GSR is a global leader and capital markets partner for the digital asset industry. Founded in 2013, the firm offers market making across crypto exchanges. Spanning around the world, GSR employs over 200 people in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. VP Payroll, Shaily Sharma has led GSR’s global payroll operations since 2022. Together with her payroll associate, she oversees payroll across seven international locations, ensuring accuracy, compliance, and consistency worldwide. We spoke to Shaily to find out more about the collaboration between GSR and CloudPay. Take a look at the full case study below.

An overview of GSR’s experience of global payroll with CloudPay

From fragmented vendors to one global partner

As a growing digital asset trading and asset-management firm operating across Europe, Asia, and the Americas with more than 200 employees, GSR was looking to streamline and simplify global payroll. To support this, they needed to find a payroll partner that could offer a more efficient and reliable solution that could both integrate with their HiBob HCM and support growth at pace.

GSR’s payroll was previously spread across several local providers. Differing vendors mean inconsistent reporting, manual reconciliations, and ad-hoc payments which all create risk, ranging from serious missed or incorrect filings, and the resulting fines, to time-consuming disputes with former providers.

This fragmentation of payroll also led to frequent inaccuracies, and as a result, GSR had to perform supplementary runs almost every month, sometimes as many as 7 or 8 in a single month. These extra runs were both time-consuming and costly, essentially doubling the workload of running another payroll cycle within the same month. Not to mention the stress and frustration it created for the payroll team.

Employees also had no central access to payslips and pay documents. HR had to manually email payslips with passwords to employees, adding to the administrative burden, and leading to frequent requests for documents such as P45s or P60s.

For these reasons, achieving connection and standardisation across payroll was a key priority for GSR. And the right global partner to help GSR address these challenges was found in CloudPay.

Why GSR chose CloudPay

Having worked with CloudPay before at a previous company, Shaily felt confident that she knew the right solution that would meet GSR’s needs. But there were some key ‘showstoppers’ that helped Shaily get her team at GSR on board with the CloudPay solution, starting with a consultative and supportive approach to sales, that drew out and understood the difficulties GSR was facing. As Shaily told us, “CloudPay approached us with the ear to listen
rather than just to sell. I still remember the feedback from my HR Director, who made the decision in the end. She mentioned that she had never seen someone so humble and understanding of the problems we had in hand.”

In comparison with other payroll vendors in the running, GSR also felt that CloudPay was competitively priced and demonstrated clear value for an end-to-end solution.

Another deciding factor was the technology fit with customisable dashboards and reporting. Shaily explained, “I liked how the analytics dashboards looked. I really enjoy that I can create my own bespoke reports and set reminders on when reports are sent to me. All the KPIs come together in one single dashboard. I just need to go there and look at my KPIs. So that was a very attractive point.”

On top of this, the assurance that CloudPay could integrate with GSR’s HCM of choice, HiBob, was critical.

“We were looking for a partner who can integrate with our HR system. We used to use Bamboo HR back in time, but we knew we were moving to HiBob, so we felt very sure that CloudPay could integrate and it would be our time saviour.”

Payroll implementation: a structured, paced, and collaborative approach

During the onboarding process, CloudPay’s implementation team worked closely with Shaily to create and agree a phased roll-out. GSR and CloudPay onboarded two countries per month, with parallel runs and weekly check-ins. When issues arose, such as missing data, it was dealt with swiftly and CloudPay’s team was able to offer alternatives to keep timelines on track. “Implementation was very well planned, very structured, very clean. I really enjoyed having the weekly check-ins with the implementation team because I would tell them my pain areas, that I don’t have the right set of data to pass to CloudPay for example, and they would give me solutions. It was like helping each other in this whole transition from messy systems to cleaner systems. And we met the implementation timelines; we were able to go live on time.”

The handover from implementations to operations remained open and collaborative, so questions post-go-live were also resolved quickly, meaning Shaily felt supported throughout. “When our countries were handed to the operations team, I could still e-mail my implementation manager and say, ‘Can you help me with this?’ and he would feed back to me. It was very good cohesive working, like working hand in hand with implementations and also asking the right questions to the operations team.”

CloudPay now provides GSR with managed payroll and integrated payment services for seven international countries. Having worked together since 2022, as of September 2025, CloudPay has delivered more than 400 payroll runs and over ten thousand payslips to GSR’s global employee population.

What has changed for GSR

• On-time & accurate: Payroll timeliness is now a non-issue; Shaily hasn’t had to draft “pay delay” comms in years.
• Reduced supplementary runs: From many each month to just a handful throughout the year, now only needed occasionally when additional updates arise.
• 4-day processing window: With inputs around the 11^th of the month and payrolls closed by the 20^th unlocking capacity for analytics, reconciliation support, and process improvement.
• Single-funding payments: One monthly transfer to CloudPay who handles all multi-currency net pay and statutory disbursements, with no hidden payment charges.
• Consistent dashboards & reports: The same structure exists everywhere, so as a compact payroll team, Shaily and her associate can confidently manage all entities.
• Employee experience: Fewer “where’s my P60/payslip?” emails thanks to ESS access.