Global Payroll: Contractors as Team Members
Matt Drozdzynski, CEO and co-founder of Plane, on global payroll post-COVID
The strategic point is that global payroll stopped being just about moving money, and became about giving international contractors the same day to day product experience as employees. In practice that means one portal for onboarding, tax forms, contracts, payslips, and in some cases benefits, while still keeping the legal line clear so a contractor is not treated as an employee in a way that raises misclassification risk.
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Before this category matured, companies often paid international contractors through Wise, PayPal, Bill.com, or bank wires, then tracked contracts and tax forms manually. The upgrade was turning scattered payments plus spreadsheets into a payroll like workflow that both the company and worker could use in one place.
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Plane pushes this further by making employment type secondary in the software. A company starts by adding a person, then chooses the right setup underneath, W2, 1099, contractor, or EOR. That design makes contractors feel operationally included without saying they are legally employees.
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This is also where competitors split. EOR focused providers argue the safest path is formal employment, because a misclassified contractor can mean unpaid taxes, weak benefits, and large penalties. Contractor first platforms compete by making the contractor path feel almost as complete as payroll, but with better tooling around forms, payments, and self service.
The next phase is a single workforce system where domestic employees, international contractors, and EOR hires all use nearly the same interface, while the compliance engine underneath decides what each person can and cannot access. The winners will be the platforms that make cross border hiring feel as normal as domestic payroll, without turning legal edge cases into operational friction.