Helios aims to fill the global HCM technology gap

I recently had a very thought-provoking conversation with a technology executive where we discussed the idea that emerging, high-growth, multinational start-ups are hardly suited for traditional HCM technology platforms and, increasingly, legacy global HR operating models. Instead, they are better suited to engage in modern solutions that fit their organizational maturity, longtail multi-country footprints, and provide the agility and flexibility to support their unique growth trajectory.   

The incredibly complex, nuanced and localized nature of HR and payroll inherently leans organizational HCM technology adoption toward engaging home country solutions (generally core HR and payroll first) and later integrating specific localized capabilities that support their eventual multi-country footprints as and when they expand. 

While this works perfectly for most organizations with incremental growth, there remains a gap for those on a global growth path from the outset. These organizations eventually operate with a cobbled-together mess of local solutions, user experiences and disparate delivery models. Making the jump to an enterprise-grade HCM platform is often cost-prohibitive for young and emerging companies and generally offers more functionality than the maturity accumulated by the organization at that stage.

The global HCM paradigm shift

I spend a significant portion of my time studying the global marketplace for HCM technology, payroll and Employer of Record (EOR) solutions, HR services and fintech. Each is increasingly necessary in the modern workplace and will continue to be highly impactful in solving HR use cases.  However, what has become very apparent is the accelerating convergence of these modern solutions to enable an emerging organization’s strategic growth plans.

I see growth-oriented organizations finding immense return on investment (ROI) in the form of organizational agility when each of these solutions is purposefully integrated and engaged at the right time and at scale to underpin and enable their strategies. The problem is that historically, these solutions have been technically enabled, operated, and sold in silos. 

While integrations have brought them closer together, there is still work to do to realize the full potential of their combined and synergistic outcomes. Despite innovations in Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and seamlessly embedded capabilities, there remains an opportunity to improve the user experience and business outcomes through global HR process orchestration enabled by a single, globally designed HCM technology platform.

The global HCM platform gap

Possibly the biggest ‘unicorn’ (not the valuation kind) in all the HR technology marketplace remains the elusive global HCM platform. It remains elusive because it’s easier said than done.

Many capable technology providers are developing and have made significant strides in global HR and payroll. However, most have approached their platform development around legacy, ‘land and expand’ methodologies. They are often launched in a single segment, generally as down-market solutions, and localized for the provider’s country of origin or headquarters. As adoption grows and client requirements expand, vendors aim to support multi-country requirements and inch their solutions toward a multi-country platform capability. 

What works in one country rarely translates to another equally for many use cases across the HR spectrum. Vendors often find themselves overwhelmed with maintaining localizations and compliance demands that ultimately impact their original programming and design. Data structures and other underlying architecture are usually the culprits as they were designed around a single localized HR requirement vs. a multi-country need. This has driven an accelerated focus by the HCM technology community on remediating their platform localizations, expanding partnerships and, in some cases, making fold-in acquisitions to boost support for multi-country buyer needs.

The HCM technology space has primarily taken this land-and-expand approach. By the time most globally capable solutions mature, they are often enterprise-grade and cost-prohibitive to emerging MNC start-ups. Further, with most of the major HCM players racing to shore up their multi-country HR and payroll capability gaps, the localizations of HCM solutions aren’t always end-to-end, meaning integrated solutions are commonly required.

While global EOR providers have managed to fill some of the global HCM technology void, there remains a glaring lack of technology maturity and differentiation amongst the cohort of leading providers. While these providers are experts at global expansion, mobility and compliance, they haven’t been able to develop and provide enough infrastructure and maturity to support the full HCM technology needs of a growing multinational organization at scale.

The global EOR provider community is well positioned and certainly making accelerated strides, mostly through partners, some acquisitions and a gradual HCM module development.  However, they all struggle with ‘how much HCM technology’ to provide for small volumes and temporary engagements, especially when they aren’t (and likely never will be) the global HR system of record.  

Despite APIs and integrations between the EOR service model and HCM technology maturing, there is a glaring gap in the arms-length nature of how these solutions should and need to work together.

