HR systems in 2050

BARCELONA 

Today is the first day when we are closer to 2050 than to 2000. Time to look back and ahead and try that most perilous of exercizes: predict the future.

2000: Turn of the millennium
The turn of the century, which was also the turn of the millennium, is when I had just started out in the HRIS vendor business, having joined PeopleSoft as Product Manager for France and Spain. I still remember vividly the drivers for all companies investing in a modern HRIS system:

-Self Service
-Training and competencies
-Global HR system of record
-Total cost of ownership.
-Internet was barely starting out and edging out client-server-based systems.

2025: What has really changed
-Rebranding of major HR areas: Time and Attendance/Time and Labor Management has become Workforce Mangement, Strategic HR is now Talent Management, Training has morphed into Learning and, of course, Human Resources is now Human Capital.
-DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) became all the rage, although the pendulum seems to be swinging in the opposite direction
-BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) seemed  destined to a promising future but, faced with security risks, many companies still insist on their employees, even on their contractors, using corporate devices. 
 -Generative AI and AI Agents are more hype than reality.
-Mobile HR has become reality with casual users (i.e. employees and managers) relying as much if not more on their smartphone and tablets to access their HR applications  than power users (HR specialists.)
-Analytics has definitely become bigger and has become one of the success stories helping HR show its value to the business by relying on hard-to-refute data.
-Metaverse and gamification never held up their promises and the fad disappeared as soon as it appeared.
-Well-Being seems to be another of those fads which I have little doubt will slowly fade into the susnet of HR systems never to be seen again.

2050: Who knows

Since I am as likely to be wrong as right, but acutely aware that even if I'm still around many of my readers won't be, let me try the following:
-AI will become a cornerstone of HR systems in more ways than one.
-Reskilling and upskilling and any other dimension of skills will also feature prominently in HR areas of action (if not of concern) especially as a consequence of the previous trend.
-New career paths or new definition of what a career is will appear.
-Communication will go into directions which we can hardly envisage today (TikTok for HR?)
-One change though is inevitable: many vendors will disappear, some will survive and new ones will emerge. 

What HRIS vendors for 2050
The table below looks at HRIS vendors in 2000, 2025 and 2050. I can see some vendors surviving in 2050, but some will be gone just like those I knew a quarter century ago. Who now remembers Peterborough Software? It was such a major vendor in the UK in 2000 and is now largely gone. The only two vendors that I see making it into 2050 is ADP, celebrating its centennial, and SAP. I have strong doubts that Workday, the current HRIS leader, will survive. It may well be on its way out while Cornerstone and Saba will be long dead. As ancient Romans used to say, "Sic transit gloria mundi" - and thus passes the glory of the world. 

Happy one-year anniversary, ChatGPT! If only you could get it right.

PARIS

It was exactly a year ago that what was to become the world's most famous AI tool was published taking the world by storm. In just 2 months, it had reached the 100-million-user mark.

Compare this with ubiquitous WhatsApp which took 2.5 years to reach the same number of users.

Internet took 7 years. Nextflix 10 years. Smartphones which nobody remembers ever living without took...16 years to reach 100 million users. 

 I was among the first to test it and like most was blown away by its magic-like qualities: providing mostly OK answers to every question asked. But, careful, ask the same question in a language other than English and you may well get a different answer. Or none. One example: Most, if not all, Danish scientists conduct and publish their research in English since they are all fluent in the language. Ask a very specific question on one such topic in Danish and since no research has been published in Danish ChatGPT will draw a blank. So, yes, it is available in a zillion languages, but its practical uses are quite limited.

Since so much has already been written on ChatGPT, no need for me to pontificate here on its pros and cons. I will just mention two things.

First, in my area, HR technology, there's little doubt that the AI potential is huge. So much of what HR does is repetitive that an AI-based tool could, for instance, provide users with lightning-speed answers to their queries, a step up over traditional FAQ or emailing somebody in HR.

Second, hoping I won't come across as too narcissistic, I asked ChatGPT who wrote my best-selling book, "High-Tech Planet: Secrets of an IT Road Warrior". To my utter surprise this was ChatGPT 's answer:

 

 

 

Hurt, I hit "Regenerate" to see whether ChatGPT will get it right the second time round (at least the description of the book was correct.) This time I got another author.

 

I wondered whether, in spite of my title being quite specific, there wasn't another, possibly two, books with the same title. So, I just searched the traditional way: I googled it and saw that only one book was published with this title and it was the one by yours truly. Sigh of relief.

Feeling much better, I remembered that Bing now comes with Microsoft's own IA tool, so I asked Bing.
And this is what I got:

So, here you go. All the hoopla may be about OpenAI's ChatGPT, but for me Bing is the most reliable of the two.

Forex fintech companies: Why TransferMate is losing out to TransferWise - and may have even more serious problems coming its way

PARIS 
With most mainstream banks embracing the internet now, even going mobile, one might wonder why one should bother with new financial services startup companies. There are at least two reasons I'd like to call out for the purpose of this piece.

First, the likes of Monzo and Revolut are digital and even mobile natives, meaning everything about them was designed for the internet/mobile experience from the moment you open your account to how you conduct your banking business about them. Traditional banks, on the other hand, when they embraced the internet/mobile did it (some still do) as an afterthought.

