The goal of the evening was to explore what’s coming around the corner for payroll professionals, with a particular focus on partnerships, technology, and transformation tools for payroll service providers.
Our keynote agenda for the evening ran like this:
- Building Cross-Border Partnerships: Insights from Enterprise Ireland - Bartosz Sieprack (Senior Market Advisor, Digital Tech Construction) & John Cosgrave (Overseas Manager)
- Customer Expectations in Payroll Transformation - Sylwia Korhonen (Associate Director, Global Payroll Transformation, Fresenius Medical Care)
- Case Study: Briddge & Payzaar – Driving Scalable Growth for Providers - Marc-Oliver Fiedler (Co-Founder & CEO, Payzaar)
- Technology as a Growth Engine for Payroll Providers (Interactive session) - Trevor Townsend (Co-Founder & CTO, Payzaar)
With a stacked line-up and an inquisitive crowd of Polish Payroll Pros (P³!), all the pieces were in place for an engaging and lively night. Let’s dive into the presentation highlights!
Scaling Smoothly Across Borders With Enterprise Ireland
Bartosz Sieprack and John Cosgrave from Enterprise Ireland, delivered the evening’s first presentation about the importance of cross-border partnerships for business expansion. Enterprise Ireland helps Irish companies (such as yours truly!) scale into international markets, including Poland’s fast-growing business services sector.
Bartosz and John both work for Enterprise Ireland’s Poland, The Baltics & Ukraine region, and they shared practical advice for the payroll providers in the room to position themselves as attractive business partners for Irish and international firms moving into the Polish market.
What Multinationals REALLY Expect from Payroll Partners
It takes two to tango in any successful partnership! For the evening’s second presentation, Sylwia Korhonen flipped the switch to explore partnership from the multinationals’ perspective. In her work with Fresenius Medical Care, a global healthcare leader present in 70 countries, Sylwia is responsible for overseeing the company’s payroll transformation and compliance across its entities. Her team’s vast scope includes vendor partnerships, quality assurance, KPI tracking, systems implementations, processes enhancements, and so much more. It’s the true definition of a supporting function that drives operations!
In her insightful keynote, Sylwia unpacked the expectations and needs of multinational clients in a vendor partnership, with the goal of imparting actionable strategies for payroll providers seeking to gain a competitive edge in the market.
Sylwia broke her presentation down into three sections used to assess a potential new vendor’s value:
How will the provider deliver as a strategic partner?
The first thing Swylia emphasizes that all potential vendors must have is a robust technological portfolio that decreases complexity while adding value. Automated data validation, HR & finance integration, and self-service analytics reporting and analytics are all just starting points for the modern Provider's tech toolkit.
However, technology is only part of the equation. An ideal partner must also demonstrate deep local expertise (and global awareness as required), cost efficiency with fees that are consistent per service (with no hidden costs!), seamless implementation guided by a dedicated point of contact, and of course, up-to-date data security and compliance standards. For the team at Fresenius, not only does a vendor need to check all of these boxes currently, they must also demonstrate the flexibility and scalability to grow with the company over the next 5 years - at least!
Hey, no one ever said the life of a payroll provider was an easy one!
How will the provider boost the company’s operational powers?
According to Sylwia, the ideal provider partner should have wide-sweeping organizational impact, enhancing the company’s operational strength across global, regional, and country levels. Beyond processing payroll, the vendor should play a supporting role in change management and risk mitigation during organizational growth. When transformational challenges such as project delays or system transitions arise, the vendor should demonstrate the capacity and readiness to adapt to the new demands. Their expertise should help the organization understand both what needs to be done in new markets and what can be avoided to prevent unnecessary use of time or resources.
In a perfect world, the provider partner helps to shift the internal payroll team from hands-on operators to strategic process controllers overseeing efficient, automated systems. By providing access to real-time dashboards and KPI trackers for metrics like timeliness, accuracy, error rates, and staffing requirements, the in-house team can provide leadership with the data needed to enhance operational intelligence and drive agility across the entire business.
How will the provider support wider organizational objectives?
For the final criteria, Sylwia highlighted the responsibility of the business for setting a vendor up for success in a partnership. A payroll provider can only support broader organizational goals when they are treated as a strategic collaborator rather than a transactional service. The more the business shares its priorities, growth plans, and challenges, the better the vendor can tailor its support.
As Sylwia advises, any payroll transformation should connect directly to organizational objectives and give the in-house payroll team the confidence to say:
“Yes, we can provide insight; yes, we can mitigate risks; yes, we can enhance financial wellbeing.”
A vendor with the right information, tools, and support can make this a reality without increasing day-to-day work internally.
