Immedis – Providing secure, compliant, accurate, and touchless global payroll

Payroll is a highly complex process, and global payroll even more. There are several elements accounting for even the most basic of payslips. A truly international payroll solution eliminates any associated risks or misinterpretations and focuses on customers’ precision and accuracy in shared communications around highly technical payroll language.

Immedis is the global leader in consolidated global payroll solutions. It processes payroll in over 150 countries. The Immedis Platform provides a unified view of global payroll operations, real-time data analytics, and advanced reporting capability while ensuring legislative compliance and data security. We had an interview with Richard Limpkin, the CPO of Immedis. Here are some important discussions from the interview.

How do you help companies make strategic decisions based on real-time, accurate global payroll information?

The Immedis Platform provides companies with singular insight into their global payroll in a way that offers both the broad, expansive view and yet also delves into the granular local level view without any compromise. Companies can compare the differences in USD or local currency to understand the true cost of payroll through a transparent comparison.

All reports are available in real-time so that business leaders don’t have to wait for disparate payroll vendors to collate and share information. All are managed by local tax experts proficient in local legislation to ensure compliance and accuracy. Our reporting capabilities give financial leaders access to powerful variance analysis comparing month-on-month variances, the severity of these variances, and where exactly the changes are occurring, right down to the pay element level per employee. We provide the payroll data needed via both deep payroll data and general ledger outputs produced per payroll, ensuring that balancing always occurs.

Tell us how you would help when the HCM suite does not integrate fully with the global payroll process?

The Immedis solution removes the need for multiple disparate payroll vendors, establishing a single unified global payroll platform for organizations. They no longer need to manage multiple vendors, each with different operating systems and processes. Instead, customers now have the assurance that each country’s payroll is managed through one central platform, with the benefit of knowing that we take care of regulatory compliance matters through our in-country partnerships. The Immedis Platform provides a cohesive streamlined solution that ensures employees are paid correctly and on time and offers reporting and workforce analytics opportunities. We achieve this through deploying the exact field-level compliance elements of payroll in an intuitive user interface based on an API -first approach. This means that your HCMs capability and deployment maturity is never the determining factor in achieving a seamlessly integrated end-to-end global payroll process.

How does the Immedis platform help support future business planning and functional improvements?

Having a single centralized repository of data provides organizations the insights and analytics to review and find the gaps and current business practices that influence trends before issues occur. Whether that is identifying gender pay disparities or variances in payroll in geos, having access to complete global payroll consolidation into a single currency makes cost comparison so much simpler. While payroll is a complex area, we believe the customer user experience and operating environment do not need to be.

Organizations can achieve corporate alignment from this single source of truth as multiple departments across the organization can utilize it, which adds to the return on investment. Customers can generate analytics that provides understanding around what drives workforce spikes and trends, produces data to monitor all organization units, and identifies headcount synergies. The data behind payroll can influence a business’s future, providing information that supports business leaders in crafting effective strategies.

Help us understand how your localization and language packs enhance both user experience and employee experience?

By its very nature, global payroll means that part of a payroll professional’s day involves dealing with a variety of countries and languages. We currently provide payroll services in over 150 countries. Therefore it is an obvious and necessary step that customers can use our international payroll solution in their language of choice. Currently, we offer over 20 languages, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish – complex character sets are second nature to the Immedis Platform.

Having the ability to generate real-time reports, essential for everyone from the C-suite to regional payroll managers, is at the core of this approach. Developing and leveraging these reports depends on the customer so having the ability to perform these actions in multiple different languages leads to increased usage and optimization. It means that employees can access it in their language regardless of the language the payroll is using. For example, a Finnish employee can use the platform in German while the payroll teams located in India are using it through Hindi.

How do you help optimize system connectivity?

One of the most obvious ways is through the integration of payroll with the HCM, Financial Management Systems (FMS), and Time & Attendance solutions. With the Immedis Platform designed with an API-first approach, organizations not only benefit from a reduction in time spent managing payroll, but they also enjoy improved profitability through people and process efficiencies. When HR, Payroll, and Finance processes are synchronized, companies see increased service levels to employees, which in turn enhances employee engagement levels and retention rates. Customers can also introduce operational efficiencies and remove the extensive administrative burden on teams associated with keeping multiple system data sets up to date with the automated flow of information. Another valuable gain is it eliminates the risk associated with file exchanges and manual data uploads between cross-functional teams, providing an automated, secure flow of information while reducing the risk of data breaches and non-compliance.

Data protection is core for any company. How does Immedis assure the same?

The Immedis Platform is designed with data security and compliance at the forefront. We have implemented extensive GDPR and ISO 27001 Information Security measures across our people, processes, and technology. This is one of the benefits of having grown-up in a financial services regulated environment. Our robust technology design, testing, and operational methods preserve customer personal data’s confidentiality and integrity from the risk of threats, internal and external. 

Immedis runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which means that customers benefit from the full spectrum of AWS’s expansive security measures. AWS supports more security standards and compliance certifications than any other offering, including PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, GDPR, FIPS 140-2, and NIST 800-171. AWS also has multiple System and Organization Controls (SOC) controls, which are embedded as standard.

We are ISO 27001 certified- this means we are following information management systems standards outlined by the International Organization for Standards (ISO). We are, of course, GDPR compliant and have an independent Data Protection Officer who conducts ongoing audits.

Meet the CPO

Richard Limpkin is the CPO of Immedis. Richard is responsible for the Immedis technical and product roadmap, including platform and service components, driving integration across global human capital management systems and promoting finance technology partnerships. He leads a team of innovative HR and Payroll technology and operational experts to produce world-class SaaS payroll solutions and services for Immedis clients.

Richard chose an eclectic path, starting with an M.Sc. in Physics from Durham University, through management consulting and chartered accountancy, to leading Professional Services, Solutions, and Innovation organizations.

“Our advanced reporting and real-time data analytics generate actionable business insights that feed into future planning. Whether it is company expansion plans, employee placement, or people strategy, Immedis has the insight.”