​

When one of the biggest conglomerates in the world with over 44,000 employees, 20 legal entities in Asia Pacific, with more than 1000 project sites across remote locations, was looking forward to several mergers and acquisitions (M&A), a standardized, robust, and scalable HCM solution seemed necessary. Especially with multi-country presence across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea, ensuring standardized payroll operations remained a major requirement that could only be fulfilled with a solution capable of quickly rolling out to provide accurate and efficient payroll administration services. In search of such a solution, the organization approached Excelity Global Solutions, one of the largest human capital management (HCM) service providers in APAC. Singapore-based Excelity Global Solutions then initiated entity project migration and process harmonization using multi-country payroll apart from activating zero to post net payroll processing and delivery for all employees. Excelity also provided customized reporting for the HR leadership team, conducted mandatory benefits regulation research in over 50 cities including Hong Kong and Taiwan along with individual income tax regulation research, managed calculation, and filing in more than 25 cities.

Excelity ensured standardized payroll processes and employee experience, regulatory compliance, standardized reporting system, customized reporting, and call center and email support for inquiries for the conglomerate, all of which proved significant for them. Excelity has delivered many such capabilities to organizations of all sizes to ease the administrative burden associated with payroll processing.

"Our expertise in the HR domain along with the degree of automation offered by us is unparalleled in the industry"

Formerly known as Aon Hewitt Asia Pacific Payroll, Excelity was founded in 1997 as a single-country payroll outsourcing service (SCPO) provider in India. Soon after, the company expanded its payroll operations to Singapore and China, becoming a multi-country payroll outsourcing service provider. In 2015, Everstone Capital, a South East & Asia private equity firm acquired Aon Hewitt’s APAC payroll business forming a new enterprise—Excelity—with an aim to transform and create HCM ecosystem. Today, Excelity is the largest payroll outsourcing service provider delivering hire-to-retire HCM solution coupled with their Insurtech platform to improve employee experience in organizations across the APAC region.

With almost two decades of experience and consistent support of a committed workforce comprising 600 employees, Excelity has come a long way in the HCM space. The company has garnered a vast client base that consists of 500 organizations across 20 countries in APAC. Over the past three years, the company has proliferated its business through its proprietary platform to cover 12 more countries and has built a hire-to-retire HCM platform. It also provides Managed Services, SaaS-based SME Payroll (ezpayroll), Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution, and Benefits offerings all on a single scalable platform; all with a single click upgrade from ezpayroll to PaaS – the only one in the marketplace. Excelity has transformed the landscape from being niche (payroll only) to unique offerings space with its Asia Pacific coverage.

Simplifying Complexities, Simplifying HR

As organizations focus on managing payroll processing seamlessly, they look forward to implementing a solution, which goes beyond an HCM application. The reasons for such a requirement are many.

These companies often face challenges when it comes to finding and retaining staff in routine administrative roles, dealing with inefficient manual processes while achieving operational scale and excellence.

Thus, they need an enabling and evolving HCM platform for better employee engagement such as Excelity’s HCM platform. The company’s intuitive “hire-to-retire” cloud-based HCM platform focuses on core HR functions, talent management, recruitment, time and attendance, payroll, benefits, and employee engagement. This single, seamless, and technology-driven platform provides a bigger employee engagement ecosystem for enterprises to engage and serve their employees better. “Our platform’s automation is three times more than any other platform that we know of in the marketplace. The degree of automation built on natural language understanding (NLU), robotic process automation (RPA) and Chatbots are truly ahead of offerings availability for us in the marketplace,” adds Jeya Kumar, Executive Chairman, Excelity.

In the HCM platform, Excelity renders highly automated Managed Services, PaaS, SaaS, and Benefits offerings. The Managed Services in Excelity’s portfolio are offered as SCPO and MCPO services across 20 countries in APAC. Excelity also has a proprietary technology platform—Payroll Data Aggregator (PDA)—which is an platform agnostic application, used for aggregating payroll data and consolidating reports. The company’s PaaS-based proprietary payroll platform, on the other hand, assists mid and large-sized enterprises in calculating earnings and deductions, generating reports, processing tax, and handling last mile regulations and compliance as per a country’s specific norms.

Excelity also assists micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and organizations employing less than 250 people with its SaaS-based payroll solution—ezpayroll. It is a highly automated, easy-to-use, flexible, and robust do-it-yourself platform, which offers scalable service yielding statutory compliance and short implementation timelines. ezpayroll is designed with the help of statutory and management reports in addition to ESS and mobility at affordable price points. It’s also the only single MCPO platform available in APAC that offers integrated payroll and HCM.

