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Is Pinwheel's market limited geographically and does the company see potential for expanding into international markets?

Kurtis Lin

Co-founder & CEO at Pinwheel

I think the international space is super exciting. What I would say is we have our hands more than full with the US. The financial services market in the US alone is plenty big to build a massive business. And again, focus is really critical. That said, in our future, I’m excited about the potential for international expansion. The one thing I'll say is payroll doesn't look the same, it looks very different sector by sector. In some places in the world, like a lot of APAC, they don't actually have payroll systems. The banks pay the employees directly through a contracted agreement with the employer.

The whole industry of payroll systems originated because there was all this complexity around local, state and federal taxes. To ensure compliance, you hired a payroll manager to deal with the compliance layer. At a certain point when software became a thing, we could extract this stuff away by turning it into a software layer. That's how payroll systems came to be.

Now, that complexity also exists in a lot of Europe. But it doesn't exist everywhere. It exists in LATAM as well. I think it's going to be critical for us to identify where there are still largely inefficiencies in other parts of the world. That's where we'll focus our attention. But it won't be, I think, as universal as like, “Oh, we're just going to go everywhere because all places don’t even have this concept of a payroll system.”

Find this answer in Kurtis Lin, CEO of Pinwheel, on the rebundling of payroll into every app
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