Second, when it comes to transferring funds from an account held in one currency to another held in a different currency, most traditional banks would charge you obscenely high fees and commissions for what is now a purely automated process. Hence, the arrival of fintech companies dedicated to this niche market: Painless, fast, reasonably priced wiring of funds from, say, a dollar-denominated bank account into a euro-denominated account.

Where these forex fintechs markedly differ from traditional banks is that where the latter provide forex (foreign exchange) transactions somewhat as an ancillary service and bleed you for the privilege, for forex fintechs it is their bread and butter. Because of that they developed everything about the way they work (technology, processes, manpower, location) to make the process as efficient as possible. 

Two of the best-known forex fintechs are TransferWise and TransferMate which I have been using for several years now for both my business and personal finances. As the following examples show I have found TransferWise better attuned to my business and personal needs, while TransferMate has gone from bad to worse.

The most shocking thing about TransferMate is how clunky and user-unfriendly the platform is. As an HR technologist I'm used to systems: It is therefore baffling that after so many years of using TransferMate every time I want to initiate a transaction I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out where to enter the source account, the recipient account, the type of transaction and sundry required fields. Any combination that the capricious system is not happy about will result in your moving to the next screen with an abstruse error message. Try to move back to the previous screen and everything is gone, so you'll have to start all over again with no guarantee of what field/sequence of data needs to be corrected. 

Of course, you can always try to contact the support team but if  you happen to be launching this transaction in the evening or over the weekend it may well be a couple of days before anybody gets back to you (see below on quality of TransferMate support staff) which negates the whole purpose of a forex operation where you want to block the current rate on offer. Wait/waste an hour and the operation may no longer be worth your while. Wait a couple of days as TransferMate often does and if you carry on you may actually be losing money. 

Compare this maddening system with TransferWise (see below screenshot). On the landing page they start with the most important piece you need: How much you want to change in your currency and how much you get. From here you may decide if you want to proceed or not. Very efficient. Fat chance of getting that with TransferMate where you have to go through the whole rigmarole explained in the previous paragraph before getting a sense of whether the rate is interesting enough that you want to log in and book the trade. 

And then once you decide you want to book with TransferWise (which in most cases you'd want to because their rates are systematically better than TransferMate) the next screen is simplicity personified: Select the account you're sending funds from, the beneficiary account and click SUBMIT. Et voilà! In a couple of minutes and as many clicks your transfer is on its way. Nothing like the horror story that TransferMate can easily turn into. 

Some typical examples of TransferMate nightmares:

- If the amount is above a certain amount you need to contact them by phone. Meaning that as explained earlier forget about booking the rate you want.

- TransferMate may ask you to provide a proof of wire of the funds, which can become a completely absurd request when the request is made after the funds have arrived. If the funds have arrived in their account, they must have been wired in the first place, mustn't they? And if TransferMate wants to make sure that the funds have indeed been wired from your listed bank account, can't their bank tell them?

-Worse, I've seen cases where TransferMate would not even accept the standard wire notice document delivered by your bank because of some weird reason like the logo or color scheme or other fanciful reasons. Yes, you've read right, a small fintech like TransferMate would challenge the payment advice template delivered by a major bank like Société Générale or ING or Bank of America. Welcome to the looney bin known as TransferMate.

-Sometimes, it may catch TransferMate's fancy to require you to send them a screenshot of your bank account whereby they will see all your personal and confidential data. They will justify this in lieu of the payment advice request mentioned earlier on. Of course, this is not only a violation of your confidential data but you and I understand why they would do that: Get more information on your spending and income patterns to serve what can only be sinister aims.

-All of these tricks serve a single purpose: During all this time, the money you wire into their account is being used to shore up their cashflow for free. Something that I NEVER saw being done by TransferWise.

-Don't try to reason with TransferMate's staff: Their incompetence is so obvious at the first call (what do you expect from people paid peanuts?) that talking to them is akin to trying to have a chat with a brick wall. You'll go nowhere, which is exactly what TransferMate wants: Remember that during all this time YOUR money sits in THEIR bank account for free.

-For Spanish, French and other non-Dublin-based Europeans speaking a non-English language, TransferMate's sales practices are so questionable that they verge on the illegal in some jurisdictions. For one, their Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) are only available in English so to a French user, sure, the platform is in French so they can conduct the transaction in a familiar language, but as soon as they want to check some specific T&Cs, sorry, only English is available. In addition, their French-speaking support person will have in their email signature a French phone number to give French customers the impression s/he is based in France when s/he is based in Dublin, Ireland. Even the company's French office is an empty shell: It refers to InterPay (address: 18 rue Pasquier, 75008 Paris) but this company  was deregistered in...2019! Yes, you read right: In September 2020,  TransferMate is using as their French address a company whose legal existence was terminated more than a year ago. If you run into a legal issue with them, fat chance of getting redress through your country's court system.  

Misleading customers in such a way is more than borderline: Regulatory agencies in both Ireland and Europe are currently scrutinizing TransferMate's practices. Another Wirecard scandal in the offing? 

 

In summary, not only does TransferWise deliver superior user experience, but TransferMate's current legal situation prompted by its sales practices is scary: As the Wirecard scandal showed, your funds can be blocked overnight following an investigation by regulatory agencies. I don't know about you, but I am not willing to take that risk.