Earlier this year I published a blog detailing Excelity Global’s rapid start to 2017, highlighting their multiple strategic partnerships, client wins, technology investments, and continued expansion and growth in the APAC payroll services market. Recently, I met members of Excelity’s executive team to discuss this month’s formal launch of the ezpayroll technology offering and its roadmap for the future.

Strategy for ezpayroll

Technology is clearly at the core of Excelity’s strategy, with technology investments consistently reaching ~25% of its revenues. And with ezpayroll, Excelity has stated its intention to provide the leading proprietary payroll technology offering in APAC.

Within the region, Excelity often finds Microsoft Excel to be its largest competition for payroll technology, with ~30% of APAC payrolls run manually on the spreadsheet application. Recognizing this opportunity, ezpayroll has been targeted at the SME market, offering potential customers an affordable, scalable, cloud-based, multi-country payroll platform that can simplify the payroll process, improve the employee experience, drive standard practices, and enhance reporting and compliance.

While the SME market will likely remain the sweet spot for ezpayroll, large enterprise clients can also be supported, making ezpayroll a viable option for processing the multi-country payrolls of smaller populations across APAC countries, with capability to integrate with leading HCM platforms such as Workday and SuccessFactors.

Key features of the ezpayroll platform include:

• Cloud-based payroll platform, with a simplified, intuitive user experience
• Capable of operating on leading mobile platforms and formats
• Self-service and reporting capability
• Integration with leading HCM platforms, as well as all Excelity service offerings and enabling technologies
• Rapid DIY implementation approach – customers can be live on average within a few days (depending on data migration needs)
• Compliant, secure, and scalable for growth
• Currently enabled in the following countries: India, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Indonesia, and Taiwan
• SaaS model with flexible contracting, (generally 1 year and greater), and priced on a Per Employee Per Month (PEPM) model
• Add-on modules include leave management, time and attendance, business expenses, and employee overtime management
• Although primarily suited for payroll technology only clients seeking to process in-house, payroll BPO services can also be included as needed.

ezpayroll roadmap

Over the next six months, Excelity’s roadmap for ezpayroll includes plans to make the platform available across its footprint in APAC in a phased approach, starting first in India, followed by Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines later this month, and Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand in June, and lastly Australia, New Zealand, and China in July.  Further, Excelity plans to continue making enhancements to the user interface and user experience features, and develop add-on HR modules with the long-term vision of developing a full HCM suite. 

Additionally, Excelity has developed industry-specific templates for ezpayroll (beginning with Banking, Manufacturing, and ITeS) to further customize and ease the implementation process for customers in those sectors. As a result, leading banks in the APAC region are working with Excelity to begin offering ezpayroll as a complimentary business service to their small business customers who maintain accounts with them (PEPM fees would then be paid by the bank on behalf of its users). Excelity expects this initiative to drive rapid growth for the ezpayroll platform across the region.

Outlook

The launch of ezpayroll further enhances Excelity’s value proposition by complimenting its proven capability and delivery model with a cloud-based payroll technology offering – moving Excelity further toward becoming a true cloud HR BPaaS provider. With a beta group of ~50 clients using the ezpayroll product today (currently all in India), Excelity expects to be processing ~120-150k pay slips monthly with ezpayroll by the end of 2017.

With several established payroll vendors currently offering SaaS payroll solutions in the region, the challenge for Excelity and ezpayroll will be differentiation.  I expect to see Excelity meet this initially with aggressive pricing, and longer term with continued investments and development of key features that enhance the user experience. Further, I expect Excelity will leverage its network of strategic partners across APAC to reach additional new customers.

Given Excelity’s strong momentum and rapid start to 2017 (particularly its strategic partnerships in Japan and China), coupled with a complete offering and proven capability in a market with deep opportunity in the payroll space (growth in APAC is estimated at 4X the broader market in NelsonHall’s 2016 payroll market analysis), I expect Excelity will see solid demand and take-up of ezpayroll in the coming year, resulting in high growth.