In the dynamic world of HR technology, few shifts have been as keenly anticipated as the true unification of HR, benefits, and payroll. To unpack this evolution, we’re joined by Ling-yi Tsai, an HRTech expert with decades of experience guiding organizations through technological transformations. With a deep focus on HR analytics and platform integration, she offers a unique perspective on a landmark partnership in the Canadian market, where a new embedded solution is set to redefine how businesses manage their people operations. Our conversation will delve into the persistent friction caused by disconnected systems, the strategic decision-making behind embedding complex financial tools rather than building them from scratch, and the tangible, day-to-day impact this integration has on business owners and their teams.
You’ve noted that payroll has been a top customer request for years. Could you describe the specific friction businesses feel managing separate HR and payroll platforms, and how this new embedded solution directly addresses those pain points?
The friction is a constant, low-grade headache that can quickly escalate into a full-blown migraine for business owners. Imagine you hire a new employee. You onboard them in your HR system, then you have to manually re-enter all that same information—name, address, salary—into a completely separate payroll platform. It feels redundant and inefficient from the start. A few months later, that employee gets a raise. Now you’re updating the HR system and hoping you remember to update the payroll system correctly and on time. Multiply that by every new hire, every termination, every benefits change, and you create dozens of opportunities for costly errors. Bringing payroll directly into a platform like Collage eliminates this double-entry nightmare. It creates a single source of truth, giving employers a sense of control and confidence that was simply missing before.
Given the complexity of Canadian payroll, Collage chose to partner with a specialist like Nmbr rather than build a solution from scratch. Could you walk us through that decision-making process and explain how Nmbr’s embedded infrastructure creates a more seamless user experience than a typical software integration?
The “build vs. buy” debate is classic in tech, but when it comes to Canadian payroll, the deck is heavily stacked against building it yourself. The regulatory landscape is incredibly intricate and constantly changing. Building it from the ground up is a monumental task, and maintaining compliance is an even greater one. A typical integration might use an API to pass data between two platforms, but it often feels clunky. You’re still aware you’re using two different pieces of software, sometimes with separate logins or slightly different data fields. Nmbr’s embedded infrastructure is different. It’s like they built the engine, and Collage built the perfect car around it. The user never leaves the Collage environment; they don’t feel the handoff. The complex machinery of payments, compliance, and data accuracy is humming away invisibly in the background, which delivers a truly seamless, integrated experience that feels like a single, thoughtfully designed product.
By becoming the first benefits-connected platform in Canada to embed payroll, what market advantage does Collage now have? For a business owner, what specific daily tasks become simpler, and how does this unified system mitigate compliance risks?
This is a significant first-mover advantage. They’ve solved a core problem within the benefits broker ecosystem that others haven’t. For a business owner, the simplification is immediate and profound. When an employee is hired, their data flows automatically from the offer letter in the HR module, to their benefits enrollment, and straight into payroll without anyone having to lift a finger. When they are terminated, the system can automatically calculate the final pay, account for vacation payout, and ensure benefits are handled correctly, which is a huge area of compliance risk. This isn’t just about convenience; it’s about creating an operational backbone that prevents mistakes before they happen. That kind of built-in safety net is incredibly valuable and frees up leaders to focus on their people, not their paperwork.
Many businesses reportedly spend over 30 hours a week managing data across different systems. How does an embedded payroll platform concretely reduce this time commitment? Could you provide a step-by-step example of how this unified system simplifies a common process like a pay increase?
That 30-hour figure is staggering, and it represents a massive drain on productivity. An embedded platform attacks that waste directly. Let’s take a simple pay increase. In a disconnected world, a manager first gets the raise approved, then they have to notify HR. HR then updates the employee’s profile in the HR system. After that, someone—often a different person—has to log into the separate payroll system and manually input the new salary, ensuring the effective date is correct. There are multiple steps and multiple people involved, each one a potential point of failure. With an embedded system like Collage Payroll, the manager can initiate the salary change within the HR platform. Once approved, that new number automatically populates the payroll module for the next pay cycle. The change is made once, in one place. It’s a single, fluid action that saves time, reduces the chance of error to near zero, and gives back those precious hours to the business.
The leadership teams at both Collage and Nmbr have deep, shared experience building Canadian HR and payroll platforms. How did this past experience specifically inform the design and functionality of this new embedded payroll solution?
This shared “innovation DNA,” as the article calls it, is the secret sauce. Leaders like Mark Bluvshtein and the team from Nmbr have been in the trenches. They’ve built and scaled platforms like Humi and Wave and have seen firsthand where the cracks appear. They understand the unique frustrations of Canadian businesses. For example, they know that a common pain point is not just running payroll, but managing the data connections to benefits providers. Their past experience almost certainly informed the decision to make this a benefits-connected platform from day one, ensuring that deductions and remittances are handled flawlessly. They didn’t have to guess what customers needed; they built the solution they knew from years of experience the market was desperate for.
What is your forecast for the future of embedded fintech in Canadian HR platforms?
I believe we are at the very beginning of a major wave. What Collage and Nmbr have done with payroll is a blueprint for the future. We will see more HR platforms moving beyond simple integrations to deeply embed other financial services. Think embedded corporate cards, automated expense management, or even employee wellness funds and lending programs, all managed through the central HR hub. The expectation from businesses will shift from “do my systems talk to each other?” to “is my HR platform a unified command center for all my people and financial operations?” This partnership has raised the bar, and any platform that continues to force its customers to juggle separate systems for core functions will quickly be left behind.