That's the power of a strong payroll partnership!
Winning Enterprise Clients Through Smart Payroll Tech: How Briddge Transformed Payroll with Payzaar
Next up, Payzaar’s very own CEO Marc-Oliver Fiedler told the inspiring story of how international payroll provider Briddge leveraged our platform to expand its service capabilities, win enterprise clients, and streamline global operations. We always love sharing Briddge’s transformation story as it shows how embracing technology and prioritizing customer-centric solutions can give Providers a leg-up over other vendors and win new business in the ever-competitive payroll service landscape.
Watch Marc’s full Briddge case study presentation below for the whole story:
From Complexity to Control: How Tech Powers Payroll (Today and Tomorrow)
Keeping it in the Payzaar family to wrap up the night, our trusted CTO Trevor Townsend led an interactive session exploring how modern payroll technology can help Providers standardize, scale, and stay one step ahead of the competition – and the future of the industry.
If Trevor’s analogy of the organization as two unruly kids fighting is apt, then technology needs to be harnessed in a way that solves problems and helps manage these wild complexities and changes. Let’s call it the grown-up in the room trying to maintain order in a world of chaos.
Organizations will always ask payroll to do more with less and this task becomes increasingly demanding with the broad range of technological obstacles that payroll teams face. Information security risks, data silos, lack of automation, and (ironically) a limited capacity to embrace emerging technologies that would help relieve these pressures. These are all realities that payroll professionals grapple with on a daily basis. And they are further heightened when an organization is undergoing transformation or expanding into new markets.
As Trevor puts it:
“It’s already a complex web of data sources people are trying to sort out to get people paid correctly, and then you do an acquisition. New employees, new systems, new benefits, and new complexities. And the reality is: The business isn’t waiting around for payroll to catch up with what’s happening”.
To keep up, organizations often outsource to service providers to take care of payroll when it grows beyond their in-house capacity, but providers themselves must navigate similar bandwidth issues and systems limitations. This is where no-code, API payroll solutions like Payzaar can help. Not only do these solutions help multinationals smoothly manage their own payroll, they also provide payroll providers with the technological power and communication tools to service a growing roster of clients with unique demands.
The emphasis on technology and connectivity will only grow with the development and widespread adoption of AI – but it might not be felt immediately. As Trevor noted:
“We’ll probably massively overestimate the power of AI in the short-run, and massively underestimate the impact of it in the long-run.”
In the initial adoption phase, AI’s benefits will likely seem convenient yet minor, but over time its transformational effects on payroll operations will be enormous.
Trevor predicts the top advantages of AI will likely center on its data implications: preparing, processing, and validating payroll information more efficiently and accurately than ever before. For payroll providers, this extends beyond operational efficiency to data security, where AI has the potential to strengthen protections and reduce risk in what Trevor calls the “stick of dynamite” held by providers on a daily basis.
As with all innovative technologies, caution is essential. Careful attention must be paid to data inputs, reporting, and compliance to ensure AI supports, rather than complicates, operations. But if implemented thoughtfully, Trevor anticipates AI will have widespread benefits for the entire payroll ecosystem:
“It will help payroll service providers and payroll professionals be better business partners and deliver more insights to the business.”
After Trevor’s keynote, the crowd broke into smaller groups to assess their own automation use, the challenges they currently face, and the new technologies they’d like to adopt in the future. And finally, as with all of our events, we ended the night with snacks, drinks, and a free-flowing networking session… But the insights and fun from this portion of the night can only be experienced first-hand, so you’ll have to catch them in-person at our next #PayzaarOnTheGo event!
So, what’s next?
Beyond dreaming about our next trip back to Poland, we have a lot of other exciting plans in the works for the coming months!
- After a summer hiatus, Plug And Pay is officially returning with a brand new episode in November! We’ll kick off Season 6 with Joe Ranzou from Grant Thornton to discuss the executive perspective on global payroll operations and services. Get your headphones ready - It’s a good one!
- Marc has been running polls on his LinkedIn page for the past few months to gain insights from the payroll community for our next Industry Report! The response has been amazing so far and we’ve already gathered some fascinating findings for the full report. But there is still much more to be done so keep your eyes peeled for future polls on our LinkedIn pages!
- We’re deep in the planning of our #PayzaarOnTheGo itinerary for 2026 and very excited to bring our payroll roadshow to some new European cities we haven’t visited before… Stay tuned!
Until then, a massive thank you to the amazing P³ community in Warsaw and to all of the night’s inspiring speakers. You gave us so much to think about around partnerships, technology, and the exciting future of payroll, and we hope you took home an insight or two as well! See you again soon 💚
