Vendor Analysis
published on Aug 23, 2023
Report Overview:
This NelsonHall vendor assessment analyzes Safeguard Global’s offerings and capabilities as a provider of global employer of record services.
Who is this Report for:
NelsonHall’s Global EOR profile on Safeguard Global is a comprehensive assessment of Safeguard Global’s offerings and capabilities, designed for:
- Sourcing managers monitoring the capabilities of existing suppliers of Safeguard Global and identifying vendor suitability for Global EOR RFPs
- Vendor marketing, sales, and business managers looking to benchmark themselves against their peers
- Financial analysts and investors specializing in the Global EOR sector.
Scope of this Report:
The report provides a comprehensive and objective analysis of Safeguard Global’s Global EOR offerings, capabilities, and market and financial strengths, including:
- Identification of the company’s strategy, emphasis, and new developments
- Analysis of the company’s strengths, challenges, and outlook
- Revenue estimates
- Analysis of the profile of the company’s customer base, including the company’s targeting strategy and examples of current contracts
- Analysis of the company’s offerings and key service components
- Analysis of the company’s delivery organization, including the location of delivery centers.
Key Findings & Highlights:
This NelsonHall vendor assessment analyzes Safeguard Global’s EOR offerings and capabilities.
Founded in 2008, Safeguard Global is a future of work company headquartered in Austin, TX, providing workforce enablement solutions to manage people and scale operations. The company helps clients recruit, hire, pay, analyze, and manage workers and operations worldwide.
In 2009, Safeguard Global identified opportunities with buyers and partners seeking to solve the challenge of hiring in-country workers where the business had no legal entities, and time was a critical factor. Safeguard also began seeing U.S. domestic PEOs seeking international solutions for their clients concerned about complexity overseas. The offering started as an add-on service for managed payroll clients and became a key solution to meet the overall lifecycle needs of established and emerging multinationals.
In late 2018, Safeguard World International rebranded to Safeguard Global. In early 2019, investment from private equity partners Accel-KKR (AKKR) for a minority stake in the firm provided funding to support its next growth phase. With this funding, Safeguard Global acquired Switzerland-based WorkFor, a Pan-European-based provider of technology-enabled human capital management services and partner of Safeguard Global since 2013. The acquisition brought a portfolio of technology-enabled HR services designed explicitly around country domain experience for local payroll and the EOR model supported by an in-country presence across eight major EMEA countries.
In October 2020, Safeguard Global acquired GEDA, a German payroll and accountancy services company. The acquisition extended Safeguard's German market presence to support multinational organizations' employee onboarding, management, and payroll.
In January 2022, Safeguard Global acquired Global Upside Corporation, a global expansion, technology, and services company in San Jose, CA. Global Upside specializes in recruiting, EOR services, new entity incorporation, human resources, accounting, payroll, and tax & compliance solutions. The acquisition supports Safeguard Global’s ‘Work in Any Way’ workforce management vision, which considers where, when, and how people work to assure a people-centric, flexible, inclusive, and diverse organizational culture.
In July 2023, the company announced the launch of ChatSG, an initial application of generative AI technology for the global HR market, delivering rapid global workforce insights. The technology integrates with Safeguard Global's proprietary dataset and analytics capabilities, allowing users to ask natural language questions in over 40 languages.
Today, Safeguard Global supports EOR services for ~1,140 clients and ~6,400k active workers across ~170 countries.
Safeguard Global offers services and technology supporting firms seeking compliant global expansion. Its vision is to transform how people work worldwide. The company groups its workforce enablement services into five categories: recruit, hire, pay, analyze, and manage.