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Why 56% of Payroll Teams Can’t Keep Up with Modern Work Culture

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1 year ago

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payroll

When companies still rely on old software, they lack the flexibility they need to grow—and payroll software is one of the surprising culprits

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, October 23, 2025/APO Group/ –Working remotely has benefits, as does working from the office. Both concepts are part of changing workplaces. Rather than choosing sides, workplace cultures should evolve to embrace these new dimensions. But when companies still rely on old software, they lack the flexibility they need to grow—and payroll software is one of the surprising culprits.

RTO? WFH? It’s not a contest

Tensions between working remotely and in the office are well-documented. Employees treasure their hard-won autonomy, the option to work remotely (WFH), and not being judged by how long they sit at a desk. Many executives see human contact as the foundation for strong workplace cultures and insist on return to work (RTO) as the way forward.

At a glance, the latter have the momentum. Most recently, Microsoft joined the RTO trend by requiring employees to be in the office at least three days a week, while Amazon requires five days a week. But business experts warn against rushing back to the previous status quo. The new workplace culture grasps how people work at least as much as where they work.

“Work hasn’t been limited to an office for at least a decade. When businesses decide about where they want their people, they should modify their culture and not romanticise a style of working that hasn’t existed for quite some time,” says Sandra Crous, MD of payroll provider Deel Local Payroll.

Businesses are realising that simply rewinding the clock has consequences, ranging from talent retention, missing goals, and falling morale to legal consequences, especially when they contravene labour laws around due process.

The new office is the old office

An office is important. It represents the essence of an organisation and provides a common space for its people. Even so, it’s not the same office of a decade ago.

Technologies like video meetings and messaging platforms alter how people produce results. Many employees embed with customer teams or work on a customer’s schedule, often remotely or at the latter’s offices. Companies are hiring people for their skills and competitive costs, regardless of which country they live in. Productive workforces increasingly integrate part-time, contract, and freelance workers.

For payroll, the answer is simple—use cloud-native platforms

These changes became embedded during the pandemic years. The battle between RTO and WFH is a misguided attempt to diffuse this tension. Instead, business cultures should evolve to accommodate the new workplace.

Technology is at the heart of the change. This cultural reconfiguration needs flexible and feature-rich business software, while outmoded software creates more rigidity. Payroll software, a cornerstone of employer-employee relations, is one of the worst holdups.

Traditional payroll software makes it much harder for payroll, HR, and finance staff to align with employees. According to the 2025 Deel Australia Payroll Report (https://apo-opa.co/4huBEuQ), 56% of payroll staff flag inflexible reporting as a major barrier, 41% struggle to respond to employees in a timely manner, and 40% frequently encounter payroll system errors.

More specifically, many point to difficulties managing hybrid, remote, and global workforces.

“The office may have changed, but we still often meet payroll teams who say they have to keep doing things like they did ten to twenty years ago. That means old and inflexible systems that sit in a corner and grow more isolated from the modern direction their companies are moving in,” says Crous.

Going cloud-native

A substantial number of companies still use payroll software that is at least 10 years old. This is prehistoric considering the features of cloud-native payroll platforms, such as self-service access, earned wage access, process automation, remote administration, flexible reporting, and automatic legislative and software updates.

With cloud-native software, a payroll administrator can remotely access and process salaries securely. A travelling manager can seamlessly check and approve requests on their smartphone. Executives in charge of finance can examine audit trails and generate custom reports directly. HR staff can automatically enhance talent management systems with payroll data.

Cloud software improves productivity, saves substantially on payroll processing costs (PAYO – https://apo-opa.co/42QS8ay), and reduces mistakes by 60% (Forrester – https://apo-opa.co/4ow4BZg). It also reduces total cost of ownership—economies of scale create lower usage and licensing costs that companies can easily increase or decrease.

Remote work versus working at the office shouldn’t be opposing ideas. They are both part of the new workplace. Companies using modern software platforms enjoy the flexibility to find the right balance for their unique culture and requirements, says Crous.

“In the modern workplace, these options work alongside each other. The key issue is which parts of the business are lagging and how to improve them. For payroll, the answer is simple—use cloud-native platforms.”

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Deel Local Payroll, powered by PaySpace.

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Huawei Wireless Unveils Innovation Breakthroughs to Pioneer New Communications Networks

Published

16 hours ago

on

October 29, 2026

By

Huawei

The innovation breakthroughs for pioneering new communications networks include RetinaMIMO, new materials, and OSCAR solution among other root technologies. By tackling coverage, energy consumption, and capacity challenges, the breakthroughs drive ubiquitous experience, simplified and green networks, and superior spectral efficiency. The breakthroughs have unlocked a wealth of new capabilities, including the world’s first commercial U6 GHz device VitaAAU, GigaGreen Plus series, and UBBPi series.
Huawei promotes A2A-T standards and drives commercial open-source OpenAN through extensive partnerships to build an open telecom agent ecosystem.

