BCX, one of South Africa’s leading ICT and telecommunications infrastructure partners, has successfully migrated a leading South African insurer’s payroll systems to an advanced cloud-based payroll solution to underpin compliance and enable seamless integration with HR systems.

The insurer is one of South Africa’s larger life insurance and integrated financial services companies and is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and Namibian Stock Exchange. With a decentralised operating model, the client had been a user of BCX’s UniQue Payroll Solution for many years.

UniQue’s payroll engine, QPac, was a Cobol-based payroll software product, providing scalability and fast processing service. QPac was parameter-driven, and enabled compliance with South African and other African countries’ legislation. In addition, QPac integrated with the client’s HR software. Together, these applications were integral to the management and payment of employees.

BCX’s strategic vision was to migrate the client to a cloud-based solution, and started planning to sunset the QPac software. The insurer, which was on a cloud journey, wanted new software that would cater for all things payroll, have an up-to-date technology design, and be able to facilitate moving data between the HR and Payroll system to improve the employee service enjoyed in their HR environment.

BCX, together with its technology partner, PaySpace, offers its clients HR and payroll cloud services to replace current legacy systems. The cloud-based solution offers a myriad of features and functions, including true cloud single instance multi-tenant, comprehensive payroll and HR, country-specific tax legislation for 43 countries, reporting including country-specific statutory reports, and automatic medical scheme rate updates in South Africa.

The insurer opted to implement BCX’s HR and payroll solution because it’s a South African developed and supported payroll with full local and African legislative and tax compliance, with API capability to extract and move data securely between its payroll and HR system, it is integrated with its financial management system, as well as BCXs’ understanding of the client environment and support service required.

Payroll is a critical process in any organisation and defines all core HR data, directly interacting with every other HR process and establishes the foundation layer of data. This is particularly true in the client’s environment, where payroll is used to make accurate calculations to pay employees on time, drive regulatory compliance, and integrate with and support the HR system. This integration process is at the heart of the client’s HR/Payroll and financial systems and is reliant on data privacy and security protocols.

Describing the project as a huge success, the client’s Group Payroll Manager said: “We could not have asked for a better team to support us during this very critical high-risk project.”