Overview

pTopia provides technology for Global Talent Mobility, the practice of strategically deploying employees around the world. Global mobility puts the right people, in the right place, at the right time, so that companies can achieve goals like opening a factory or breaking into a foreign market. In practice, most companies face major barriers to mobility. They spend an enormous amount of time and money just to calculate the cost of moving someone, never mind actually moving them. Their global talent management strategy suffers as a result. Topia’s four applications–Plan, Manage, Pay and Go–and the recently acquired Monaeo business travel compliance solution–streamline the mobility process. No other vendor digitizes and automates the end-to-end mobility workflow./p

Supernova Award Category

Future of Work: Human Capital Management

The Problem

pThe data required for a truly global talent strategy is fragmented between massive HR platforms, relocation logistics companies (e.g., real estate agents and moving companies), and thousands of companies that practice global mobility using different data standards and processes. One consequence is that global mobility programs distort what companies know about their own employees—they might have to fire them in one system, hire them in another, and pay their mobility expenses using numerous other systems that can’t share data with each other. A second consequence is that companies cannot benchmark their mobility programs across policies or against other companies, so they don’t know how their mobility costs and outcomes compare, and they struggle to measure the ROI./p

The Solution

pTopia’s solution is Topia One, the first cloud-based open platform that provides an integrated data standard across global talent mobility. It addresses the data gaps discussed above by enabling HR to finally have one, central record of each mobile employee that draws data from an entire ecosystem of HCM, ATS, payroll, and finance systems as well as global mobility service vendors. And by standardizing global talent mobility data, Topia One provides HR departments with a single global lens of their employees and the ability to benchmark their mobility programs against other peer departments and use cases./p

The results

pTopia One launched on June 16, 2020 to disrupt the entire global talent mobility industry. Thus, we have limited before-and-after data to draw on. However, we can say the following. Customers are gaining unprecedented insight into their mobility strategies thanks to the new benchmarking abilities. Normally, if a company has only moved five people from New York to Hong Kong, that’s their benchmark for moving a sixth employee. Now, HR can benchmark the cost of moving employees from New York to Hong Kong against hundreds of companies and tens of thousands of relocations. HR departments and their stakeholders can now perform more of the mobility workflow on a self-serve basis, saving time and reducing costs. When every step is executed from Topia applications, the Topia One data layer can record each action in a standardized, comparable data model. With our open API infrastructure, leading technology providers can be seamlessly integrated into our platform. We launched Topia One with a Workday integration that was sought after by many of our clients. Other notable integrations include Docusign and Looker. Topia One has standardized mobility data in accordance with the best practices and common use cases we’ve observed over a decade. The result is that we can compare mobility data across industries, job roles, destinations, demographics, and more – while still providing the flexibility required by complex mobility programs./p

Metrics

pTopia’s applications have a well-documented impact on efficiency, compliance, and savings, as the following metrics attest:/p ul liEfficiency ul liTelstra, an Australian telecommunications company, saved more than 700 hours per year by using Topia to automate its mobility workflows. It saved roughly two hours per estimate and eliminated two days of preparation needed to generate reports on its mobile population./li /ul /li liCompliance  ul liThe computer company Dell reduced W2c issuance (in other words, an amended tax form to fix a correction) by over 90% using Topia. Prior to using Topia, that means 90% of their employee tax returns were incorrect due to incorrect data./li liIn 2020, Siemens USA, part of the global innovation conglomerate, protected over $5 million in tax exposure by identifying over 1,700 employees with over 15 days of travel across the U.S., including 316 employees with withholdings across 36 locations./li /ul /li liSavings ul liDuring New York’s COVID-19 lockdown, Tiger Global reduced its tax bill by $3 million by using Topia to show that employees were working outside the city versus inside, where taxes are significantly higher./li liBy using Topia to optimize vendor spending, customers on average are able to reduce spend on relocations by 10% and save hundreds of thousands annually in reduced outsourced service fees. /li /ul /li /ul

The Technology

pTopia One is a cloud-based, open API platform that provides a standard data model for global talent mobility while still giving customers flexibility to execute their programs in their way. It includes a built-in tax engine covering over 110 countries and territories that  calculates the cost and ROI of deploying talent. Topia integrates with many third party technologies including HCM and payroll providers such as Workday and ADP as well as embedded solutions such as Docusign./p

Disruptive Factor

pAfter a decade in the global talent mobility space, we discovered that our enterprise clients knew shockingly little about the performance of their programs, the relationships between mobility and talent management, and how they compare to their peers. To digitize and automate mobility wasn’t enough—to create true network effects, we needed to standardize global talent mobility data and processes such that every deployment would become a rich source of insight for every enterprise on the platform. Towards that end, we exhaustively studied the best practices in our industry and challenged the status quo by taking a stance on which metrics and processes need to be standard if companies are going to make meaningful comparisons and evolve the global talent mobility space. With the launch of Topia One, our clients are contributors to and beneficiaries of a platform that grows smarter each click and keystroke, helping companies mobilize talent in pursuit of their most ambitious strategic goals. /p

Shining Moment

pOriginally formed a decade ago to transform the way employees relocated for work, Topia today is the result of combining four organizations - MOVE Guides, Polaris, Teleport, and Monaeo - to make mobility programs more cost-effective, agile, and strategic for our clients. Topia One is the culmination of a decade long vision to make it easier to deploy talent around the world. Topia One is the platform we’ve been dreaming about since the beginning of that journey./p