As the pandemic and the rise of the gig economy pushes more people across the globe online and into non-traditional work roles, there is an increasing need for multinational companies to provide cross-border payroll to employees.
Whether that is a traditional employee, a contractor, ex-pat or more, Payslip is providing this technology to companies with their feet on the ground in multiple countries.
The Ireland-based fintech provides a global payroll platform for high-growth multinational companies that are already using payroll across at least five countries, with most clients reporting somewhere between nine and 11.
While there are companies that provide back-end engines for these payroll processes, such as SAP, legacy systems can stall set-up. Instead, Payslip has focused on the front-end user experience and utilizes localized experts to handle the individual regulatory challenges of each country’s payroll systems.
In a recent interview with FinLedger, Payslip’s CEO and founder Fidelma McGuirk explained that while the company originally only handled traditional employees, it is now seeing a new wave of employment happening, ushering the fintech to find ways to develop new technology for this growing population of workers.
“Increasingly, these corporations have non-employees on their payroll as well, so employees of records, ex-pats, contractors and independent workers,” McGuirk told FinLedger.
“And really what they want to do is have a simple globalized and standardized way of managing all of the parallel processes across all the world, all those different kinds of workers, and that’s what they do on our platform. We enable them to standardize it and manage it in a unified way,” she said.
Founded in 2016, Payslip has seen growth through organic expansion, funding rounds and most recently the pandemic. The company raised €12M through three funding rounds, including a €1 million seed round co-led by Allied Irish Banks and Frontline Ventures in 2018.
Payslip’s most recent funding round was a €8.3 million Series A in March 2021, co-led by Middlegame Ventures and Mouro Capital. McGuirk sid that funding has been used to expand product and integration engineering teams, with a new base across Spain, as well as for investing in sales and marketing teams.
Compared to traditional payroll companies, which operate in a siloed manner, Payslip operates with a non-centralized structure that allows the regulatory compliance measures of individual countries to be overlaid onto its global payroll framework.
“We’ve extracted a global standard of how to manage your process, while still having lots of flexibility underneath it, and we have those global standardizations for both data and also for process,” McGuirk said.
“So we set up data structures at the very start for our customer implementation across the big countries, and the small countries, that align so after that, every country that gets set up, the data set comes in and all of its local country richness, but it gets boxed off into the global categories.”
Payslip’s focus now is providing new technology for these new worker types to be rolled out in the third and fourth quarters of 2021.
“We’re also building out new modules for enhanced vendor management, so that it gives a really good ‘Trustpilot’ type indication to our customers of how their vendors rack up against other vendors on the platform and in the market,” she said, also looking forward to new products Payslip is working on.
“We’re nearly finished choosing a payments partner. We’re looking now at those last mile of downstream processes that have to happen for payroll to be successful,” McGuirk said.
McGuirk says that Payslip’s payments integration are set to go live at the end of 2021 and early 2022, and says it will include some payment processors that are already working as key disruptors in the fintech space. She also noted the company has two large enterprise companies going live with their product in the next year – one having 170,000 members across 25 countries and another having 44,000 people across 38 countries.
“Many of our customers have not centralized their payments and their treasury, and they incur high costs for a country and centrally on that. By integrating with at least one if not two payment partners, they’ll be able to press a button and then the data will be used for that last purpose, as well as all the other purposes on reporting and insights.”