Payslip with Fidelma McGuirk | E219
Standardizing payroll process across 80 countries.
Today in the show, we have Fidelma McGuirk, founder, and CEO of Payslip. Payslip is an Ireland-based payroll company that does work all around the world. She is on the show to discuss the challenges of working with multi jurisdictions and other complexities. Payslip is a technology company that provides a job apparel control platform to multinational companies, says Fidelma.
Episode Highlights:
1.10: Payslip enables a multinational company to integrate all their IT systems and payment providers in different countries into a payslip. All the data flow is secure, structured, and standardized across other countries, says Fidelma.
2.23: There are 83 countries with which payslip is working, and each of them has different regulations and rules surrounding payroll deductions, taxation, and employer compliance, says Jason.
4.34: Fidelma has many avoidable situations that we have to manage. Therefore, they should have better ownership and actionable decision-making coming out of their plan data.
5.39: Fidelma figured if she could identify the global level of abstraction they could automate, then there may be a way to have a technology solution or automation job apparel management.
8.49: We want to have one standard way of working worldwide. We want to have useful tools to automate manual work and reduce the risk. And then, we want to have one system of record for our global payroll data so that we know we’re managing it carefully. So, I set the payslip as that central global parallel management technology, says Fidelma.
10.16: The traditional services aggregator model is an American model. For example, if you find experienced payroll leaders in the US, 4 out of every five payslips in the US are issued to the ADP platform, says Fidelma.
12.29: In Europe, there is a default outward approach to looking at why you are going to build your business, why you are going to have to be ready for it, and what gross efficiency looks like. It means you have to have an agile operational model.
13.34: Jason asks how do you stay on top of 80 countries’ worth of the complexity, HR, and taxation laws, especially given language challenges?
17.15: A multinational employer has different payroll service providers. They don’t want to be logging into different software that each service provider built just for their part of the process of their own country. They wanted to decide how they automate their whole process from the beginning to the very end.
19.01: Services aggregator model has been around for more than 40 years. There are some very successful companies in that space. They spend a huge amount of money and time investing that this is the only way to solve it things, Fidelma.
21.55: Companies get to a certain level, and then they’re only going to hire the top-tier consulting firms who charge extortion amounts to do work that other firms would do for a fraction of the cost, says Jason.
24.52: When you are an entrepreneur for five years, and it is pretty established, then your job actually kind of changes. You get to do the piece you are good at, which is like keep finding more spaces to innovate to make it even better, and that’s most exciting, Fidelma.
25.50: We are finding more ways to automate with a zero-touch project to ensure that the customers have to do less and less themselves. The system produces really interesting transaction reports and saves them a lot of time, says Fidelma.
3 Key Points
Fidelma founded the payslip in 2016, and her previous life involved the setup and management of operations across 21 countries for a tax company that she was leading.
What our technology does is help unify the data model at the global level and help standardize the process at a global level. We have a workflow automation engine standardized across all the different countries but has lots of flexibility, says Fidelma.
Payroll is a bit like IT tech support for people. It is challenging to be recognized until something goes wrong, and if you don’t hear anything about it usually means that it’s all running very well.
Tweetable Quotes
“Payroll is a systematic process. It requires every pay period in every country.” - Fidelma McGuirk
“Over the last 50 years, the only model offered to large multinational employers for managing global payroll centrally was to outdoors the services to one provider.” - Fidelma McGuirk
“More often, most jurisdictions, especially large ones, use engineer solutions solely for their jurisdiction. They don’t necessarily do multi custodial or multijurisdictional.” - Jason
“You need to prove the validity of the system, credibility of your company, and the longevity of it, but that’s a bit tricky.” - Fidelma McGuirk
Resources Mentioned:
Facebook – Jason Pereira’s Facebook
LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedIn
Woodgate.com – Sponsor