The world certainly seems a lot smaller than it was just a short decade ago. Instant audio-visual communications across vast distances, disappearing land borders, and affordable air travel have combined to create an environment ripe for collaboration and cooperation across traditional barriers of space and time.
Unfortunately, the rapid advances in technology that allow us to interact faster do not always make that interaction better. Companies operating across national borders too often find out the hard way that workplace culture, government regulations and international business protocol can vary wildly across even small geographic distances.
To overcome these barriers, firms looking to establish a wider footprint in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East (SEEME) while maintaining regulatory compliance are turning to the region’s premier business advisory and payroll organization, Eurofast.
Excellence Across Borders
Eurofast is a boutique professional consulting and employee services company headquartered in Cyprus. It specializes in providing comprehensive payroll and accounting services, cross-border structuring, compliance reporting, international tax and transfer pricing advice as well as M&A and Corporate Finance.
Always quick to anticipate their clients’ needs, they have expanded their portfolio to include the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). With Eurofast, a business can enjoy assured compliance, limit its liability, reduce costs, and maximize resources for peace of mind.
The company has a dense network of offices spread across over 20 countries in the SEEME region, including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, Macedonia, Georgia, Greece, Iran, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine.
Each of these offices is staffed by a carefully-selected team of up to 60 talented professionals drawn after an intensive vetting process from the payroll, taxation, legal, M&A, accounting, audit and consulting specialities. They are recruited from law firms, financial services providers, listed companies and the public sector.
Wherever possible, Eurofast opts for local advisors who have the experience and specialised knowledge to provide intelligence and leadership beyond the baseline. While the human element is at the heart of Eurofast’s success and the foundation of the company’s commitment to excellence, it also invests heavily in technology to support its services.
Every one of its offices is interconnected using the latest computer, telephony, and video conferencing technology to ensure flawless communication and interaction with clients, and internally within its teams. Besides simplifying information exchange, this robust network also facilitates the ability of the company to deliver consistent standards of quality in client services, regardless of geographical location.
Globalized Solutions
Eurofast places extraordinary emphasis on employment and payroll services. They explain this focus as the recognition that effective employee remuneration is critical to business success.
“Our aim is to ensure remuneration plans work in practice and not just in theory, wherever you deploy your people. We understand that globalization and the complexity of the business environment demand sophisticated and customized advice that meets the highest standards, delivered by experienced professionals who put their clients’best interests first.”
Eurofast has fully embraced the shift towards outsourcing to further streamline the process for its clients. By relieving in-house personnel from complicated time-intensive tasks, its clients have more resources to devote to functions that really matter; they are free to focus on their core business, and on recognizing and leveraging opportunities in the new environment into which they have expanded.
Eurofast complements its payroll processing with sweeping initiatives that save the client money, improve compliance, and ensure confidentiality.
A significant factor in these resources is Eurofast’s adoption of the latest HR and Payroll technology. This gives them a significant advantage over less versatile industry rivals who may be more reluctant to invest so heavily in cutting-edge solutions.
To simplify its clients’ operations, Eurofast seeks to make its HR and employment-related services as accessible and as simple to use as possible. Their suite of services includes:
- Payroll preparation and processing
- Due diligence for employer and employee tax, social security, withholding, and compliance
- Due diligence for global legal and regulatory standards
- Employee compensation and engagement programs
- Equity awards for international assignees
- Taxation of expatriates
- Residency and work permits
- Employment Outsourcing Services
- Long- and short-term global equity and cash plan design and implementation.
The Three Keys
There is no shortage of players, both established and new ones, in the payroll industry and it is rather challenging for any individual company to differentiate itself. However, Eurofast has managed to achieve this with remarkable ease.
The company credits its success in this aspect to its three-pronged approach to delivering excellence, which is the combination of Exclusivity, Efficiency, and what the company terms ‘Business Empathy’. These three parameters have been integral to the success that Eurofast enjoys.
Exclusivity refers to their ability to craft tailor-made solutions to each client. This is a departure from the ill-fitting template-based products that are rife in the industry. With Eurofast’s bespoke options, each client can customize the scope, focus, and results they want to achieve in line with their internal company structure, work culture, and goals.
Importantly, this pivot away from a standardized approach meshes multiple points of coordination, which enables the client to reduce the overlapping expenditure of finances and manpower. That leads to the second aspect of Eurofast’s three-tiered philosophy for excellence – efficiency.
Efficiency is the basis on which every Eurofast solution is built. The company’s experts invest a great deal of effort into familiarizing themselves with the client’s procedures, processes, and frameworks before designing and executing their plan. This serves to eliminate bottlenecks and choke points which drastically reduce productivity. At the same time, they identify areas which can be combined or coordinated to create a streamlined flow of work and resources.
“CEOs and CFOs who appreciate how important it is to efficiently manage time and money value this very highly and we make it a point to mirror their concerns and expectations in this respect.”
Eurofast calls this proactive desire to understand the management team’s priorities and expectations ‘Business Empathy’.
“Empathy is defined as the capacity to place yourself in another’s position. In our case, business empathy refers specifically to the ability to understand what a CEO, CFO, or other company leader wishes to achieve, as well as their fears about everyday management and the bottom line. We then align our vision with theirs to work towards a goal that they set.”
“When we hire and when we promote internally, we look for dynamic individuals who embody this capacity to empathize and adapt themselves to achieve common goals in the client’s interests. Common ground and mutual understanding are key to every relationship we forge with our clients.”
Approach Matters
Eurofast has thrived in its sphere for four decades now. Established in 1978 in Cyprus, it initially focused solely on the Southeastern European region and its operations centered primarily on taxation and audit.
Today, the veteran company has a stellar working relationship with many global brands and leading institutions, ranging from medium-sized locally-listed companies to large private entities and multinationals. Its clients come from the manufacturing, retail, airline, and professional services sectors.
This list continues to expand as Eurofast’s long list of delighted clients themselves become its greatest marketing asset. Eurofast has managed to retain its clientele even when the economy is not at its strongest.
“Our ‘Know Your Client’ policy makes the difference. It allows us to attract and retain professional companies who understand the value that we provide, and appreciate how our solutions enable them to weather the worst when their industry is experiencing a downturn while maximizing profits at other times.”
Eurofast has made this policy a fundamental principle for its key management personnel and professional teams.
Making Success a Certainty
Regulatory compliance is becoming an ever more pressing concern for companies, especially those that work across European borders. Factors like the recent introduction of the GDPR guidelines have the ability to exponentially complicate otherwise routine interactions and transactions.
Elsewhere, increasingly sophisticated software to detect irregularities and non-compliance means that simply adhering to the status quo that worked before will not be able to shield companies from inadvertent mistakes that would previously have been overlooked. The consequences can be dire and long-lasting.
Coupled with the need for efficient business models to succeed in a corporate ecosystem which promotes competition, services like those provided by Eurofast have seen considerable value amplification in recent years. Eurofast’s proven track record of delivering reliable advice and actionable intelligence in terms of Payroll and Employment solutions has not gone unnoticed. The company is surging ahead of the competition to establish itself as the most trusted and most competent payroll outsourcing company for any enterprise seeking a profitable business presence anywhere in the SEEME region.
They consistently feature on industry awards and recognition lists but consider the accolades simply a minor incentive; their true motivation lies in seeing their clients succeed, no matter how complicated the task or how demanding the project execution.
“We aim to be in the top 10 professional rankings in terms of size compared to other similar organizations in our region. We simply want our clients to stand out and proudly say that they work with Eurofast in this part of the world!”