 




 
 

SHANGHAI, CHINA – Media OutReach Newswire – 29 October 2026 – At Huawei Decoding China 2026, Fang Xiang, Corporate Vice President and President of Wireless Network Solution of Huawei, unveiled a series of innovation breakthroughs to pioneer new communications networks. The innovation breakthroughs mark major leaps in root technologies focused on ubiquitous experience, simplified and green networks, and superior spectral efficiency. With the breakthroughs, Huawei has launched the world’s first commercial U6 GHz device VitaAAU, GigaGreen Plus series, and UBBPi series. Additionally featuring the new progress in open ecosystem for telecom agents, the breakthroughs will lay a solid foundation for new communications networks.

With booming intelligent devices and services, new devices, traffic, and applications are taking shape in the mobile industry. The new devices are expanding network connectivity from people to things and agents, increasing the number of connections by 100 times. Device-cloud synergy for intelligent services calls for stronger uplink capabilities to support training and inference, shifting network focus from downlink dominance to both uplink and downlink. With new applications, come a diversity of new interaction modes, calling for higher standards in experience and driving networks to support ubiquitous steady ultra-low latency with a high reliability.

As the world steps into an intelligent era, the value of connectivity is not only about quantity—it’s more about quality. This has been inspiring Huawei to convert cutting-edge breakthroughs into the commercial practices of new communications networks by focusing on root technologies for ubiquitous experience, simplified and green networks, and superior spectral efficiency.

Pioneering ubiquitous experience

RetinaMIMO is a new pioneering technology designed to solve the challenge of concurrent ultra-high bandwidth and ubiquitous coverage. It features the industry’s first Retina scanning system that allows RF link topologies to be reconstructed to eliminate coverage collapse in the vertical direction. It also adopts a reconstructed antenna array architecture to address the diminishing marginal gains as array elements (AEs) increase.

Based on RetinaMIMO, Huawei has launched the world’s first commercial U6 GHz device VitaAAU. Compared with similar products with 1024 AEs, VitaAAU widens coverage by about 30%, enabling U6 GHz to match C-band in both horizontal and vertical directions. This enables operators to deliver U6 GHz coverage for new communications networks on their C-band sites, minimizing overall TCO. To date, VitaAAU has seen commercial adoption in the UAE and other markets, with peak downlink speeds exceeding 10 Gbps, making ubiquitous premium experience a reality.

Pioneering simplified, green networks

Huawei’s pioneering EP power amplifier (PA) architecture capitalizes on new materials and technologies to solve the problem of energy efficiency decline on higher frequency bands, maximizing energy conversion efficiency. The industry’s first-ever multimode dielectric filters allow antennas to have small dimensions and low power consumption on multi-channel networks with high frequency bands. Powered by new materials, technologies, and architectures, VitaAAU antenna is reduced to 1.5 m in diameter while supporting “0 Bit 0 Watt 0 Loss”, delivering superior energy saving efficiency. These innovations enable Huawei’s GigaGreen Plus series products to achieve significant reductions in dimensions, weight, and power consumption, better positioned to power simplified and green networks.

Pioneering superior spectral efficiency

Multi-band, multi-cell, and multi-user interference is a major restrictive factor of capacity. The time scaling of the Tau (τ) law is introduced to base stations for the first time to realize optimal dynamic resource scheduling across all domains based on the OSCAR solution. With low-latency bus and high-speed interconnect technology, a high-speed architecture is built to enable the real-time exchange of massive data. Thanks to software and hardware synergy, new UBBPi series products improve average user experience by 1.3 times while reducing power consumption by approximately 40%, further improving spectral and energy efficiency.

Pioneering open-source autonomous networks

Autonomous networks have emerged as an inevitable choice to deal with the growing AI services and increasing network complexity. RANSpirit is another industry first from Huawei, implementing single-domain network autonomy based on the telecom foundation model and digital twins. To date, RANSpirit is serving more than 1.2 million cells across 25 networks around the world, providing assistance to more than 2,000 engineers.

Extensive agent collaboration relies on an open, win-win ecosystem. This galvanizes Huawei to join industry partners to develop ecosystem standards, communities, and industry alliances. In terms of standards, Huawei adapts to the TM Forum, building a cross-agent foundation on the A2A-T standard and framework agreed upon by the industry. In terms of communities, Huawei jointly promotes neutral open-source communities and donates open-source agent components to the Linux Foundation, driving global collaboration and innovation. With regard to industry alliances, Huawei has taken the initiative to pool ecosystem strengths to accelerate business implementation based on the GSMA industry platform.

Fang concluded with the reiteration of Huawei’s unswerving pursuit of dual-drive innovation to promote new breakthroughs in mobile networks and work with partners from around the world to deepen the OpenAN ecosystem, advancing new communications networks through technological innovation and open collaboration.

FAQs

Q1: Why is it challenging to balance ultra-high bandwidth and ubiquitous coverage?

Ultra-high bandwidth depends on higher frequency bands. As we know, a higher frequency leads to a greater propagation loss of electromagnetic waves and a weaker ability for them to penetrate obstacles, because high-frequency signals attenuate fast and have short coverage distances, while ubiquitous coverage requires signals to travel a long distance in complex environments. Inherently, the two priorities pull in sharply opposite directions.

