Payroll Benefits Administration

Real-time, real impact: Inside Deel’s payroll engine for the modern enterprise

Smriti Avinash•

|28 July 2025|

Updated on 16 August 2025

Real-time payroll, local compliance, and a single engine powering teams across borders. Here’s how Deel is powering APAC organisations to scale smarter.

Managing payroll across borders has long been a logistical and compliance minefield for APAC organisations -- from juggling multiple vendors, navigating local tax laws, to dealing with delays that erode employee trust. But as businesses grow increasingly global, the need for a faster, more unified approach has become urgent.

That’s where automation and integrated platforms are shifting the narrative. By consolidating operations, improving accuracy, and ensuring real-time compliance, companies can now scale with confidence and deliver a seamless experience to a distributed workforce.

We speak with Mark Samlal, General Manager, APAC, at Deel and Founder of PayGroup, a seasoned leader with over 25 years of experience. From scaling startups to leading listed companies, Mark has been at the forefront of payroll and workforce innovation across APAC. His journey reflects deep operational expertise, a strong investor mindset, and a track record of building high-growth businesses across the region.

Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

What are the key challenges APAC companies face with fragmented payroll systems, and how does Deel address them?

For many companies, multi-country payroll management involves working with an in-country payroll provider or separate engine for each region, relying on external payroll managers to calculate and process payroll. This process often comes with the following challenges:

Delays in processing
Lack of visibility
High dependency on manual intervention
Inability to address errors early

Deel provides a single platform for all your payroll needs, including real-time payroll. Complying with global payroll regulations when paying employees across multiple countries is no easy task. Keeping up with the regulatory changes in different countries can get complicated, as each jurisdiction has its unique laws regarding taxes, benefits, social security, record keeping, payment methods, and data privacy laws.

Implementing a unified platform ensures consistency in applying payroll policies and adherence to regulations across all operating countries, minimising discrepancies and errors. New AI-driven capabilities can enable proactive identification of potential compliance issues, allowing you to address them before they escalate.

Utilising sophisticated payroll compliance software for automation enhances efficiency, reduces manual intervention, and ensures accurate tax calculations and deductions, keeping the payroll process compliant and streamlined. Real-time payroll also eliminates manual calculations prone to error, ensuring accurate tax and benefit deductions.

Real-time payroll from a unified engine is gaining traction—how does this shift redefine expectations for employees and employers across APAC?

Now, real-time payroll is redefining what’s possible for the next generation of payroll professionals. Real-time and unified are often confused because historically, real-time didn't mean ‘in real time,’ as it still involved batch processing and delays. That’s no longer the case.

Real-time payroll now provides instant gross-to-net (G2N) calculations—this instantly determines an employee’s net pay by applying taxes, benefits, and deductions. This improves payroll accuracy, speeds up processing, and supports better financial planning for employers and employees. For employers, this evolution dramatically reduces administrative overhead and risk. For employees, this sets a new standard for trust and financial empowerment.

How does Deel’s real-time payroll infrastructure support distributed teams working across borders in the APAC region?

Deel’s real-time payroll is localised for over 50 countries, ensuring compliance and transparency. With just the push of a button, companies can immediately view the final payroll cycle result, including total employer cost, gross pay, and net pay.

Deel offers real-time payroll through a proprietary single payroll calculation engine. In 2024, Deel strategically acquired PaySpace, a pivotal move that brought with it a revolutionary single, universal payroll calculation engine. This engine is rapidly transforming Deel’s payroll services. The vision is to enable companies to hire and manage the best talent globally, regardless of location. That means delivering a seamless experience—not just payroll, but everything that touches the employee journey: onboarding, compliance, benefits, performance, etc. To do that, we centralise the employee data record so it can be used instantly across the platform. That way, real-time payroll doesn’t just stay in the payroll department—it powers insights and action across the business.

What misconceptions do APAC finance and HR leaders still have about implementing global payroll solutions, and how is Deel helping change that?

