It has been a year since private equity firm Everstone Capital purchased Aon Hewitt’s APAC payroll business. The most obvious change is the rebranding to Excelity Global, but behind the scenes, the company has been working hard to transform its payroll business to meet market demand.

At the time of the acquisition, Excelity’s offering was focused solely on a full payroll services model with the majority of its business in India, Singapore, China, and Hong Kong. As the company evaluated the market, it took stock of the fact that the wider market was shifting towards a SaaS payroll solution. In fact, NelsonHall research estimates that approximately three quarters of the total global payroll market is for partial payroll services, which can be in the form of application/SaaS only payroll services or limited/bureau payroll services.

Accordingly, Excelity set out to expand its payroll service offering by developing a cloud payroll offering, Payroll on Demand, formally launching this quarter. Excelity’s roadmap includes rolling out its cloud solution across 13 APAC countries by the end of this year, ultimately providing the company with a unified cloud-based regional payroll platform in the following countries: India, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan.

Initially, Excelity’s cloud-based payroll offering will likely see the most traction from organizations needing a payroll solution in a single country, but as its experience strengthens over time with localized client wins across all of the 13 countries, it will start to get the attention of multinationals seeking a standardized payroll platform in the region. Ultimately, Excelity’s go-to-market strategy will include an expanded payroll portfolio consisting of full and partial payroll services in the cloud.

The cloud payroll offering will be especially appealing to fast-growing companies operating in the region, due to the relatively low cost, shorter implementation times, and flexibility, with the option of adopting a full payroll service model in the main countries, while leveraging Payroll on Demand in tail countries.

At the same time, Excelity is establishing significant relationships in the market that will accelerate its presence throughout Asia Pacific. For example, it is a certified Workday partner for payroll services, which is important since just last month Workday’s leading European sales executive was tasked with increasing Workday’s presence in the APAC region.  

By this time next year, Excelity will be operating with a payroll offering that is slated to be the most comprehensive of all the regional providers.