Gusto

1. As the CSO at Gusto, what are the most significant cyber security challenges you have witnessed when maintaining and enhancing safety in payroll and health insurance of workforces? 

Gusto provides mission-critical payroll and HR technology to more than 200,000 small and medium businesses so that they can pay, onboard, and provide benefits to their teams. We serve businesses in every state and nearly every industry—from corner coffee shops to high-growth startups. It’s a diverse set of companies that have differing resources and varying approaches to cybersecurity. Our priority is to understand their unique security constraints so we can offer tools to support them. For example, enhanced anti-virus measures to prevent account takeovers or increased monitoring of malicious IP addresses to prompt additional authentication checks. 

One key challenge we areencountering is ecosystem security. No company is an island anymore. It’s critical to ensure that the companies we partner with are like-minded and mission-aligned with us in their approach to privacy and security. For us, that means they see themselves as entrusted with (rather than entitled to) customers’ data. It’s also important for us to understand how robust and modern their security systems are. 

2. With digital transformation boosting the emergence of innovative technologies, what are some of the trends you have witnessed in the payroll and team management services space today? 

Without a doubt, remote work—particularly when it comes to working from home— is the biggest shift we areseeing in the payroll and team management space right now. Gusto platform data shows a 240% spike in remote work since 2021 among small and medium businesses. That trend isn’t going anywhere.

One key challenge we are encountering is ecosystem security. No company is an island anymore. It’s critical to ensure that the companies we partner with are like-minded and mission-aligned with us in their approach to privacy and security

That has changed both the way we serve our customers and how we operate as a business. For our customers, it means we areenabling remote support and offering new remote capabilities—from enabling business leaders to pay their employees across borders to offering remote onboarding features. In terms of our own workforce, it means enabling even better remote employee provisioning and support. 

3. When it comes to your organization, are there any trends you are leveraging to establish robust and cost-efficient payroll and insurance management seamlessly?

I find that cultural transformation is the real driver of digital transformation. A lot of the technology we use commonly post-pandemic already existed, but folks found a true need for it in the past few years. Take QR codes, for example, which were invented in 1994. Before the pandemic, folks could go into a restaurant and pick up a paper menu, so there was no need to learn how to use them. Now, tons of restaurants have QR code menus. Zoom meetings are another example. If you run a small or medium business, and you could meet in person or over the phone, why bring Zoom into the mix? But when need met opportunity during the pandemic; we saw how adaptable folks are in embracing these technologies.

The same is true for payroll management and HR services. During the pandemic, we haveseen historic levels of new business creation and technology adoption. Business owners who were used to having all of their employees in one brick-and-mortar location found their employees moving across the country. Remote work is a great way for employers to retain talent, but it comes with compliance headaches and complications. To meet the moment and our customers where they are, Gusto acquired Remote Team. Together, we aresimplifying the backend burden of payroll and tax compliance so that small and medium businesses can pay and retain the best workers they can find, no matter their geography. 

4. As a thought leader, what are some of the technological advancements that you would like to see implemented by other payroll and team management providers?

Integration is important and APIs are the future. Building an API ecosystem means you view your customers as partners. It also means, as a company, that you view yourself as a data custodian, rather than the owner of your customers’ data. That’s an important distinction. When you see yourself as servicing payroll rather than owning it, you build solutions that serve your customers’ needs. That’s the philosophy behind Gusto Embedded Payroll & Services, which takes the infrastructure we’ve built servicing tens of millions of paychecks and tens of thousands of tax codes and makes it available to software developers. 

5. As an ending note, what is your advice for other senior leaders and CSOs working in the payroll management services arena?

Leaders should think of themselves as data custodians rather than data owners. We are not entitled to data, we are entrusted with it. Payroll companies don’t own the customer’s payroll; we facilitate payroll. What we can own is the customer’s payroll experience. And that’s what the focus should be on.