Though Excelity Global is a new name and brand, Excelity was formerly the Asia Pacific payroll business of Aon Hewitt, which was acquired by Everstone Capital in 2015. I recently interviewed a Fortune 10 multinational conglomerate that has been an Excelity payroll outsourcing client in China since 2004 to understand its expansion plans in Asia Pacific.

The company has a history of aggressive growth, including mergers & acquisitions, and wanted to centralize and standardize its payroll services across its new entities being established, all on one platform. Excelity was chosen in 2004 due to its ability to scale and quickly deploy, and its ability to partner, which has remained a key renewal criteria for the client throughout its journey with Excelity.

Contract Scope & Expansion

The contract began with only China in scope in 2004, and Excelity became an approved global vendor. In 2013, Hong Kong was added, as was Taiwan in 2015. In Q3-Q4 2016, Korea will be added. Although there are some countries still providing payroll in-house, the company is exploring more opportunities. In China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan there are ~15,000 employees across ~48 legal entities in scope. Korea will be an additional ~1,000 employees.

Services in scope include:

• Multi-country payroll administration
• Gross to net payroll processing and delivery for all employees
• A hotline service where employees can call Excelity if they have a payroll question (both China and India support payroll administration, with China providing employee call support)
• An employee self-service (ESS) portal where employees in Taiwan and Hong Kong can access pay statements online. This is a future scope expansion opportunity for China. All employees in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong receive their pay via wire transfer/direct deposit
• Customized reporting for the HR leadership team
• Mandatory benefits regulation research in ~50 cities, plus Hong Kong and Taiwan
• Individual income tax regulation research, calculation and filing in ~40 cities
• Pricing of the contract is based on a fixed fee per employee per month.

Governance, SLAs & Benefits

Governance includes quarterly leadership team reviews and monthly operations meetings which includes review of metrics/SLAs and process improvement opportunities.

Metrics include timeliness and accuracy of pay and tax filing, issue resolution response time, and compliance with local tax laws. To date, SLA targets are being met, including accuracy of 99.9% and timeliness of 99%. Additional benefits obtained include:

• Regulation compliance across ~50 cities
• Standardized reporting system across ~48 legal entities and customized reporting specific to different business unit requests
• Standardization of payroll processes and employee experience.

Lessons Learned & Best Practices

These include:

• Building a successful working partnership. This was important when the company first outsourced to Aon Hewitt and is equally important now with the rebrand to Excelity, which came with new management changes. This requires many regular meetings between the parties, and commitment to achieve working best practices around requirements and priorities
• Effective communications, reviewing contacts and connections, including the escalation process for any service issues
• Focus on continuous process improvement and service excellence. As the company grows, adds new entities, and outsources payroll in additional countries to Excelity, process improvement, including continuous improvement of communications and development of both parties’ teams, is imperative.

Outlook

This Excelity client’s global strategy is to expand payroll outsourcing, so I expect to see additional countries added in 2017 and beyond. As Excelity currently supports ~450 client organizations across 17 countries in Asia Pacific, I expect Excelity to continue to meet the client’s needs by paying particular attention to best practice processes and effective governance.