisations will again be considering location strategy, and hybrid working will continue to evolve. All of this is why there is so much focus on simplification and efficiency as companies look for payroll to provide not only a solid foundation which can support significant change but play a leading role in defining and influencing those changes.
If you’d like to chat to or learn more about any of the providers on this list, or you would like to speak about getting support for your payroll requirements, reach out to us below using the contact form below.