The simple comingling of external workers (employed by the EOR’s entity) with full-time employees is just one challenge, as the rules differ from country to country. More importantly, the HR operational process handoffs are needed to support those workers compliantly within the local requirements, often creating a choppy employee/user experience depending on how the worker is engaged by the employer, both legally and from a technology perspective. 

This doesn’t factor in the handoffs in processes enabled through service providers and in-country partners, as most act as aggregators relying on local support for last-mile compliance. Even the most direct and organic global employment providers require some help to enable their services, which results in more handoffs. The same can be argued for aggregated global payroll solutions, where much of the heavy lifting is done by a local provider in long-tail locations (often fueling local EOR and payroll provider solutions).

These handoffs always result in a degraded customer and user experience due to the presence of rework, which drains efficiency and productivity. With local service providers leveraging bespoke technology and tools, buyers commonly engage in multiple solutions that lack orchestration between them, further degrading the user experience.

Let’s not forget the data implications. A single control point for workforce management, data and insights globally is critical for modern organizations to engage, nurture and grow a high-performing global workforce. While integrations have improved the free flow of real-time data across the HR tech stack (which for most is growing), maintaining a single source of globally consolidated data and insights remains a challenge for multinational companies (MNC) organizations of every size.

Enabling a paradigm shift

Helios, led by global HR tech veteran Rick Hammell, is on a mission to fill the global HCM technology gap. No doubt, a lofty goal that team Helios believes is achievable with the right mix of science and art…technology and flexibility.

Helios has incorporated all the key design elements expected of a modern HCM technology platform. Of course, it’s cloud-based, offering a user-centric design with workflow automation, AI-enabled insights and guidance, and a roadmap that will mature its modules and localizations toward an eventual globally oriented full-suite HCM platform.

Beyond simplifying global workforce administration, Helios is doubling down on designing a true global employee experience platform with a mission to ‘win the employee.’ That approach goes beyond its modern user interface and support for employees and practitioners through an integrated, automated, insightful and guided experience. Collaboration and communication are central elements to Helios’ design features, supported by an engaging social media style ‘communities’ space, and collectively aimed at driving engagement and enabling the organization with the tools to nurture a global workforce. More specifically, it is purposefully designed to empower employers and employees operating in remote heavy and hybrid working models.

AI is thoughtfully woven into the platform design to automate tasks and augment users. Helios takes this a step further with co-pilots, aiming for more of an orchestration enablement. It provides a one-touch experience enabled through access to country-specific insights paired to support global workforce administration and decisions in the flow of business. AI automates and augments the employment process for both employee and employer, from onboarding straight through to payment. 

Beyond the core side of HR (onboarding, payroll, time, benefits, performance, etc.), Helios will initially leverage its marketplace of technology and service providers to enable broader capabilities for recruiting, learning, accounting, expenses, the employee benefits marketplace and more. Over time, it plans to mature its talent modules along with other capabilities based on customer demand.

Helios also aims to support platform localizations for over 125 countries and 50 languages. Taking this a step further, global employment services are available and included with the platform’s all-in licenses, and global payroll (including the U.S.) is enabled and available through a cohort of integrated in-country payroll and last-mile compliance partners.

Helios has also enabled payments offerings to underpin its solution and employee experience, including no-touch payments automated within the platform, local banking options, digital wallet, Helios card and cross-border FX.

Where Helios’ plans to differentiate itself beyond its technology centers on enabling maximum flexibility for emerging MNCs to support agility and unique business needs through complete modularity.  With Helios keenly focused on global HCM technology and its partner marketplace enabling services, clients are afforded a highly flexible and agile approach to global employment that decouples global HCM from global managed services.

By decoupling technology from services and offering a controlled open API approach, buyers can maintain their core technology investment while customizing their operating models with select services and integrated partner solutions of choice.

Helios is also initially aiming to enable a highly flexible data schema to power its platform and enable the ingestion and comingling of structured and unstructured data at scale across its modules and functionality. This approach allows Helios to manage disparate data formats bidirectionally to its local in-country partners. Machine learning (ML) is leveraged to ensure data validation and enable real-time insights, workflow automation, reporting, and analytics.

