How Barings scaled global payroll and fueled growth with Deel and Workday

Barings, a global financial services firm operating across numerous countries, was struggling with a disjointed and inefficient payroll system. The firm relied on multiple service providers—CloudPay in Europe and Vistra in Asia-Pacific—with processes in APAC being almost entirely manual.

This fragmentation created significant operational and strategic hurdles:

• Manual workload: Payroll in APAC relied heavily on Excel spreadsheets, which increased the potential for inconsistencies and placed a significant burden on teams. In Europe, outbound data changes also required manual handling, adding further strain to operations.
• Compliance considerations: Limited automation heightened the risk of errors, making it more challenging to maintain compliance across multiple jurisdictions.
• No clear picture of costs: Without a unified system to bring payroll actuals back into Workday, Barings couldn't analyze the true cost of employment. While base pay was visible, other elements such as pensions, benefits, and statutory contributions across regions remained less transparent.

"In APAC, everything was manual—literally run on Excel spreadsheets. It was inconsistent and exposed us to compliance risks. We couldn't do a true cost analysis, which made our location strategy discussions incredibly difficult." —Heather Ashley, Director of HR Technology, Barings

To solve its remaining challenges, Barings needed a global payroll partner that wouldn’t just replace vendors, but would deeply integrate with its core HR system: Workday. The goal was to consolidate its third-party vendors and create a seamless, automated flow of information.

Barings selected Deel for its purpose-built integration with Workday—designed to enhance platform capabilities and unify global payroll operations. The decision was driven by key partnership strengths:

• A certified integration: Deel's status as a certified Workday partner was critical. Its modern platform and pre-built integrations guaranteed a reliable, future-proof connection.
• A single source of truth: By centralizing global payroll with one certified partner, Barings could ensure consistent, high-quality data flowed back into Workday, eliminating the risk of errors from multiple, inconsistent vendors.
• End-to-end data visibility: The solution's power lies in the bi-directional data flow. Employee data from Workday seamlessly populates in Deel for processing. After each payroll run, critical data—actual costs, taxes, and deductions—is fed directly back into Workday. This creates a single, unified view of the entire global workforce within the system they already use.

"We needed a partner with strong technology and the stability to handle our global complexity. Deel’s ability to centralize support and integrate seamlessly with Workday's latest tech made them the clear choice." —Heather Ashley, Director of HR Technology, Barings

With Deel, Barings is transforming payroll from a disconnected function into a strategic data layer. The moment the European entities went live, the impact was clear. Actuals from every country in the EU now flow directly into Workday, enabling real-time data for key stakeholders, like the global CHRO.

This new visibility is already fueling two new corporate initiatives: a formal analysis of the total cost of employment and the reconciliation of benefit costs against invoices, a granular level of oversight that was previously out of reach.

This data is the cornerstone of the firm’s cross-functional location strategy team. This group, once forced to make decisions with incomplete information, can now analyze the true cost of hiring in different countries. As Barings prepares for its APAC entities to go live at the end of the year, it expects to see additional benefits:

• A seamless UI for employees in APAC to access payslips and tax forms through Workday.
• Centralized data capture via Workday APD Employee Self-Service, allowing staff to input their own payroll data and reducing the reliance on manual spreadsheets.