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John Pearce | SVP, Payroll Operations at CloudPay
CloudPay’s success is built on helping companies reshape their payroll to meet the needs of a fast-changing business world. Our single global platform for managed payroll and payments services is used across more than 130 countries and 160 currencies to unify data, teams and processes.
In early October, we held our first-ever customer event: a seminal moment in the history of our organization. We brought together more than 80 business leaders and CloudPay users at the Myriad Hotel in Lisbon, Portugal, to explore what the future of pay holds together.
This blog summarizes some of the insights shared at the event, helping you understand the future direction of payroll in global business, and the vital role that technology has to play.
Days One and Two
The event kicked off with a networking and cocktail event, where the attendees were able to start engaging with each other and learning from their peers’ experiences. Once all had assembled, attendees were welcomed by CloudPay’s CEO Paul Bartlett, who set out the agenda for the days to come.
The first of our keynote speakers was Liz Rennie from NelsonHall, exploring the current state of the payroll industry. She highlighted the importance of payroll within businesses as a whole, saying: “Payroll is a critical business function as it promotes trust through timely, accurate, transparent results and will offer increasingly guided insights.” She also predicted a future where payroll is increasingly mobile-first, with more alternative payment solutions such as pay cards, digital wallets, and Earned Wage Access (EWA), all coordinated by a modern platform-based offering.
Nick Bryant from Expedia followed up with a detailed look at the importance of payroll performance metrics. He neatly summarized which metrics are the most relevant to quantifying payroll success, and how best to measure them. Key metrics highlighted included Payroll Performance, Dissatisfaction Rate, and Case Aging. Crucially, he was also keen to make the point that improving perceptions of payroll within businesses will take time to filter through.
Attendees also took part in a series of roundtable discussions and learned more about CloudPay’s future strategy from CSO Josep Elias, and our global pay portfolio from Grant Tasker and Borja Perez from CloudPay and Wezaam (a CloudPay company).
Day Three
The third day was opened by CloudPay’s CRO Emma Streatfield, who introduced a talk on on-demand pay by Medtronic’s Marc Ladenstein. He described on-demand pay (also known as Earned Wage Access) as “the next disruption in employee well-being and engagement”.
Marc shared his views on EWA, and where it could sit within Medtronics wider HR strategy and the future of pay. Then explained that Medtronic is currently exploring an EWA solution with the help of Cloudpay. In time, he hopes that a more flexible approach to when employees are paid will not only support better financial well-being but also be an employee benefit that helps with retention and acquisition in an industry where the best talent is highly sought-after.
That flexibility within CloudPay NOW is supported by our partnership with Visa Direct, which enables simple and secure payments into employee bank accounts at any time. Dayna Karel from Visa spoke later on Day Three to highlight this unique partnership, which is helping give employees control over how and when they’re paid and helping employers reduce their payroll cycle without compromising performance.
Day Four
CloudPay’s CMO Nick Webb was the host for the final day of the event, where center stage was taken by Mel Pizzey from the Global Payroll Association. Mel has long advocated the value of payroll as a strong career option in the business world and explored the changing payroll landscape from this perspective in her keynote.
In particular, she highlighted the pros and cons of payroll running as its own department, the direct and indirect impacts of the Great Resignation on payroll teams, and how to not only retain the current generation of payroll professionals but attract the next one, too.
After Mel’s speech, the final roundtable discussions and Q&As were held to finish off four successful days of knowledge-sharing in Portugal.
In summary
Taken as a whole, the insights from the event demonstrated that the long-standing practice of going to the bank and withdrawing pay in cash is far behind us. Instead, payroll technology has an important part to play in meeting employee expectations around supporting their well-being needs inside and outside work, and making them happy, productive and loyal workers in the long term.
We’d like to thank all those who came to Lisbon and made the event such a success, helping us further the conversation about payroll in global business.
To find out more about how CloudPay is redefining the modern pay experience, you can click here.
