This report identifies key demand-side trends in the payroll business process transformation services space, helping enterprises fine-tune their payroll operations. It provides an overview of key observations and business challenges that Avasant considers important to highlight in the payroll outsourcing space.

Why read this Market Insights?

Enterprises are moving toward managed payroll services that unify technology, analytics, and compliance into a single, flexible delivery model. Driven by talent shortages, rapid technological change, regulatory complexity, and cost pressures, buyers are prioritizing scalable solutions that enhance operational efficiency and minimize fragmentation. They expect predictive compliance, automated statutory updates, localized tax feeds, proactive alerts, and embedded audit trails to lower risk and simplify governance. At the same time, organizations are embedding AI across payroll, automation, anomaly detection, copilots, and orchestration layers to boost accuracy, speed, employee query resolution, and end-to-end visibility.

The Payroll Business Process Transformation 2025–2026 Market Insights™ aids organizations in identifying important market trends and expectations for any payroll projects they engage in.

Methodology

The industry insights presented in this report are based on our ongoing interactions with enterprise CXOs and other key executives, targeted discussions with service providers, subject matter experts, and Avasant Fellows, analyst insights from primary and secondary research, and lessons learned from consulting engagements.

Table of contents

About the report (Page 3-5) 

Executive summary (Pages 6–9)

• • Key enterprise payroll trends shaping the market
  • Avasant recognizes 24 top-tier providers offering payroll business process transformation services

Demand-side trends (Pages 10–15)

• • Inflation, trade tensions, and geopolitical risk are reshaping global payroll operations.
  • Enterprises are shifting to intelligent managed services to address talent shortage and cost pressures.
  • Organizations are rationalizing vendor fragmentation by consolidating multiple local providers to a single orchestrator for cost savings and improved compliance.
  • Enterprises are deploying predictive compliance and real-time statutory monitoring to reduce audit risk and cut compliance costs.
  • Cloud-based, harmonized platforms are being deployed across the globe to eliminate fragmentation, reduce complexity, and enable real-time global visibility.

Key contacts (Page 16)

Read the Research Byte based on this report. Please refer to Avasant’s Payroll Business Process Transformation 2025–2026 RadarView™ for detailed insights on the service providers and supply-side trends.