Payroll is one of the most critical and complex processes for any organisation—it directly impacts employee satisfaction, compliance with local regulations, and financial planning. However, half of HR and payroll professionals say most of their time is spent working to resolve issues, and 54% say they deal with delayed employee payments due to slow payroll vendor support. That’s because, traditionally, the payroll cycle has been a rigid, multi-day process that relies on sequential steps, manual inputs, and lengthy communication between employers and in-country payroll providers.

Real-time payroll is transforming end-to-end payroll. By automating calculations and providing instant results, it removes bottlenecks, reduces errors, and gives teams the data they need to make informed decisions faster. It is powered by the integration of Deel and PaySpace’s universal payroll engine, which is built to handle payroll calculations for any country. Using modular, country-specific rules and formulas running on a single engine, it allows the system to calculate G2N within its infrastructure, without relying on in-country partner engines.

Here’s how it works:

Input submission: Payroll details—such as salaries, bonuses, and overtime hours are entered into the system as they are ready
Instant calculations: The Deel payroll engine calculates G2N pay instantly, applying country-specific tax and compliance rules automatically
Review and finalisation: Payroll teams review real-time results and finalise payroll

How is real-time payroll shaping the future of employee financial wellness in APAC?

Real-time payroll enables instant G2N calculations, allowing employees to receive pay more quickly and predictably. Employees can clearly see how their pay is calculated, helping them plan better and avoid surprises.

In APAC, where compliance and payroll structures vary widely by country, real-time, localised payroll reduces mistakes that can lead to employee dissatisfaction and financial strain. Employees benefit from accurate, on-time pay and greater visibility into how their salaries are calculated, building confidence and reducing payroll-related friction.

Can you share a specific example of how Deel helped an APAC client unlock speed, compliance, or cost savings with global payroll?

Deel played a pivotal role in helping the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) overhaul its fragmented payroll operations across Southeast Asia. Before Deel, BCG worked with four different vendors across six countries, leading to inefficiencies, inconsistent experiences, and siloed systems. By adopting Deel’s Global Payroll solution, BCG consolidated these operations onto a single, centralised platform. Deel provided seamless integration with single sign-on, allowing employees to access payslips, submit leave requests, and complete background checks all in one place. Their multilingual support and dedicated account management ensured smooth implementation and continuous optimisation.

With growing interest in real-time and on-demand pay, what innovations is Deel investing in to stay ahead of global payroll trends?

With Deel, you get more speed, efficiency, and real-time payroll visibility while eliminating fragmented processes and delayed support, compared to traditional global payroll providers. Key Deel capabilities include:

Instant G2N calculations for Deel Local Payroll, powered by PaySpace, Global Payroll, and Employer of Record (EOR) customers
Automated compliance rules are built into every localised payroll model
Full visibility into gross pay, net pay, and employer cost data
Elimination of third-party engines, reducing delays and risks
Seamless multi-country payroll from a single platform

What is Deel’s vision for the future of payroll? How does the technology roadmap, particularly the continued development of the Deel single-engine platform, support this vision?

Deel was founded as a global-first work solution, and our payroll ambitions are no different. Our global payroll product for enterprise customers is our fastest-growing offering, and our acquisition of PaySpace means we now own the full HR stack: entities in more than 150 countries, local teams (legal, HR, payroll), and local payroll engines in 50+ countries across six continents. This acquisition is a game-changer for our customers, giving them truly global coverage and faster, more flexible payroll for their teams. This news, combined with our 2022 acquisition of APAC payroll provider PayGroup, makes Deel one of the most comprehensive payroll and HR solutions on the market. No other payroll company owns this level of infrastructure. Our ambition is to serve 100 countries on the same native, global payroll engine within the next four years.

Learn how leading APAC companies are using Deel to streamline payroll and drive cross-border growth.

Topics

#HR Community

Author

Smriti Avinash