Globalisation Partners are the historic giant in the EOR space.
Operating for 20+ years, and supporting most countries, they have a lot of coverage.
These pain points were all shared from 2021 - 2023. Since the GP have launched a platform/portal. It’s uncertain how much impact this has had (if any) on the pain points we’ve heard:
The main issues / differences
Slow: GP are an old clunky company. Their processes and support are slow. Getting set up is slow.
Though they have invested in a platform and becoming more tech driven, it’s long and hard to change these sorts of old company processes. Expensive + hidden: GP doesn’t share pricing on their web page. Every inquiry is priced up, and haggled. There’s also a litany of hidden fees; ranging from onboarding fee, set up fee, consultation fee, off-boarding fee, re-opening payroll fee... etc
While they have tried to remove/streamline some of these costs, there are still way more than other EORs on the market
There is no info on FRX on their website (which given that pricing is also hidden, makes sense) Minimum headcount: Often GP won’t take one employee inquiries, or if they will, will charge extra hidden fees for it. Invoicing: To make tracking these hidden costs even harder, they don’t send one invoice a month like Boundless. Let’s say your a customer with 3 employees in Sweden, 5 in the UK and 3 in Canada through GP. You may get 3-4 invoices a month. And it won’t be based on an obvious split like per country:
- Your first invoice may cover by 2 people’s payroll in Sweden.
- Your second invoice will cover 3 of the employees in the UK and 2 in Canada.
- Your third invoice could be for the 1 in Sweden, 1 in the UK and 1 in Canada.
- And your 4the invoice could cover the 1 remaining UK employee.
Then next month, the split of which invoices covers which employee could change.... good luck keeping track of which employee you+GP have paid, let alone how much you’ve paid in fees. Partners: GP have a mixture of in-house and partners when it comes to their country covers. It’s impossible to know which is which, without directly asking, and your POC there might not even know Multiple POCs+ emails: With such a large team, covering so many countries, with partners, everything from queries to onboarding to renewing/negotiating terms can involve a new POC and multiple people on email cc. It means it’s inefficient and customers are spent scrolling through emails of different threads to figure out who to talk to and if a query has been resolved or missed Excels: As recently as early 2023, GP were still sending quotes and breakdowns in excel attachments to get lost in customer invoices
GP (Globalisation Partners)