For this November edition, we are zooming in on four stories that say a lot about where the market is headed: embedded payroll reality checks, governance at rocket-ship startups, comp tech consolidation, and the unglamorous world of tax accounts that can make or break your week.

Let’s get into it.

1) Lattice Backs Away From HRIS & Payroll

What’s happening

Lattice has told customers that it will be sunsetting its HRIS and Payroll products relatively rapidly:

  • Payroll access continues through March 31, 2026

  • HRIS access continues through July 31, 2026

  • Customers get credited for HRIS/Payroll subscription fees through the transition period

  • The company says it will focus fully on the Talent Suite + AI capabilities going forward

This comes not long after a very public push into HRIS and Payroll, including the launch of Lattice HRIS in fall 2024 and then Lattice Payroll in 2024/2025.

Why it matters: Embedded payroll got another reality check

At the start of the year, I went out on a limb and said that embedded payroll would be the single biggest disruptor of 2025, then followed up in July with a "halftime report" that was already pouring some cold water on that take.

Two big questions have been hanging over the embedded payroll story:

  1. Is payroll really a commodity service you can "just" plug in via API?

  2. Or do the traditional payroll-centric vendors - ADP, Dayforce, UKG, Paylocity - have moats that are harder to cross than they look from the outside?

Lattice pulling back from HRIS and Payroll this quickly is a strong data point for option 2.

Remember, this is not a bootstrapped upstart taking a flyer. Lattice is:

  • Well funded

  • Sitting on a strong Talent Suite

  • Under pressure to deepen stickiness and wallet share with customers

If anyone was set up to make embedded payroll work at scale, they were on the shortlist. The fact that they are retreating after a relatively short window suggests that:

  • The service and support burden around payroll is heavier than it looks on a whiteboard

  • The economics and operational risk may not pencil out unless payroll is truly your core

  • Customers may be more biased towards proven, been-there-done-that payroll providers than previously estimated

For everyone else who has been watching embedded payroll from the sidelines, this is another reminder: APIs are great, but they do not come with the domain expertise earned from 20 years of tax edge cases that the incumbents have already tripped over.

2) Deel Hires a New CFO (and Retires the Father-Son Act)

What’s happening

Deel has appointed Joe Kauffman as President and Chief Financial Officer. He joins after more than a decade at Credit Karma, where he served as CFO, President and eventually CEO.

As part of this transition:

  • Kauffman steps in as President & CFO

  • Philippe Bouaziz, who has been Deel’s CFO since the company was founded, is moving into an Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer role

  • Philippe is also the father of Deel co-founder and CEO Alex Bouaziz

So this is not just a standard upgrade in the finance seat; it is a re-architecture of the leadership table.

Why it matters: From "move fast" drama to IPO adulthood

A few months ago we spent an entire newsletter on the Deel espionage saga and what it revealed about leadership maturity and governance.

My take at the time was pretty simple:

The biggest risk at Deel was not the product, or the market, or the team of operators in the trenches. The risk was that immature or ethically questionable decisions at the very top could erase a ton of value that thousands of employees have been working to create.

Seen through that lens, this move is encouraging:

  • Kauffman has lived through multiple public-company cycles and capital markets swings at Credit Karma and within Intuit

  • Splitting the CFO role away from the founder’s father reduces a big governance red flag

  • Putting a seasoned operator in charge of both finance and day-to-day business performance makes an eventual IPO feel less like a fantasy and more like a project plan

Is this enough to erase the concerns raised by the lawsuit and the stories we have already seen? Maybe not for everyone. Trust in global payroll is slow to rebuild, and plenty of buyers will remember the last year for a long time.

But if you are already heavily invested in Deel or evaluating them as part of a global payroll stack, this is at least a sign that the board is willing to professionalize the house instead of doubling down on the family dynamic.

In other words, this is the kind of "grown-up" move that needed to happen before any S-1 roadshow becomes credible.

3) ADP Buys Pequity: Comp Tech Meets One Of The Biggest Data Lakes In The Game

What’s happening

On October 29th, ADP announced that it is acquiring Pequity, a compensation management software provider founded in 2019.

Pequity brings:

  • Spreadsheet-like compensation planning and budgeting

  • Scenario modeling for offers, merit cycles and promotions

  • Pay equity analytics and guardrails

  • AI-driven insights on pay decisions, integrated with common HCMs 

ADP is framing the deal as a way to:

  • Help employers handle fast-evolving pay transparency laws

  • Deliver deeper analytics on pay decisions at scale

  • Expand compensation tools for mid-market, enterprise and multinational clients

Why it matters: Pairing UX with an unfair data advantage

We have seen a wave of modern comp tools over the last few years: Pave, Pequity, Welcome (now part of BambooHR), Carta’s comp products and others. They have raised the bar on:

  • Collaborative budgeting

  • Audit trails and guardrails around offers

  • Benchmark data surfaced inside the planning flow

The usual trade-off has been:

  • Independent comp tools have slick UX and responsive roadmaps

  • Core HCM vendors have the transaction data and scale, but slower product cycles

ADP buying Pequity is interesting because it tightens that gap. ADP already has:

  • A truly massive set of payroll and earnings data, used by the US government as input to monthly unemployment and wage estimates

  • Deep reach across the mid-market and up into global enterprise

Now they can plug a modern comp engine into that unparalleled data moat. That is a powerful combo.

It will not show up everywhere overnight, and ADP will move carefully. But this is another signal that even if ADP doesn't roll out new features as quickly as some peers, its leadership team continues to push all of the right buttons to put ADP in a future-proof position.

4) Mosey Launches Tax Account Management: Fixing The Worst Part Of Multi-State Payroll

What’s happening

Mosey announced Tax Account Management, a new service focused on the least glamorous, most anxiety-producing part of payroll: state and local tax accounts. 

Highlights from the launch:

  • Centralized oversight of 1,200+ state and local payroll tax agency accounts

  • Help with registering new accounts, resolving agency notices and monitoring existing registrations

  • Aimed at reducing the billions of dollars businesses collectively waste on penalties and interest tied to payroll tax issues

In short, Mosey wants to be the nervous system that watches all the .gov portals so you do not have to.

Why it matters: Remote work and PE rollups created a quiet compliance mess

As a neutral advisor, I am not supposed to have favorite vendors. As a small business owner who hates nothing more than dealing with tax notices, I find Mosey’s mission very easy to cheer for.

Two big trends have made this problem worse:

  1. Remote work
    A 40-person company that used to be in one state now quietly has employees in eight. Every new state means registrations, filings, notices and a new set of late-fee landmines.

  2. Multi-entity PE rollups
    Private equity has rolled up entire verticals into multi-entity structures. Each entity and state combination multiplies the number of accounts someone has to track, often via clunky government portals that were never designed for modern workflows.

Payroll systems like ADP, Paylocity, Rippling, or Deel will calculate and remit the taxes. The painful part is everything around that: opening accounts in the right sequence, keeping credentials alive, clearing up mismatch notices and monitoring whether a "small" mailer from a state agency is actually a big problem.

Mosey’s founder, Alex Kehayias, helped build Stripe Atlas, which I personally used when I launched OutSail to incorporate and open bank accounts with a click. This new product feels like the same core idea applied to long-lived state tax relationships instead of a one-time incorporation. 

I am biased here, because this is the kind of unsexy problem that, when solved, gives small teams a disproportionate amount of their time and sanity back.