Announcing Our Fall 2022 Product Updates

As we head into the home stretch of 2022, the Topia team is excited to announce details of our latest product updates. This includes a new unified UI view of customers’ globally distributed workforces, a new Global Immigration Library solution and a whole host of additional new features.

Over the last few years, we've been busy completely redesigning our platform to support all of the changes and developments we've seen in global talent mobility, travel compliance and distributed workforce management. We've introduced new solutions for remote work, immigration management and business travel, acquiring Monaeo and Pearl Global Tech, but it’s been important to us that this ‘journey’ isn’t felt by our customers when experiencing our products day-to-day.

As such, a big focus of our Fall Release in late November 2022 was on enhancing our user experience to seamlessly bring mobility, business travel, immigration and remote work into new, unified, integrated views for both corporate and employee users - amongst other core highlights. 

New unified views for mobility, travel and remote work

As the barriers between different types of ‘mobility’ or ‘global distributed work’ continue to collapse, so does the desire to have separate systems, separate accounts, separate pages and reports to manage this. 

To reflect this, our latest release further aligns and streamlines our employee and corporate views to cover traditional mobility, business travel, remote work and immigration sponsorship. This means that if an employee is working around the world for any reason, both they and their HR and mobility teams see this collectively managed in new single views.

Immigration data at your fingertips

As part of our recent acquisition of the Permiso immigration assessments engine from Pearl Global Tech, we can now surface key immigration information - including details on various visas, work permits, restrictions and latest immigration law developments - for 73 countries around the world. The aim is to help companies quickly obtain information about options for different permits, potential minimum salary requirements, etc. as they go through the move planning process. This means organizations don’t have to consult their immigration provider at every turn, saving them both time and money.

Integrated COVID-19 data for remote workers

As employees consider their remote work options as part of our remote work explore experience, they can now also take into account potential COVID-19 restrictions and entry requirements for each location thanks to our integration with TravelPerk’s COVID-19  data API - still very relevant for unvaccinated travelers and those traveling to various countries in Asia. 

Enhanced pre-travel assessment capabilities

We’ve expanded on our pre-travel risk assessment engine and the ways in which users can interact with it, including:

• A new self-service portal accessible by any employee in your company where users can:
  • Submit a request for an assessment and authorization to travel - obtaining an automated assessment using Topia’s engine, and either receiving a ‘green light’ or having any flagged risks routed for review according to your business processes
  • Submit a request for a service, such as help with obtaining work authorization for the traveler or a team member to the relevant team within your organization.

• New national and US state withholding tax pre-travel risk assessments, adding to our existing assessments for immigration, social security and posted worker risk.

• New pre-travel risk assessment ‘factor views’ for all risks, helping to immediately highlight to employees and corporate users the logic applied in the assessment process and how the employee’s current and potential future travel stack up against risk thresholds.

Automating the compensation revaluation process

As we go into the new year, many organizations will be starting that dreaded period of salary reviews - made even more complicated when considering mobile employees on equalized compensation packages, mobility allowances based on salary, split pay arrangements and multi-country payroll obligations. 

We’ve introduced our new Bulk Compensation Refresh workflows, allowing customers to import new compensation or employee details (such as promotions or family size changes) and recalculate, review and communicate out changes to mobility policy allowances, tax deductions, compensation worksheets and cost accruals in just a few steps.

Insights for reflecting back on remote work’s big year

We’ve introduced new standard dashboards helping our customers reflect back on their remote work programs for 2022 and understand key stats - such as program usage, typical locations and durations for remote work, risks raised and approval/denial rates - and iterate as needed for the upcoming year.

• • • • • • • Aires, for initiating relocation management services
            • A new standard Topia flat file integration which can be used to receive updates from providers and receive employee data from HR systems - meaning that any provider or any HR system is able to connect with Topia, regardless of their API capabilities.