05 / 10
Integrating Two Organisations' HR Across Asia After Acquisition
Headline result
Workforce scaled 7,000 → 15,000+
The challenge
A major cross-border acquisition had, on paper, created one global financial services organisation. In practice, HR in Asia was still two organisations wearing one badge – two sets of Core HR, Payroll, Learning, and Advisory services, running in parallel, while the combined workforce grew from around 7,000 to over 15,000 employees in a short space of time.
My approach
As Programme Director, I designed and implemented integrated HR shared services across five countries, bringing Core HR, Payroll, Learning, and Advisory services from both legacy organisations onto a single model. I wasn't just leading the implementation from the outside – I was also on the receiving end of the underlying technology as a customer of it, and part of the team designing how the new model would actually be operationalised day to day. Rather than centralising everything into one location – impractical across five countries and several languages I built three multilingual regional hubs, each carrying enough local capability to serve its markets while operating to one shared standard. A large part of the work was building the capacity and service disciplines the team would need to keep pace with an employee population that was growing faster than the service itself.
The impact
The integrated model successfully scaled to support a workforce that more than doubled, with two previously separate organisations now operating on one HR model across five countries through three regional hubs. Employee satisfaction rose from 55% to 72% favourable within a year of go-live – a 17-point rise, the highest differential recorded anywhere in the wider shared-services group. The team that delivered it – around 40 people at its core, and later recognised as the business's HR Team of the Year – became the backbone of HR service delivery for the region going forward.