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Dimitris Papageorgiou, Principal, Advisory, Human Capital Advisory with KPMG LLP where he leads Global Payroll and Workforce Management (WFM) services, is a highly seasoned executive with more than two decades in human resources (HR), WFM, and operations leadership. He specializes in modernizing payroll and WFM operating models through technology and skills-enabled transformations.
A recognized thought leader, Dimitris often keynotes at HR, payroll, and labor productivity conferences in the United States and abroad. His current initiatives focus on helping large, global Fortune 500 organizations across various industries digitize their payroll and WFM functions, leveraging his deep expertise in vendor ecosystems such as Oracle, Workday, SAP, UKG, and ADP to drive holistic and integrated transformations.
Q: What are the biggest challenges the C-suite should know about and address for their payroll teams?
Let’s start by establishing a universal truth: payroll is one of the largest—if not the largest—operating expenses an organization has. As such, the C-suite needs to understand that payroll is as important as finance, HR, operations, or any other organizational construct they may have, yet payroll is grappling with significant, recurring challenges.
Payroll departments are perpetually underfunded, often misunderstood, and most commonly reporting to leaders who do not fully comprehend payroll’s complexity, by no fault of their own. Our 2025 KPMG global payroll survey showed that the top five challenges are the following:
- Data accuracy, cited by 48%
- Compliance with local laws at 47%
- Resource constraints at 31%
- System integration at 34%
- Supporting employees across many countries at 29%
These aren’t just operational hurdles; they create significant financial risk. The key to addressing them is a strategic, top-down commitment to transformation—moving away from fragmented, legacy systems toward a standardized, global model with smart automation.
Q: What more could the C-suite do to understand the changing role of the payroll professional?
The C-suite must recognize that payroll is evolving into a strategic data intelligence and decision-enablement hub. Payroll is the connective tissue between HR, finance, and IT, and often the lowest common organizational denominator for all employees.
With modern technology automating routine tasks, payroll professionals are now focusing on providing strategic labor insights, analyzing workforce trends, and forecasting costs. Payroll professionals are strategic advisors who drive business value, while promoting consistent and positive employee experience.
Q: What has being an executive leader in payroll meant to you?
It has been a journey of architecting and leading profound change. For me, it’s about elevating the perception and function of payroll from a misunderstood cost center to a strategic, value-driving partner.
Seeing a client embrace a modern approach—leveraging intelligent automation and employee-centric design thinking—and witnessing their payroll team transform from reactive firefighters to proactive, strategic advisors is incredibly rewarding.
Q: What advice do you have for other payroll experts who want to follow your example into a C-suite role?
My advice is to first become a holistic business leader—develop a deep understanding of finance, technology, and corporate strategy—and then become a payroll expert.
Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to work with organizations that were setting the agenda on this topic. The experience I gained leading many tech-enabled transformations enabled me to collaborate with the entire C-suite—often the board of many of those clients.
In those circumstances, you must be able to impart information to the C-suite in succinct, easily discernable, fact-based communications while connecting payroll initiatives to broader business outcomes like cost optimization, risk mitigation, or synergy realization.
You need to master data storytelling and advocate relentlessly for payroll’s strategic value, with a proposal rooted in facts versus emotions and with an audience-appropriate level of detail.
Q: What leadership qualities are essential for payroll executives to influence C-suite priorities effectively?
To influence the C-suite, a payroll executive must be a visionary strategist, a compelling communicator, and a data-driven realist. You need the strategic vision to architect a future-state operating model and the communication and analytical skills to create a compelling business case for it.
Crucially, as KPMG’s 2025 survey data on payroll leakage proves, you must ground your arguments in hard numbers, showing how investment in payroll transformation directly impacts the bottom line and mitigates enterprise risk.
Q: How significant is cultural intelligence to your global payroll strategy?
In my work with large-scale global programs, cultural intelligence is non-negotiable. A successful global strategy isn’t about forcing a single process on everyone; it’s about creating a flexible, global framework that respects local regulations, customs, and diversity.
This means designing systems that can handle diverse legal requirements and using a hybrid governance model—as favored by 61% of organizations in our survey—that balances central control with local expertise.
Q: Can you recall a time when you successfully integrated payroll insights into a broader corporate strategy? What was the impact?
A CEO came to us with a problem statement that went along the following lines: his global organization in financial services was experiencing its highest undesired attrition among the senior executive ranks. The CEO was asking to be alerted of any impending departure risk, so that he could have an opportunity to retain those individuals.
The exit surveys the organization had collected over three years were reviewed, and we discovered that individuals were leaving the client for three main reasons:
- No career growth
- Problems with their manager
- Money
We reviewed a sample of those individuals, focusing on behavioral patterns in their interactions with the organization, up to a year prior to departure. The data provided insights that revealed those individuals would change their participation in deferred comp and pension type of contributions months before their resignation.
They would change tax profiles to maximize cash flows and log cases with HR on post-employment considerations around stock- and pension-related matters. Our research identified 11 trigger events. Once someone had exceeded seven of those 11 events, there was a 95% certainty of a resignation within six months.
