Over the last twenty years, technology’s influence on our lives – professional and personal – has been spectacular. Even before recent advances in AI – the internet and smartphones have transformed commerce; enabled instant global social connections; and promoted ultra-convenience via the simplification of many daily tasks.
Such is the transformation that when tasks remain clunky, not user-friendly, and do not embrace convenience – the failure seems even more glaring and inexplicable. How and why could the technology revolution have left some areas all but untouched? And even in the rare instances where this occurs, surely it won’t be in something intrinsic to our daily lives and how we fulfil our needs and wants – right?
Wrong!
Counter-intuitively, an area vital to almost everybody is stuck in the dark ages. This startling anomaly is payroll – the process of calculating and distributing employee compensation. Globally, it is a $100 billion market, growing at over 6% per year, and is an element of business impacting all workers regularly and meaningfully.
As a co-founder and CEO of a global payroll technology firm – I see every day how payroll is stuck in the past. It is an industry built on precision and numbers, yet most companies run payroll on engines bolted onto ERP systems decades ago. These platforms were built for compliance, while we need flexibility.
Simple change requests can take months and cost hundreds of dollars. The learning curve is steep, integrations are complex and almost every company I’ve seen has had to compromise when selecting its HRIS (Human Resources Information System).
So, when companies claim to have automated their payroll, they actually just mean Excel spreadsheets with macros. Linking formulas feels like progress – and for some it is! – but it is still manual data entry. There is no audit trail; version control is chaos; and one wrong cell can cascade through everything. Real automation means API-driven validation, compliance alerts and real-time processing. All of which are still rare.
We have become used to instant payments in our personal lives, so we assume salary payments mirror this. They don’t. Multiple countries, currencies and approval flows keep things slow, and batch based. Even APIs promising real-time processing often just queue data into batch runs. Finance teams close payroll just how they reconciled ledgers in 2005.
Employee data is everywhere: HRIS, time tracking apps, expense tools, government platforms, shared drives, you name it. Without clean data flow between systems, payroll teams spend hours reconciling information manually. The process becomes reactive not proactive, always playing catch-up instead of running smoothly.
Another pattern I see constantly is a major impediment to progress. HR owns onboarding; Finance owns approvals and funding; IT owns the system; and Legal owns compliance. Payroll becomes everyone’s responsibility and thus nobody’s priority. With no single accountable owner, nothing is ever modernized.
Because of this ownership crossroads – a small mistake can trigger audits or fines. This fear creates a ‘don’t touch it if it works’ culture. Many teams prefer manual checks over automation because they trust human double-checking more than AI recommendations. I understand this completely. We’re dealing with people’s livelihoods, taxes, and local regulations. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Moreover, payroll teams are consistently undervalued and overloaded. They need to track labor law updates across multiple countries; manage dozens of different file formats; explain every payslip discrepancy; chase late approvals and manage missing data – all while staying invisible unless something goes wrong.
They are also rarely allocated the resources modern HR or finance teams receive. Worse, they often don’t have seat at the table when decisions are made about systems, HR policies or subjects impacting salary calculation and compliance.
Fortunately, change is coming. Modern businesses are hiring globally – forcing them to confront these issues now. Enterprises are seeing global payroll for what it really is: an intricate operation requiring the highest precision. Yes – every country will always have its own formats, bank protocols and reporting obligations, but managing each country and employee data via a separate system with disconnected processes has become unsustainable.
Payroll has to be continuous, embedded with seamless connections across HR, finance and payroll. Transparency should be standard – where employees can track their salary status anytime, anywhere.
The right technology stack makes payroll self-healing. AI will rapidly detect anomalies early, so payroll experts can focus on solving actual issues, not manual checking. Payroll will shift from a back-office task to a strategic system that supports business growth.
CEOs and CFOs are also recognizing the strategic value that CHROs and CPOs bring to the boardroom. Meanwhile, technology is delivering new levels of agility equipping the C-suite to make faster, better decisions.Technology is dragging payroll – at speed – into the 21st century. This is good for enterprises and workers
