How BCG centralized payroll across 6 nations while enhancing employees’ experiences

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) is a global management consulting company. It helps organizations develop a competitive edge, achieve growth, and make a positive impact on society. Many of BCG’s clients are among the 500 largest corporations in the world. BCG operates on a global scale, working in a number of countries in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore.

With a dispersed global workforce, BCG used to wrangle multiple payroll systems to pay its people. The team had to run payroll separately for each country, making payroll incredibly difficult to centralize. “Before 2019, we had to use four vendors for six countries, and each had a different way of operating,” says Rajes Rajamorganan, SEA-payroll manager at BCG.

Additionally, communication was often time-consuming due to language barriers, and some vendors were limited technologically.

“Some had portals that allowed you to upload payslips but no other information,” says Rajamorganan. These portals couldn’t be integrated with BCG’s other online platforms, so employees frequently forgot login details.

“Other vendors didn’t even have online capabilities,” explains Rajamorganan. “They would send payslips by email to employees, which was quite a hassle.” In 2019, BCG decided to overcome these challenges by moving to PayAsia by Deel’s multi-country payroll service.

BCG decided to move to Deel via PayAsia because it’s a truly multinational company with a worldwide payroll. “This enabled us to standardize the entire process for Asia,” says Rajes.

Another draw was Deel’s cutting-edge technology. With PayAsia by Deel, all employees can use a single platform to view playslips, upload background checks, apply for leave, and more. Plus, PayAsia by Deel’s platform is easy to use, intuitively integrating BCG’s single sign-on system. “Employees tell us the portal is very user-friendly, and they trust the system,” says Rajamorganan. “We don’t have any issues.”

BCG also benefits from PayAsia by Deel's customer service. “We have a call every week with the IT and integration team and every two weeks with the account manager,” says Rajamorganan. “They are very proactive whenever we have questions—and not only about the payroll.” Deel’s customer service provides HR advice in countries where BCG operates and updates on legal and regulatory changes, all in a variety of languages.

BCG is currently working with PayAsia by Deel to integrate its HR system, Workday. Due to the success of the payroll platform in the current countries, BCG has hopes of expanding the technology into its other global operations like Japan.

Working with PayAsia by Deel has saved BCG time and resources, and it expects to continue growing. The team expects to grow another 10-15% in the next few years while keeping their payroll headcount at 1.5.