Fast-growing fintech Payslip lands Deloitte tie-up and eyes €15 million in annual revenues

Payslip, a fintech company based in Westport, Co, Mayo, has secured a partnership with Deloitte to provide payroll services. The business expects its annual recurring revenue to reach €15 million over the next 18 months following this deal and the growth of other partnerships.

Payslip is a software business that helps businesses manage payrolls across multiple jurisdictions. The company was started by Fidelma McGuirk in 2016, it has 83 staff and has raised €12.4 million in funding.

“Our customers are large multinationals. If you take a business like Fyffes, they employ [workers] across 38 countries. They have to pay tax in all of those countries with a lot of complicated reporting rules to navigate. Companies like Fyffes use our software so they can manage payroll across all those countries in the same way,” McGuirk told the Business Post.

“Essentially we help businesses standardise how they manage payrolls across the world.”

The idea for the business grew from McGuirk’s previous experience working in a tax business. She was running operations across 21 countries and recognised the complications that came with that.

“I needed data to tell me what was happening, in terms of costs of operation and compliance. There was no real way to do that with payroll being managed separately in each country,” McGuirk said.

Having moved with her family to Westport in 2015, she decided it was the right place and time to address the challenge directly.

“It’s an industrious town. I did some research on the market and decided to set up software to fill the gap in the market. We now have offices in Westport, Dublin, Santander in Spain and Varna in Bulgaria,” she said.

“We’ve built a large platform to help standardise the process for companies. It’s complicated as we are dealing with large companies with well-developed payroll systems, including stocks, shares and other benefits programmes.”

The first version of the software was released in 2018 while it launched a new product that runs global payroll integration as a service.

“A lot of companies who want to automate manual work meet a block because they have so many different systems. The flow of the data becomes a challenge. To do that, they need system integration so we have developed a way for them to plug and play,” McGuirk said.

The business is supported by Enterprise Ireland. Having initially received competitive start funding from the agency in 2017, Payslip has continued to receive help beyond financial aid from the body.

“We joined the high potential start-up unit (HPSU) in 2018 and have received multi-layered support from Enterprise Ireland. We have an advisor who helps us navigate all of the services available across the world,” McGuirk said.

She said the Deloitte deal will aid the business in its future growth. Payslip’s services are being rolled out this year to the first 35,000 of what will be 500,000 employees over the course of the project.

“We’re a partner of Workday and we are doing some enhanced technical partnerships and co-sales with them in 2024. We want to keep growing those partnerships and develop our sales team.”

This Making It Work article is produced in partnership with Enterprise Ireland