When a company hires someone in another country, it’s easy to assume that the hard part is finding the right person. In reality, there’s much more to navigate – especially when local employment laws and compliance regulations vary dramatically from one country to the next.
Native Teams, founded in 2020, set out to make this process easier for everyone. The platform, which now operates in 95 countries and serves more than 3,000 customers, handles the legal and financial complexity of cross-border employment, pay-roll, and work operations, so both parties can avoid the costly consequences of getting it wrong.
At this year’s IFGS conference at London’s Guildhall, Tech Funding News sat down with Skerdi Sino, Native Teams’ chief marketing officer, to understand what the future of global hiring looks like — and why the trust infrastructure behind it matters more than some people realise.
The cost of getting it wrong
One of the most common mistakes companies make, Sino explains, is bringing someone on as a contractor when, legally speaking, they’re functioning as a full-time employee.
In many countries, regulators treat this as a misclassification, and the consequences can be as severe as millions in unpaid taxes and fines that affect both parties.
“We have had customers come to us after paying fines and retroactive payments of half a million euros,” Sino tells TFN, adding that the bills compound quickly when the same mistake is repeated across multiple countries at once.
Native Teams is designed to step in before it gets to that point, he explains, acting as the legal employer on the ground so its customers don’t have to carry that risk themselves.
As cross-border employment becomes more common, thanks to the rise of remote and flexible work, the employer-of-record market has grown to match. Sino, however, is quick to point out what sets their model apart from the “95%” of competitors who don’t own their local entities directly.
“Native Teams has made it adamant for us to only operate in the countries where we own 100% of the entity,” Sino explains. “This is compliance – this is us saying we are here and we’re responsible for whatever happens.”
Trust as an infrastructure
Running payroll and employment compliance for people spread across dozens of countries is, by nature, a deeply personal business.
“There’s a lot of trust,” Sino says. “The employee trusts us to be their employer in the country, the company – our customer – trusts us to treat their employees with the same level of care that we would our own.”
That’s why, even as the company builds out new AI features, Sino says transparency remains central to everything they do. When customers want to apply the employment practices they know from one market to a new one with completely different rules, he argues that the team is there to guide them.
“We keep that human connection,” Sino says, between both the company and the individual worker. “We’re always present when our presence is needed.”
The future of work
Much of the conversation around AI and work focuses on job losses, but Sino is more measured. While he acknowledges AI is reshaping entry-level roles across some industries, he sees the bigger story as a fundamental shift in how and where work gets done.
And as AI tools allow companies to operate with leaner teams, the focus on finding exactly the right person — wherever in the world they happen to be — becomes much more essential.
“Once the team gets to a smaller number of people,” he says, “finding the right resource becomes a lot more important than finding a resource.”
That shift, he argues, is also making global work the new default. As remote and nomadic lifestyles spread, “a lot of the good employees are moving into different countries,” Sino notes, and companies that want the best people will have to follow them across borders.
Rather than treating this as a threat, he frames it as a compounding opportunity: “As far as innovation goes, I believe that opportunities are only going to get compounded in the next five years.”
Those opportunities don’t stop at white-collar roles. Sino says Native Teams is also moving into gig and platform work in sectors like ride-hailing, trucking and construction, areas less exposed to AI-driven headcount cuts, but where workers still need better financial tools.
In Sino’s view, AI, remote work and cross-border hiring are together rewriting what it means to build, and belong to, a global workforce. And with that shift underway, Native Teams is betting that the infrastructure holding it all together will only become harder to ignore.
This content is produced in media partnership with Native Teams and Innovate Finance.