Apart from payroll administration, Excelity categorizes health, wellness, travel, and other services as Benefits offerings for employees via an online marketplace. For instance, a part of these offerings is free (NAC) insurance for employees when an organization signs up for the voluntary marketplace or manages the portability of products and services purchased online. This will become available in selected countries in Q1 2019. Excelity will further extend the HCM ecosystem with integration with other benefits players in Asia Pacific.

Some employees exploit HR systems by using proxies, blocking the time tracking application or hacking it to provide inaccurate results of employees’ efforts. As most of the organizations today look for innovative ways to track employee performance and monitor their work activities seamlessly, Excelity offers a simplified time tracking solution— WiFi Timesheet—that captures employees’ presence through wifi by registering their mobile devices via an app. The WiFi Timesheet utilizes the wifi to provide a low-cost alternative to time and attendance management, eliminating the requirement for expensive time and clock systems for SMEs. The WiFi Timesheet’s ease-of-use makes it accessible through iOS and Android devices.

“All our products and services are designed to improve employee engagement through compelling benefits that are supported by our own Insurtech and collaborative partnerships,” mentions Kumar.

Unparalleled Automation

While Excelity takes care of HR administration and operations, it also allows companies to focus on their strategic HR functions. Excelity’s end-to-end HR outsourcing solutions are cost-effective, reduce compliance risks, increase employee engagement and commitment, and ensure productivity in the HR team. “Our expertise in the HR domain along with the degree of automation offered by us is unparalleled in the industry,” mentions Kumar.

A leading Singapore-based bank epitomizes the measure of Excelity’s highly automated platform, which was earlier using a slow process for their flexi claims. The bank’s employees would submit their flexi claims for flexible spending accounts (FSA), outpatient, gym subsidy, or mobile bill reimbursement via Excelity’s web portal. The portal would then create new claim record and assign one unique claim number to every employee who would write those numbers at the backside of receipt and drop them in the bank’s drop box. Thereafter, the bank’s HRs would courier those receipts to Excelity on a weekly basis, and Excelity’s operation team would verify the receipts and approve the claims to be paid in the next payroll cycle.

In this process, the employees had to wait for the next month’s payroll to get paid in case of an issue with the claim. On the other hand, Excelity’s operations team and the bank’s HR team dealt with the challenges related to the submission of wrong receipts. Whenever an employee submitted a wrong receipt, it was rejected, and thereafter the employee had to submit it again and wait for their next payroll to get the invoice amount reimbursed.

To find a solution to these problems, Excelity asked the bank’s employees to submit their flexi claims using mobile apps created by the bank, which were integrated with Excelity’s Flex system through web services. The Flex system, whichis capable of creating new claim record and assigning one unique claim number to every employee, allowed the employees to take photo of the receipts and attach them with their claims. This made the task easier for the operations team to verify the claim receipts in the system itself for the approval. The invoice amount was then paid to employees easily within three working days post-approval.
Excelity has solved many such problems for its clients over the years, earning significant recognition and reputation in the industry.

The Road Ahead

Excelity will soon announce nine technology partnerships across APAC to extend its reach and depth in the marketplace creating a new paradigm HCM Ecosystem. In collaboration with a regional insurance service provider, Excelity will launch its Benefits platform in the first quarter of 2019 and further related partnerships in the second quarter, which will help the position the company further as an HCM provider. Currently, the firm is planning to expand its footprints to 17 countries, which will be one of the largest geographical expansions in the APAC region.

The company is also working on developing an intuitive autonomous payroll platform. “In the autonomous platform, the processes will be more advanced because when we implement a payroll, both our customers and team invest a tremendous amount of time and effort in configuring the system,” says Kumar. Next year, Excelity plans to roll out a completely new intelligent configuration product, almost like a no code platform, which will demonstrate the way payroll operations can migrate, process and manage its operations.

Kumar anticipates Excelity’s cloud business to grow by 100 percent annually for the next two years. So far, the company has been investing 30 percent of its revenue in technology, which is expected to increase as much as 50 percent in the near future. With its focus entirely on the APAC region, the company is looking forward to establishing more delivery centers in Japan, Korea, and Indonesia by the next year, which will certainly increase its capabilities by manifolds.