September 2024: Charting CXL's Success: A Look at 2024 and Predictions for 2025

• CXL Group stands out by offering tailored payroll solutions meeting specific needs of clients, especially MNCs, which global providers can't always accommodate without major system changes.
• In 2024, CXL Group successfully implemented automation for 90-95% of our invoicing processes and is planning more automation in 2025.
• Strengthening our payroll services with industry certifications, professional indemnity coverage & cyber security insurance.

A look back at 2024 has given us a sense of accomplishment with more clients onboard. Among them are larger companies, MNCs and conglomerates. But understanding what we do has given them confidence with our payroll processing capabilities.

Take for instance a luxury goods & jewellery MNC, although they have a global account with a shared services provider, they went ahead to carve out the payroll portion for CXL Group. Why would they do that? Based on my conversation with this client, it is because we can tailor-make the payroll modules to fit their requirements, supported also by our physical presence in the local market.

Customising Success

As a payroll outsourcing provider with clients of all sizes from big to small, we understand the need to customise beyond what traditional off-the-shelves applications can do. This is important because every company is different, more so when we talk about large companies. But the unfortunate thing with global providers is that it demands a change of programming codes when a client request exceeds the maximum default boundaries of the payroll solution. Changing the codes risks compromising the payroll application worldwide and this is not the kind of responsibility anyone is ready to shoulder.

As we continue to hold dialogues with clients from different industries, we realise that instead of having these global systems tweaked to accommodate the local business processes, some vendors recommended the clients to alter their reports to fit into the global system. This sounds like a role reversal between the client and vendor and in my mind is, “Why would a client do that?”

Given the above, CXL Group stands out because we are able to cater to almost any kind of payroll requests and part of our professional obligation is to give our clients the peace of mind when doing business with us. By that we mean going the extra mile to be on par if not better than the global providers and that is by being internationally recognised with industry-based benchmarking standards:

Hosting Level (Tier 3 Data Centre, highest standard in Malaysia)?

1. Information Security Management System - ISO/IEC 27001:2013: This certification shows that CXL Group follows strict standards to keep clients’ information safe and continuously improve our security practices.
2. IT Service Management System - ISO/IEC 27000-1:2018: This standard means CXL Group has a solid process in place to manage and improve the quality of the IT services provided to our clients.

Software (or Application) Level

1. ISO/IEC 27001:2013: This demonstrates that CXL Group meets global standards in developing, maintaining and supporting our HR Information/Management System, ensuring it runs smoothly and securely.
2. Penetration Testing on External Web Application: This shows that CXL Group regularly tests the system’s defences to make sure it can block hackers and other external threats, so our clients’ payroll data stays protected.

Process (or Service) Level

1. ISO 9001:2015: This certification ensures that CXL Group’s payroll services meet high international standards that can deliver quality and consistency to our clients.?

To solidify our position, we have also subscribed to Professional Indemnity Insurance (to compensate untoward incidents eg. erroneous processing) and a Cyber Security Insurance with RM5 million coverage (to protect against cyber threats eg. hacking).

As we put our neck on the line by promising 99.7% uptime through our SLA (Services Level Agreement), we are also mindful about securing our business practices through adequate industry-recognised mechanisms. This putsus at a completely different playing field against our peers in the market and communicates immense confidence to our clients.

Key Trends 2024 & 2025

To assert our familiarity with tech, I shared in November and December 2023 about how we were experimenting with automating our invoice processing. I am happy to share that we have applied this to 90 to 95% of our invoicing needs today and have integrated it with our payroll system.

Moving forward, we will be looking at automating more processes, starting with the statutory requirement of e-invoicing and followed by payroll in 2025. Other repetitive tasks such as EPF contributions and tax submissions will be next.

Our aim of doing this is to elevate payroll processing to be a “smart” or “highly intelligent” process so that we can bring about the kind of operational efficiency and cost optimisation that is fully compliant and secured for our clients.

But a techie HR person may turn around and ask, how is CXL Group doing this when all we’re hearing are high level big words like automation, compliance or security?

At the heart of what we do is committed investments into making the solution as seamless as possible for our clients without compromising features and functionalities. To do this, imagine Steve Jobs unveiling the legendary iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad for the first time. Now imagine what would’ve gone on in the background to get all these premium gadgets to work flawlessly that won Apple their legion of fans around the world. That’s the same spirit we are adopting at CXL Group where we put our money where our mouth is by investing heavily into the APIs (Application Programming Interface) of major HRIS/HRMS so that our system can talk to other systems without any human intervention.

But with new systems comes resistance because some fear advancements are threatening their position in the office. This is a mindset shift that must be instilled in the 21st century. Much can be said about tech as a complementary tool for HR but ultimately, it would take a fully “converted” HR professional to admit their strategic role is more important than their repetitive tasks processing mileage claims or entitlements.

So while our HR professionals mull over their role in the high tech era of AI, robotics and automation, we at CXL Group will continue to streamline our processes internally and beef up our offerings because incrementally, clients and new prospects have been asking about how we tackle compliance, security and accuracy. So much so that this combination of questions has become a verbal FAQ throughout 2024. I suspect this will continue to be their favourite topics moving into 2025.