“At Immedis, Innovation is at the Heart of What We Do” – Ruairi Kelleher, CEO of Immedis

Global payroll management is exacting and immensely time consuming, just to name a few of the daunting challenges organizations and their HR, finance and payroll teams face every day. Immedis’ Platform is built to deal with these complexities while simplifying and streamlining the accurate and timely delivery of payroll for organizations across every industry and in every part of the world. Launched in 2016 from the highly successful Clune Group, Immedis has reimagined how global payroll is delivered by using the best modern technology combined with deep expertise in global taxation.

“The Immedis team that we have grown over the past five years has enabled us to grow our customer base to include some of the biggest brands in the world. While we grow, it’s important to me that we don’t lose a sense of who we are and what makes Immedis unique,” said Ruairi Kelleher, CEO of Immedis, in an interview with us. Further, Ruairi discussed the company’s unwavering focus on innovation, Perpetual Validation (the company’s AI-powered, industry-first payroll technology), and much more. Read on for excerpts from the interview.

Q. What was your motivation behind starting a visionary company like Immedis?

Immedis is part of Clune Group, a collection of global companies that delivers focus-driven, digitized solutions to simplify the complexity of global business. I joined the wider group in 2012 and along with Terry Clune and Mark Graham launched Immedis in 2016 to reimagine how global payroll is delivered, utilizing best-in-class modern technology capability combined with a deep expertise in global taxation. With over 20 years in Global Tax Mobility, Immedis has a deep understanding of the most challenging aspects of global payroll. We used that knowledge and expertise to create a global-first payroll platform that’s purpose-built for the digital age. I am responsible for the corporate direction, strategy, and M&A activity at Immedis, enabling the team to drive innovation in international payroll and tax services through our cloud-based platform. Since we created Immedis, I have worked to share the strategy and vision with employees, customers, partners, and the wider global payroll industry to promote a new vision of global payroll consolidation through global tax expertise and integrated agile technologies.

 “Innovation is in our DNA and at the core of everything Immedis does now and for the future.”

Q. Could you tell us about the services you offer?

Immedis is the global leader in consolidated global payroll solutions. By helping in processing payroll in over 150 countries, the Immedis Platform provides a unified view of global payroll operations, real-time data analytics, and advanced reporting capability, while ensuring legislative compliance and data security. Immedis’ deep integration capabilities with HCM and finance providers, dramatically simplifies multi-country payroll obligations. The company is trusted by some of the world’s fastest growing enterprises like McAfee, Adobe, ServiceNow, and Nutanix.

Q. How important is AI to your platform? How does it supercharge the platform?

HR, finance, and payroll teams are tasked with ensuring the timely and accurate delivery of payroll for a globally distributed workforce at least 12 times a year, 24 times a year in most cases. Each country, region, and state often have unique regulations, compliance requirements, and tax laws that organizations must follow when issuing payroll to its employees. The Immedis Platform is built to not only improve the timeliness and accuracy of payroll delivery for organizations, but to also simplify the process. Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays an important role in Immedis’ ability to simplify payroll operations. Perpetual Validation is an industry-first innovation by Immedis that demonstrates the important role of AI in our payroll platform.

As the name suggests, Perpetual Validation is a technology that is continuously checking and subsequently validating the quality and completeness of data contained within the Immedis Platform. The platform’s AI examines and inspects overall data and determines where or what data is inconsistent or missing. For example, a statutory change in a particular country may result in the requirement for additional employee data. All this takes place in real-time. As a result, users can quickly identify gaps in their global payroll data for any country and in the moment so these issues can be immediately addressed prior to running payroll. This ensures the accurate and timely delivery of payroll to an organization’s workforce.

Q. How does your platform put the spotlight on security?

The payroll department holds the most sensitive data about employees, including salary data and banking information. Ensuring the security and confidentiality of this data is crucial. At Immedis, we have multiple measures in place across our people, processes, and technology to ensure the highest standards of data security.

Immedis is a native cloud platform, meaning our infrastructure, application, and development methodology is cutting-edge and of the highest security standards. Hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Immedis customers are safe in the knowledge that their data is stored within secure AWS data centers and that information flowing between and stored in AWS is automatically encrypted.

All data in transit and at rest is fully encrypted using the latest in encryption technologies. For the most sensitive of information, double encryption of specific data fields is enabled for added security and peace of mind. Additionally, our role-based system access allows for a granular level of data visibility and control, enabling administrators to decide who can view and edit specific information based on their account and data security access level. Immedis is also ISO 27001 certified and Security Operations Centre (SOC) compliant.

Q. Working despite the pandemic last year must have been challenging. How was the company affected by the pandemic?

So much has happened over the past year, including adjusting to the long-term impacts of Covid. While we are all still getting used to the new normal, we, in Immedis, are fully focused on supporting our customers and enabling them to realize their potential. While separated physically, we have in fact never been closer as a team. We have put in a huge amount of work since the start of the pandemic to ensure that we stay connected as a team and continue to collaborate remotely.

We started hosting weekly CEO Sessions (Ruairi’s Stories) to provide business updates and engage external speakers on topics such as wellness and inclusion. We invited our brand ambassadors, Shane Lowry and Stephanie Meadow, to support the team in terms of mental resilience. We also launched Immedis Coffee Connects, a biweekly session, where we encourage employees to have a coffee and chat with each other in an informal setting to encourage cross functional engagement – recreating the water cooler. This meant that regardless of where you were based, you got to know people from across the business in a way you otherwise would not have. Certainly, we have worked hard to meet the challenges Covid has presented to all of us and find ways, where possible, to turn these challenges into opportunities. It has given us the opportunity to improve communication across the organization while also improving product delivery and services to our customers across the board. In many ways, the last year has highlighted the importance of the products and services Immedis offers that enable organizations to deliver accurate and timely payroll to their employees no matter where they are in the world.

Q. What does the future hold for your company?

At Immedis, innovation is at the heart of what we do. We continually innovate, offering our customers several platform releases each year to ensure they are strongly positioned for their current need and for the future of work. While our platform is best-in-class, Immedis constantly and tirelessly seeks to add value for our customers in terms of savings (time/cost), advanced real-time reporting, global oversight, date security and compliance. As our values state, we find the best way. We walk in our customers’ shoes. Innovation is in our DNA and at the core of everything we do now and for the future.

The Leader Upfront
Ruairi Kelleher, CEO

Ruairi is responsible for the corporate direction, strategy, and M&A activity at Immedis, enabling the team to drive innovation in international payroll and tax services through the company’s cloud-based platform. Since co-founding Immedis, Ruairi has worked to share the strategy and vision with employees, clients, partners and the wider global payroll industry to promote a new vision of global payroll consolidation through global tax expertise and integrated agile technologies.

“We walk in our customers shoes and continually strive to find the best way to solve their payroll problems. Immedis takes on the complexity, so organizations and payroll teams don’t have to.”