Company Overview

Founded in 2006, South Pole is a global climate consultancy and carbon project developer that helps governments, NGOs, and enterprises design and implement decarbonization strategies, channel climate finance, and deliver measurable environmental and social impact.

Challenge

As South Pole scaled into new markets, its payroll infrastructure couldn’t keep up. What started as a mission-driven startup had become a global enterprise, but payroll was still being run like a startup. Employer of Record (EOR) became a critical operating process, yet the underlying payroll and vendor landscape wasn’t built for global scale.

A patchwork of providers

27+ legal entities and 15 different payroll vendors created silos, inconsistent processes, and spiraling costs. Some entities operated with their own payroll logic, documents, and provider “language,” making consolidated reporting and cross-team coordination difficult, especially for finance and leadership visibility.

Manual overload

Payroll relied on spreadsheets, emails, and boutique firms, leaving Finance and HR drowning in work. More than 600 hours each week were spent on manual inputs, leaving little time for strategy.

Compliance risk, fairness gaps, and limited visibility

Expat-style contracts drove higher costs and led to inconsistent employee experiences across regions. HR didn’t always have direct access to contracts or employee data, making it harder to support timely decisions and maintain consistent standards across compliance, fairness, and GDPR.

Solution

Fair and transparent  EOR workforce model

Papaya restructured legacy expat-style agreements into compliant, locally aligned EOR contracts. This not only reduced inflated costs but also ensured that EOR workforce employees received fair treatment and equal benefits, whilst ensuring faster onboarding in just a few days.

HiBob Integration

By integrating directly with South Pole’s HRIS, HiBob, payroll data now flows automatically into Papaya. This reduced manual entry, minimized human error, and freed the People team from spending entire days on data input. “The HiBob integration was a game-changer. Our payroll data flows automatically to the Papaya platform. We have less manual entries, less errors,” Öykü noted.

Global payments and wallets

Papaya’s payments infrastructure streamlined salary payments and authority payments, taxes, and wallet-based funding, providing both HR and Finance with confidence that payments were accurate and on time, while reducing exposure to FX volatility and missed deadlines. “Wallet based funding… gives us the peace of mind knowing that in all our 27 countries, the employees are going to be paid on the exact same day”. said Öykü.

Analytics, Knowledge base

With Papaya’s BI reporting and embedded knowledge base tool, South Pole consolidated multi-country payroll data in one system, so HR and finance could move faster on budgeting, forecasting, audit prep, and compliance checks with a single source of truth. “What used to take days can now be done in minutes,” Öykü continues.

“Having that Knowledge base stored in the Papaya platform really supports our understanding of compliance in our decision-making.” emphasized Laura Madeddu, People Operations Lead, EMEA

Employee experience (Papaya Personal)

With the employee-facing Papaya Personal experience, payroll became more transparent and self-serve. Employees could easily access pay slips and other payroll documents in one place, download, store, and reference them whenever needed, helping to reinforce consistency and trust across locations.

“Papaya helped bridge HR and Finance. For the first time, both teams had visibility and accountability,” Öykü explained. “Payroll is one of those jobs where if you do it right, no one thanks you. Having Papaya behind us made my team feel recognized and supported.”

Impact

• With Papaya, South Pole transformed payroll from a fragmented, manual process into a unified global system built to scale.
  • 600+ hours saved weekly, freeing HR and Finance to focus on strategic work.
  • €417K in annual savings from eliminating redundant providers and inflated contract models.

  What also made the difference was the support around the rollout and beyond.

  “We have a fantastic account manager who is always involved in escalated cases, also there to prevent issues,” said Laura

  Beyond the hard numbers, the bigger shift was consistency. Employees supported through the EOR model could be treated to the same standards across locations, and internally, HR and Finance finally had one place to work from instead of chasing inputs across vendors.

At the end of the day, choosing Papaya wasn’t only about efficiency. It was about building resilience and future-proofing our operations but also our people strategy.  said Öykü.