We created a predictive analytics model that would be utilized by the client’s business partners to have proactive discussions about the three principal areas from the exit surveys with employees identified as those they wanted to retain. Within a year of deploying this analytical tool—which was heavily reliant on payroll and HR data—the organization saw a reduction of 80% in undesirable attrition.
The model worked so well that they ended up deploying it across their entire organization and all ranks, with slightly different trigger events identified.
Q: How do you maintain alignment between payroll goals and overall business objectives, especially during periods of rapid organizational change?
Alignment is maintained through a clearly defined and communicated strategic roadmap. Per KPMG’s 2025 global survey, 92% of organizations claim to have a global payroll strategy, which is an essential starting point.
During rapid change, this roadmap acts as a North Star. It’s critical to have a flexible, cloud-based technology platform that can adapt and to establish a strong governance model—like the regional (56%) or global (33%) models cited in our survey—to ensure payroll decisions remain tied to enterprise goals.
Q: How do you see AI and automation reshaping global payroll processes in the next five years, and what are the pros and cons?
Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are the most significant driving forces reshaping payroll today. The opportunity is immense: AI will move us beyond simple automation to “Agentic AI” that can provide predictive insights, flag compliance risks in real-time, and answer employee queries.
The challenge isn’t the technology itself; it’s the change management required to upskill teams and redesign processes to create an “intelligent hybrid workforce.”
Q: What strategies have you adopted to navigate increasing global regulatory complexities in payroll compliance?
The most effective strategy is to move from a reactive to a proactive compliance posture—a core component of my advisory work. This involves leveraging modern cloud platforms that provide automated regulatory and labor compliance updates.
It also means establishing a robust global governance framework and a sole source of truth for data, which helps in standardizing controls and enables quick, accurate reporting when audits arise.
Q: How can payroll data be leveraged to inform executive-level decision-making across the organization?
Payroll data is a goldmine for strategic insights that can be used to forecast labor costs with greater accuracy, model the financial impact of mergers and acquisitions activity, identify retention risks, and optimize staffing levels.
For example, our survey found that 43% of leading organizations can gather payroll data for executive reporting within a day. When payroll can provide this level of agile, data-driven insight, it becomes an indispensable partner in strategic decision-making.
Q: What role does payroll play in fostering financial inclusion and global equity within multinational organizations?
Payroll is on the front lines of fostering financial inclusion and equity. By ensuring every employee is paid accurately and on time, regardless of location, we build a foundation of trust.
Furthermore, modern trends like earned wage access (EWA) give employees more flexibility and control over their finances. By analyzing compensation data, payroll can also provide the raw data needed to identify and address pay equity gaps across the organization.
Q: How do you see the role of payroll leadership evolving with the growing prevalence of decentralized and hybrid workforces?
The rise of hybrid and decentralized work makes strategic payroll leadership more critical than ever. The complexity of managing compliance, tax withholding, and consistent employee experience across countless jurisdictions is immense.
Payroll leaders must become masters of technology, experts in global compliance, and champions of an “intelligent hybrid workforce,” ensuring the right systems and processes are in place to support any work arrangement. By “hybrid” in this context, I am referring to the management of human and digital labor alike. Agentic AI will still need training, performance evaluation, and continuous learning and upskilling, similar to a human colleague.
Q: How can payroll departments contribute to driving sustainability and corporate social responsibility initiatives?
Payroll contributes directly by ensuring 100% compliance with labor laws and fair pay practices, which is a cornerstone of corporate social responsibility. Pay equity and pay transparency can only be truly administered and safeguarded by payroll. HR provides inputs, but payroll administers payments and establishes equity guardrails.
On the sustainability front, digitizing processes and moving to paperless payslips and reports help reduce the company’s environmental footprint. These actions demonstrate a commitment to ethical and sustainable operations for employees, investors, and customers.
Q: What are the top risks in global payroll today, and how do you mitigate them at the executive level?
The top risks are financial losses from “payroll leakage,” compliance penalties, and data breaches. Our 2025 survey showed organizations lose 2%-4% of total payroll spend to leakage, with 27% estimating losses over $1 million to $5 million annually.
We advise our clients to invest in a unified, state-of-the-art payroll platform with incident and vendor management frameworks role and responsibility matrices on interaction modes, all in service of the modern command and control center needed by organizations to administer quality global payroll. This centralizes controls, automates compliance checks, and provides the transparency needed to identify and stop leakage before it happens.
Q: How do you balance the need for cost efficiency with the demand for employee satisfaction in payroll operations?
This is not a zero-sum game; the two goals are complementary. My experience in applying employee experience and design thinking to transformations shows that modern, automated systems that reduce manual errors also create a better employee experience.
Self-service portals, mobile access, and on-demand pay options reduce the administrative burden on payroll teams (improving efficiency) while empowering employees (improving satisfaction).
Q: What advice would you give to a payroll leader transitioning to an executive-level strategic role?
Broaden your perspective beyond processing. Learn to think like a CFO and a CIO. Master the data within your department and learn to translate it into strategic insights about labor costs, risk, and workforce trends.
KPMG’s global payroll survey clearly shows that payroll’s future is strategic. Embrace technology, become an expert in data analytics, and start building the business case for why payroll deserves a seat at the enterprise table as a standalone strategic function.
Frank J. Mendelson is the Acquisitions Editor for PayrollOrg.