Zellis, the leading provider of payroll and HR software to the UK and Ireland, announced a series of company and product updates at its annual user summit in London this week – a highly anticipated event that was attended by close to 400 customers, prospects and partners.

The 2024 summit featured keynote presentations from company leaders as well as panel discussions with industry experts and customers. Delegates also enjoyed a preview of product development plans as Zellis doubles down on its purpose of powering exceptional employee experiences.

The summit marked the general release of Zellis HCM AIR, a major evolution to the company’s award-winning flagship solution, which deploys cutting-edge AI and Realtime payroll to drive tangible efficiency and experience gains. Previewed in June this year, Zellis HCM AIR introduces the following features:  

Realtime payroll enables customers to distribute workloads more evenly across the pay cycle, relieving month-end stress and reducing the costs of errors by creating more time to verify data. Capabilities include autonomous processing and new payroll dashboards which act as mission control for HR and payroll teams supporting instant decision making and updates.

Intelligent anomaly detection identifies unexpected pay data throughout the entire cycle, highlighting irregular findings in real time so that anomalies can be identified immediately while reducing the time-consuming need for manual effort.  

Intelligent data entry further reduces the need for manual data entry by leveraging AI to quickly and accurately scan information from HR forms, entering it into the employee’s record automatically.

Intelligent payslips provide personalised, AI-powered content to help employees better understand their pay, and variations to pay, increasing employee engagement and financial confidence in the process.

Announcing further product enhancements, Zellis also showcased enhanced realtime resilience architecture in Zellis HCM AIR, using the latest Azure functionality to replicate data across three Azure zones, adding additional layers of protection and assurance.

As part of the event, attendees heard great feedback from the earliest adopters of Zellis HCM AIR, with customers referencing its insightful, easy-to-navigate dashboards and time-savings, reduced latency between work done and being paid and time-savings for the payroll teams.

Development plans for Zellis HCM AIR were also revealed as part of the summit, which will see intelligent anomaly detection covering multiple pay periods, and the extension of the product’s intelligent data entry feature to include more payroll and HR forms.

Zellis reinforces commitment to HR and payroll customers – Abigail Vaughan announced as CEO of Zellis business unit

Changes to the Zellis leadership team were also announced at the event. To support the continued expansion of the Zellis Group (Zellis, Benefex and Moorepay), John Petter, who has served as Group CEO for all three business units as well as CEO of the Zellis business unit, is taking on a more focused role as CEO of the Zellis Group. He will continue to work closely with Abigail Vaughan, COO for Zellis for the past five years, who becomes CEO for the Zellis business unit with immediate effect. This change reflects Zellis’ commitment to evolving and increasing its focus on its payroll and HR customers.

John Petter, Zellis Group CEO, said: “Zellis Group has evolved into a multiple award-winning market leader within our sector. In close partnership with our owners, Apax Partners, we have big ambitions for continued innovation, expanding AI integrations to deliver ever increasing benefits for our customers.  

Petter continued: “As the scale of the Group continues to grow, we’re also taking every step to ensure we’re well positioned to pursue our ambitious five-year plan. I have no doubt that Abigail [Vaughan], having led the transformation of Zellis Managed Services over the past five years, will lead Zellis to new heights as CEO.”

Vaughan responded: “Zellis is a purposeful organisation, providing meaningful products and services that are critical to large UK and Irish employers. Our incredible user summit was testament to the fact that we are fully committed to powering exceptional experiences – and I look forward to bringing even more benefits to our valued customers and their people.”

Alongside Zellis’ bold plans for innovation and increasing AI integration, company leaders also previewed a full upgrade of the company’s popular Zellis MyView self-service application, which goes into general availability in early 2025. The Zellis team also presented Zellis Co-Pilot – an AI-powered assistant that enables customers and colleagues to query their policies and data to generate new content for communicating with employees and executing tasks efficientl