236
employees
9
Countries
Paysend operates in
13
Oyster hires
16
months
using Oyster

Paysend

at a glance

Founded in London in 2017, Paysend is a global fintech company on a mission to change how money is moved around the world. Their seamless payments ecosystem enables customers and businesses to hold, spend, and send money internationally.

Paysend partnered with Oyster to reach their ambitious growth targets, which they decided would be best served through global hiring. With Oyster, they found a like-minded partner to help them address this particular challenge, and they’ve been thrilled with the results.

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Key results
  • Paysend has the agility to hire wherever they want
  • Paysenders get a smooth, satisfactory onboarding experience
  • Oyster acts as the "bridge" for Paysend to hire globally before setting up their own entities

The challenge

As an ambitious fintech startup disrupting the financial services market, Paysend decided early on that they would be a remote-first organization because they didn’t want to be geographically restricted in their access to talent.

For Alex Nicolaus, Chief People Officer at Paysend, the decision was clear: “We wanted the best talent available globally to join Paysend.” But the next question was how to make that happen, since the time, effort, and expense of setting up legal entities wouldn’t be worth the trouble.

“We didn’t want to have legal entities in over 100 countries where we might find talent, so that was a stumbling block. It would’ve been really costly and very difficult for us to implement.”

Yet another challenge was being unable to provide the same benefits that someone would receive if working for an employer in their home country, such as statutory holidays, health insurance, and so on. Alex needed candidates to feel confident that they would receive “the same benefits and the same employment cover” that they would expect locally.

In order to meet their aggressive hiring goals, Paysend needed to find a solution to these challenges. As a disruptive fintech company, they were especially keen to find a partner that was similarly disrupting the global hiring space.

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Oyster helped us bridge the gap between wanting global talent, but not having entities in all the locations to hire them. If we do a cost analysis between the time and effort it takes to set up legal entities versus having the right talent to join your business through an organization that really understands what we’re trying to do—it’s totally worth the cost.
Alex Nicolaus
Chief People Officer at Paysend

The solution

After considering several possibilities, Paysend chose Oyster as their global employment partner in March 2021. For Alex, what made Oyster stand out is that “they understood exactly what we wanted to do and could easily articulate their solution to help us solve the problem—all within the first half hour of speaking to them.”

Alex says Oyster delivered exactly as promised with a platform that offers simplicity and ease of use, despite the complexity of the global hiring challenges that are abstracted away by it.

“What made it easy to choose Oyster is the user interface, the simplicity, the connectivity—all that works really well. The seamless interface makes it really easy for something that is actually quite complicated.”

Oyster quickly became an extension of Paysend’s business, says Alex, enabling them to engage talent in multiple countries. Overall, he’s impressed by Oyster being a reliable and trustworthy partner.

“What Oyster does extremely well is they deliver on what they say they will do. There’s quality over quantity with Oyster, which helps things get done on time. The signatures arrive, the paperwork is done properly, it’s the latest versions, it has the latest details in it. We haven’t yet seen anything that hasn’t been at the standard we would expect. The relationship has worked extremely well.”

Paysend’s People team always tells candidates that they’ll be hired through Oyster, so that there’s no surprises. When they later solicit feedback, they always receive positive feedback about a smooth and seamless Team Member experience.

“Once they’ve joined and become a Paysender, we ask them, ‘How was your onboarding? How was the process with Oyster?’ And the level of satisfaction has been met. My expectations were exceeded. The feedback we get is our best indicator that the partnership is working.”

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We know confidently that if there’s someone we want to hire globally, we can. And we can do it quickly.
Alex Nicolaus
Chief People Officer at Paysend
The results

As a fast-growing company, Paysend’s needs are constantly evolving, and using Oyster gives them the flexibility to adjust and recalibrate as needed. Oyster creates value by making it possible to access talent anywhere in the world, which has helped them meet their ambitious growth targets.

“We’re growing rapidly, with hiring needs that change rapidly as well, which means that we don’t always find the same people in the same locations. So, if you want to launch a new product and you’re looking for a software engineering team, that specific coding language or that specific commodity in terms of talent might not be in the same country where you launched your first tech hub, for example. Oyster allows us the agility to hire talent globally, which is a big plus.”

Alex explains that Paysend doesn’t hire all of their staff through Oyster, but he thinks of Oyster as a necessary tool in their hiring strategy. It gives them the confidence that they have the right setup in place so they can avoid any stumbling blocks when they do want global talent.

“We know confidently that if there’s someone we want to hire globally, we can. And we can do it quickly at a seamless cost, which helps because hiring targets and growth targets change. We don’t have to worry about how we’re going to get the talent on board. It allows us to remain aggressive on our growth targets because we have the right setup.”

In addition to the confidence, there’s also the time and money saved by not having to hire lawyers and accountants to set up legal entities and local payroll in multiple countries.

“The service is seamless, the communication is very good, and there’s definitely a lot of time and cost saved. The cost of using Oyster is less than what it would cost for us to deliver the same service using external consultants.”

Another benefit of the partnership is that Paysend’s People team has learned a lot about global employment in the process. “We learn about employment regulations, we learn about contract templates,” he says. “There’s a lot of positives there,” he explains, because these learnings will help them when they’re ready to establish their own legal entities in the future.

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We were probably one of the first fintechs to use Oyster because I always feel it’s good to partner with organizations that want to disrupt or improve the industry they’re in.
Alex Nicolaus
Chief People Officer at Paysend

The future with Oyster

In the long term, Paysend plans to establish legal entities in countries where they end up with a significant volume of teammates. “But there’s no rush to do that because we have a very good partner,” says Alex. With Oyster, they can enjoy the platform’s flexibility and cost savings until they’re ready for that next step.

“Once we get a certain volume of employees within a country, it makes more sense for us to create our legal entity. But Oyster gives us a really good bridge between doing that and the agility to have a global workforce that is very personalized to our needs as an organization. It allows us to manage our costs until we feel we need to invest more ourselves.”

Even when they have their own entities in high-volume countries, Paysend will continue using Oyster to hire in other places. “Oyster will always be part of our hiring strategy,” says Alex. “I don’t think it will ever be a diminished relationship.” In fact, he’d like Oyster to continue building on the relationship by “thinking about how to offer additional products and services." 

Alex has some advice for hyper-growth companies who don’t want to restrict themselves in terms of talent. First, you have to be clear internally that a distributed, global model is right for your organization, and that global hiring is part of the company’s growth strategy.

“If you’re just looking at a solution to do a quick fix because you want to hire a few people here and there, it’s not going to be effective because it’s not going to be sustainable. Don’t jump into the how before figuring out the what and the why. Once you’ve figured that out, then the implementation is actually quite straightforward and Oyster is very good at that.”

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