Employers turn to MCPO to enhance employee payroll experience, retain talent
The Multi-Country Payroll Outsourcing (MCPO) market is one of the fastest growing markets in the HR outsourcing space, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 19 to 23 percent between 2014 and 2016 to cross the US$1.5 billion mark. This momentum is likely to continue for the next two years due to the rising appreciation for the MCPO value proposition and increasing provider maturity, according to Everest Group.
Enhancing employee experience with payroll processes is likely to become a key driver for MCPO, particularly because talent retention has become a vital and challenging business requirement.
“Talent retention is one of the biggest challenges employers face today, and the payroll process is a crucial employee touch point, so employers are ramping up their investments in technology to provide a more sophisticated user experience,” said Anil Vijayan, practice director at Everest Group. “This includes getting rid of multiple sign-ins; presenting a consistent look, feel and function across all pages; offering fast-loading and friendly interfaces; providing dynamic visualizations of data; and, of course, ensuring reliable, easy-to-use mobile access.”
Enterprise buyers also are becoming increasingly aware of the other key benefits that the MCPO construct provides:
- better control and visibility of payroll operations across multiple countries through consolidated reporting and analytics
- compliance with regulations, particularly as repercussions of failed compliance have become harsher and the legislative landscape is changing rapidly
- cost reduction, directly through labor arbitrage and technology as well as through efficiencies derived from centralization, standardization and vendor consolidation
Everest Group explores these findings and others in a recently published report: “Multi-Country Payroll Outsourcing (MCPO) – Annual Report 2017 – Evolution of Drivers and Enablers in a Rapidly-growing Market.” This research provides a comprehensive analysis of the global MCPO market, including buyer adoption trends across geographies, regional trends, emerging solutions and the service provider landscape.
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Additional key findings in this report include:
- North America and Europe are relatively more mature and bigger MCPO markets, and they accounted for a large chunk of the global deal activity. Asia Pacific and Latin America are emerging as strong MCPO markets on their own. Local buyers in these geographies, especially Asia Pacific, are playing an important role in shaping these markets.
- In terms of buyer size, smaller firms continue to dominate the MCPO market adoption through simple deals spanning a few countries.
- The MCPO market is mostly industry-agnostic. Services, hi-tech and IT, and manufacturing are the leading adopters of MCPO globally, with industries such as healthcare and energy showing promising upticks.
- While core payroll subprocesses such as “gross-to-net,” payroll distribution and reconciliation remain fundamental to the construct, ancillary processes such as those for contact centers and time-and-attendance are also increasingly being included
- Emerging areas of technology investment include analytics, automation and enhancing employee experience through UI improvements. Other major areas of investment include enhancing in-country and multi-language capabilities and meeting compliance needs.
