Above: Panellists, Beverly King, Ben Oghene, Soren Sturup- Toft & Sigrid Nauwelaerts


Ensuring that the ecosystem of relocation is robust is so important to the whole process of the assignment. “If something happens within the immigration


side or the compliance side, it then has an impact on everything else in the chain, and the whole chain comes down,” Beverly King said. “Talking about the anxiety (around delay) for the employees and the effect on their wellbeing is such a critical thing,” she said.


HOW AUTOMATION IS SAVING TIME & CUTTING COSTS Benjamin Oghene, the CEO of the Cozm, a technology company that handles compliance for global mobility and business travel, talked through a real world example of where technology had been able to solve a major compliance and visa headache for a client. He cited the example of the EU Posted Workers Directive which required everyone attending the Paris Olympics to have a special visa. Cisco wanted to send a team of people to work at


the Paris Olympics but they only had two weeks to go before the deadline, and their normal service provider advised them that the process would take a minimum of six weeks and cost £600 per applicant. “Obviously they couldn’t do that because they had


only two weeks to have the people on the ground,” he explained. “So we (The Cozm) leveraged a combination of different types of automations to file those applications, not in six weeks, but in 60 seconds or less for each application, and for around about 20 per cent of the fees it would have been if it was delivered through humans. “This gives you an idea of the impact of these types of


technologies that are emerging in our industry and how the cost of these services are going to drop dramatically over time, and the speed is going to increase,” he said.


8


The next project that Cisco had was in Croatia, where


they were losing up to a million euros a day from not having people on the ground in Croatia because their Croatian clients told them they couldn’t arrive without having all the paperwork.” Benjamin Oghene explained that they worked with


other companies, including Adidas, and they partner with other service providers, which is also becoming an important part of The Cozm’s work.


HOW CAN BUSINESS TRAVEL, COMPLIANCE & GLOBAL MOBILITY WORK TOGETHER? Beverly King suggested that there were a lot of opportunities for business travel, compliance and global mobility to liaise and work together, and yet in many organisations these departments were kept in separate silos. Sigrid Nauwelaerts of RSA said in her company it was


“very separate, but we are also size wise, much smaller” than her previous workplace. She said that in 2022 the pharmaceutical company’s mobility team started to carry out some risk assessment around business travel, highlighting the need for compliance, who was responsible for it and who would provide the budget for it. She said that no one really wants to take on all the


responsibility for these different functions, especially if there are not going to be given extra staff to help with it. “If you have more resources, maybe that’s a


possibility, or with a different technology that is also a possibility. But I think personally, it makes sense to align those two from a compliance perspective, and then a cost perspective, and aslo aligning also your vendors. I think that definitely makes sense.” Soren Sturup-Toft said that the responsibility was also split at Databricks, where business travel is


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