We had the opportunity to attend the Equifax Workforce Solutions (going forward just Equifax) user conference – held at the beautiful Lone Pine Resort East of Austin. The event is well attended, with more 15% more attendees joining than last year’s edition, showing the traction of the Equifax workforce services division. Compare the earlier editions of this conference from New Orleans (see here) and Scottsdale (see here).
I recorded a short video of the Top 3 takeaways – take a look here:
No time to watch? Read on:
Always hard to pick the Top3 of such an event – but here you go:
New Leadership – The division has seen a change at the helm with Dann Adams (he has become the President of the Equifax Personal Solutions business) handing the reins to Rodolfo Ploder, who previously ran the US Information Solutions for Equifax. From early impressions both employees and customers are excited about the new leadership, which is likely going to explore more synergies with the rest of Equifax.
Compliance Progress – The Compliance Center offering is making good progress, this is the area of Equifax that offers I-9 and e-Verify, Direct Deposit and W2 consent, WOTC with eSignature and federal and state tax compliance services. The biggest advancements has been the expansion of the offering beyond the federal to the state level, with all 50 states being supported now. There is market for this, as e.g. 40 states with new hire notice requirements (overall) and 35 bills that have been introduced in 2016 alone with new hire form requirements. Moreover, Equifax makes it easier to integrate with other HCM players, providing out of the box integration to Oracle (Taleo) and iCIMS for a start.
Unemployment Management – A large part of the Equifax business is the area of unemployment cost management. Equifax is providing key value for customers, in 2015 alone the vendor has recovered more than $380M in incorrect charges to client accounts. Overall the vendor has managed over 4.8M unemployment claims in the same year. It is good to see that Equifax has reached very high Compliance as a Service (CaaS) levels for this service, offering customers to be the inbox / outbox for all unemployment data and concerns both at a federal and state level.
MyPOV
Compliance and Integration both vie for the top concern for HR professional. Enterprises will pay a lot for getting rid of ‘California headache’ and ‘Pennsylvania drowsiness’ in regards of compliance worries. In conversations with CxOs and payroll executives, these professionals peg the value of CaaS close to the same costs as the paycheck. Considering that worldwide payroll and payroll related services are close to a 100B US$ market, CaaS can / could double the addressable market for all existing and potential players. Equifax is well positioned to capture a piece of that market, but is also uniquely positioned to become a much bigger player in this field. As other potential players are concentrating on software challenges and opportunities, CaaS is a unique opportunity for Equifax.
On the concern side, Equifax needs to keep investing in modern tools and platforms to enable its business. Next to CaaS the vendor has a unique opportunity in DaaS (Data as a Service) helping customers to benchmark themselves, better understand their performance and integrate data into their decision processes. But that is only possible with an advancement in business best practices and investment into platform, coupled with a desire for strategic investment. The good news is that Equifax overall is not a stranger to the insights business and has the financial resources to make this a workable strategy.
Overall a very good event for Equifax, that is delivering on the insights solutions that the vendor name point to. We will be watching.
More on Equifax
- Musings - Is Transboarding the Future of People Talent Management? Read here
- Musings - How technology innovation fuels Recruiting and disrupts the laggards - read here
- Musings - What is the future of recruiting? Read here
- HRTech 2014 takeaways - Read here.
- Why all the attention to recruiting? Read here.
And more on Payroll:
