How Reward Gateway consolidated global payroll with Deel and Workday

Before Deel, Reward Gateway ran payroll the way most growing companies do: country by country, vendor by vendor. Bulgaria, the UK, the US, and Australia each had their own provider and their own process. In several markets, only one specialist knew how that process actually worked.

“All the knowledge was in one person’s head, specifically in our Bulgarian payroll, but also in other areas,” said Christiaan Uys, Finance Manager at Reward Gateway. “We needed to address that.”

The fragmentation showed up differently in every market. Bulgaria was running payroll software Uys described as decades old. Australia’s provider struggled to produce consistent payslips, so Reward Gateway had to bring in a fourth-party vendor to help. In the US, where Reward Gateway’s payroll ran through a PEO, a simple termination meant a two-week wait for the provider’s legal team to sign off, even in states where final pay is legally due the same day an employee leaves.

“We couldn’t understand it, and we just needed to move away from that. We had to address the risks,” Uys said.

Deel is Workday’s long-tail payroll partner: Workday stays the system of record for HR, and Deel handles the global payroll depth underneath it. That division of labor is exactly what drew Reward Gateway to Deel.

Reward Gateway went to market in 2023 looking for a single partner that could run payroll for a shared service model, administered centrally from its Bulgaria office rather than scattered across local vendors. A third provider couldn’t support Bulgaria and was ruled out early, which left a shortlist of two.

The deciding factor wasn’t price. It was who actually ran the payroll.

“Deel has its own employees in each country. We work with Deel’s people and Deel’s teams,” Uys said, contrasting Deel with competitors that relied on third parties. “With other providers, I felt like I was raising a ticket and waiting. Deel is quicker when we need payroll answers.”

That ownership model let Reward Gateway run a consistent process on top of real country-by-country complexity. “Even though in the background you do many different things in each country, because payroll is actually quite different in each country, for us it looks like the same approach,” Uys said. “We’re almost in partnership with Deel. Deel provides the expertise, and the data we hand over each month is what drives everything after that.”

Reward Gateway went live on Deel Payroll in January 2024 for its original four countries. An additional entity, added after Reward Gateway’s acquisition by Edenred, joined the following month. Edenred later had Reward Gateway move its HR system of record to Workday, a combined HRIS and payroll project the team spent most of 2024 planning before going live that November.

Workday for HR, Deel for payroll

Today, Workday is Reward Gateway’s system of record for HR, and Deel is the system of record for payroll. Keeping the two separate gives Reward Gateway the segregation of duties it needs from a controls perspective. Payroll data flows from Workday into Deel, where payslips and tax documents live, the same way they would with any payroll provider. “If an employee can already access their own payroll data, why have it in two places?” Uys said. Downstream, Deel also feeds the journal entries that complete Reward Gateway’s financial reporting in NetSuite.

The clearest proof point came from an unplanned test. Not long after going live with Deel, Reward Gateway’s payroll team had to cover a colleague’s long-term absence. It was the exact scenario the old one-person, one-country model couldn’t survive.

“With Deel, we have proven that our payroll processes work, even when a person is out on leave. The rest of the team can just step in, communicate with the right people, and payroll happens,” Uys said.

That resilience hasn’t come from a bigger team. Reward Gateway still runs payroll for all four countries with four people: three based in Bulgaria who administer the day-to-day work across every market, and one payroll manager based in the UK. By Uys’ own estimate, that’s roughly half the headcount a similarly sized payroll operation would typically carry.

“I think we’re running with about four fewer people than a similar-sized payroll function would need. Deel gives us a direct line via Slack to the local teams in each country, which has meant a true partnership—not just for payroll queries, but for staying compliant and getting local expertise when we need it,” Uys said.

What’s next: Global Payroll Connect

Reward Gateway and Deel currently exchange payroll data through scheduled file transfers, set up when Reward Gateway first joined Deel. Now the team is working with Deel to move onto Global Payroll Connect, the certified, bi-directional integration between Workday and Deel.