The road ahead for Helios

Post-launch, Helios will focus on expanding its HCM module set and maturity to include broader capabilities to support more use cases on the talent side. Helios also plans to launch an app to enable its platform functionality through a multi-factor design approach. 

Data, insights and UX will also be key focus areas. Helios is advancing its AI capabilities by leveraging interoperable, open-source large language models (LLMs) and layering in small language models (SLMs) tailored to its dataset and dedicated models for each customer using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). This approach allows Helios to protect customer data better and ensure zero cross-pollination, which can be an issue with public LLMs. It also empowers customers to train their models with data from user actions, company data and the exchanges generated through the integrated generative AI chat and insights application ‘Albert IQ.’ 

Further, its marketplace expansion will also play a role in augmenting the functionality and white spaces, providing clients and their employees with value-added integrated solutions and options for shaping a solution for their unique requirements.

A key focus area for the Helios marketplace will be the eventual expansion of global payroll and EOR partners to create a ‘provider-of-choice’ option, with Helios as the single experience, control and orchestration control center. Its Global Payroll Control Center can consolidate rules and regulations for multiple countries into a unified dashboard. The platform centralizes and streamlines global requirements and processes, including compliance, data, payroll processing and reporting.

My POV and outlook for Helios

Looking ahead, Helios is entering a fragmented and overcrowded market full of global HR tech point solutions and employment services options, with more popping up daily. Despite the EOR model and its providers sitting in the front row for the global talent imperative and having existed for over a decade, the technology, innovation and differentiation have been lackluster at best. 

I believe this can largely be attributed to the fact that most global employment providers try to take on more than any one vendor can realistically build, maintain and service alone – it takes too long, it’s unmanageable, and it takes a community to enable an effective globally compliant solution (tech or services, let alone both).

Where I see Helios differentiating in its approach lies within its flexibility and the agility it enables. Helios does not aim to be all things to all firms. They are, in the simplest terms, aiming to empower emerging organizations with a platform that provides a global workforce experience layer and orchestration point that will enable employers to access talent anywhere, support the employer and its talent from ‘sourcing to payment’ and provide market insights and benchmarking data for informed workforce decision making, resulting in organizational agility.

What I see as most important in this approach is the agility Helios can provide. With technology and services tied so closely together, provider solutions have commonly been all-in, and decoupling those was difficult. Let’s say the services are great, but the technology lacks capability. Or conversely, assume the technology is great, but the customer is unhappy with the service experience. Either way, most solutions tie the organization to both. All or nothing, take it or leave it. 

However, when services and technology are decoupled, the organization has more control over designing a unique stack or solution and experience to meet its unique needs. The modularity here provides speed, agility, faster ROI, potential cost savings and an approach that forces its vendors to perform.

We’ve already seen this dynamic in the global payroll space where SaaS providers (with no gross to net calculation engines or services capability) are entering managed services deals and winning.  Why?  Customers want the flexibility to personalize the solutions that best retain their investments, complement their strengths, and allow them to leverage the local providers of choice, yet still control that through a single, modern, rapidly deployable solution that transforms their operations in weeks vs. months and speeds up ROI realization.

Emerging MNCs increasingly need access to multiple sources of talent supply, enabled by technology and automation, to engage and support talent from ‘sourcing to payment’ and market insights and benchmarking data to guide and enable the organization along the way.  Helios will lean on its robust marketplace to support talent sourcing and advanced talent capabilities. Much like EOR and payroll, allowing for the mix and match of best-in-class solutions has tremendous agility benefits. Accelerating its native talent capabilities is already on the roadmap and a potential candidate for the right fold in acquisition.

Helios won’t be a fit for the everyday SMB buyer. I still firmly believe most need a local home country-oriented HCM with integrated (if not native) payroll and EOR providers as/when the need arises. However, for the emerging, hypergrowth MNCs oriented toward a global trajectory that requires more than a simple local HR solution but not quite the power of an enterprise-grade HCM platform, highly flexible solutions like Helios have a tremendous opportunity to disrupt the status quo.