This week, ADP held its annual industry analyst event in NYC, and as well as welcoming guests with apples to celebrate the arrival of fall, it also ushered in the season with significant news regarding its HR technology innovations. One thing is clear about the technology-enabled services company: its investments in innovation continue to accelerate, as it invested ~$450bn in FY 2017 – a significant increase from the ~$150m invested in FY 2011.

The key areas of innovation ADP has delivered to date include:

• Cloud HCM platforms: across its cloud suite, which includes Run, Workforce Now, Vantage HCM, and GlobalView, ADP supports ~570k cloud clients, adding ~40k in the last year
• Mobile: its mobile app has ~12m users
• Big data and analytics (via ADP DataCloud): there are ~4k analytics clients and ~1.5k benchmarking clients
• Open HCM ecosystem (ADP Marketplace): there are currently ~205 apps available, ~6k subscriptions, and ~4k downloads from ADP Marketplace.

While client-centric innovation has been a focus at ADP for several years, the company is going even deeper now with its latest next generation technology. Key attributes of ADP’s NextGen Platform include the ability to create dynamic teams, which incorporate analytics (such as attrition rates), and ~30 mini apps (and growing) for various HR processes across the entire lifecycle; these allow organizations to personalize their HR experience with the functions most pertinent to their needs, whether by company, region, or country.

In October, ADP will launch its NextGen Payroll engine which was again built with the user in mind. The system has ~51 predefined policies to facilitate configuration, and is event-driven, with payroll recalculated in real time. Advantages of the new payroll system for employees include flexibility of when they get paid, the ability to see all of their pay if they work multiple jobs and are paid by ADP, and transparency in how their pay is calculated. Transparency is also a common theme for HR practitioners as well as getting global insights.  Already available is ADP’s NextGen Tax engine, which is supporting ~300 clients to date. 

Other key initiatives include building out DataCloud further. Recent enhancements include launching the following data explorers: Turnover Probability and Pay Equity Explorer, with additional data explorers such as overtime projections on the horizon. A significant development with DataCloud includes the application of machine learning, which will add personalized assistance to HR (e.g. schedule certain reports to run automatically, or recommend that you run other reports based on what your peers in a particular industry are doing) and push insights to HR and managers (e.g. notify you if overtime is high). In addition, ADP will launch Mobile Insights this year.

The HR services industry is at an inflection point where technological innovation like that at ADP is necessary and will significantly impact whether vendors continue to experience healthy growth rates year-on-year.