  




 

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Cassava Technologies becomes an authorised reseller of Claude on Amazon Bedrock

Published

2 days ago

on

October 28, 2026

By

The agreement allows Cassava to give organisations across Africa another route to access these capabilities, helping them adopt AI technology more easily as they prepare for future growth

LONDON, United Kingdom, October 27, 2026/APO Group/ –Cassava Technologies (www.CassavaTechnologies.com), a global technology leader, has become authorised to resell access to Anthropic’s Claude models through Amazon Bedrock.

Claude is Anthropic’s state-of-the-art large language model, offering features like advanced reasoning, vision analysis, code generation, and multilingual processing. The agreement allows Cassava to give organisations across Africa another route to access these capabilities, helping them adopt AI technology more easily as they prepare for future growth.

 




  

Our goal is simple, advanced AI within reach of every business, government, researcher, entrepreneur and university across the emerging markets globally

“What matters to our customers is being able to use AI in their business, and that starts with access to the best models. Bringing Anthropic’s Claude to them through Amazon Bedrock delivers on this need, which is supported by the infrastructure, partnerships and services African businesses need to adopt them responsibly and take a greater part in the digital economy. Our goal is simple, advanced AI within reach of every business, government, researcher, entrepreneur and university across the emerging markets globally,” said Hardy Pemhiwa, President and Group CEO of Cassava Technologies.

 

Through Amazon Bedrock, organisations can access Anthropic’s Claude models and incorporate them into their own applications and services. Cassava’s authorised reseller status gives African customers a way to access Claude through a local partner focused on serving businesses across the continent.

 

Through its digital ecosystem, which encompasses connectivity, cloud, cyber security and AI solutions, along with a continent-wide data centre footprint, Cassava is investing in the infrastructure and solutions needed to support the wider adoption of artificial intelligence across Africa.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Cassava Technologies.

 

 




 

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Idris Elba’s Akuna Group launches free Artificial Intelligence (AI) filmmaking programme for creators in five African countries, in collaboration with Google

Published

3 days ago

on

October 27, 2026

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Over fifty weeks, selected creators will move from a twelve-week academy into mentoring, pitching and production; Selected funded teams will make their films, which will be showcased in October 2027

Creators need a route from the classroom to the screen, and this programme carries them all the way, from their first application to a finished, funded film

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone, October 26, 2026/APO Group/ —An AI filmmaking programme for African creators opens today in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and South Africa. Applications are live at (https://AkunaLearning.com).

Akuna Learning, from The Akuna Group, chaired by Sir Idris Elba, today opened applications for From Script to Screen with AI, a free programme that equips eligible African creators to tell stories on screen leveraging artificial intelligence. Delivered in collaboration with Google and supported by US$1 million funding from Google.org, with curriculum developed by Curious Refuge, the programme is open to aspiring filmmakers in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and South Africa.

 




 
 

Applications are open now at (https://AkunaLearning.com) and close on 15 November 2026. The programme is free to apply and, for those selected, free to attend.

Over fifty weeks, selected creators will move from a twelve-week academy into mentoring, pitching and production. Selected funded teams will make their films, which will be showcased in October 2027. Creators will maintain control of their work, with no claim of ownership rights by the programme or partners running it.

From foundation to funded film

Every participant will complete a foundational course in AI filmmaking; then participants will be able to choose to specialise in one of five creative pathways:

  • Fiction: narrative filmmaking and scripted storytelling, from short film to series.
  • Documentary: real-world stories and factual filmmaking.
  • Animation: animated storytelling, motion design and visual world-building.
  • Advertising: branded storytelling, commercial content and creative campaigns.
  • Screenwriting: script development, dialogue and structure, writing from page to screen.

The programme is structured in five stages:

  1. Applications & Selection (October 2026 to January 2027). One open call across all five countries, closing on 15 November 2026, with review panels in each country and a final panel looking across all five.
  2. Learn & Get Certified (February to April 2027). Twelve weeks of online training with Curious Refuge, with weekly Akuna facilitation, in-person meet-ups in every country and certification at the end.
  3. Get Mentoring (April to June 2027). Graduates put forward their own one-page ideas. Shortlisted idea owners build teams, which then spend four weeks with mentors and subject experts.
  4. Pitch Your Film (June to July 2027). Mentor-endorsed teams pitch to panels drawn from Akuna, Google and the wider industry. Selected projects are funded.
  5. Produce Your Film (July to October 2027). Funded teams make their films with creative and technical support, then take them to festivals and showcases. The programme is for aspiring and emerging visual storytellers: filmmakers, screenwriters, animators, advertisers, digital content creators, photographers, designers, editors and visual artists. Applicants do not need AI experience, a film school qualification or a set number of years in the industry.

 

Sir Idris Elba, Chairman of The Akuna Group, said: “For me, this is about learning. This is about access to courses that help educate creators across the continent to tell their stories. Through Akuna Learning, we’re partnering with Google and Curious Refuge on ‘From Script to Screen with AI’, a remarkable training and mentorship programme teaching African filmmakers to use AI tools. Selected projects will receive production funding, and creators will retain control of their work. I’m looking forward to seeing the stories they choose, and how the education leads to employment and self-momentum, but helps shape the narrative of Africa.”

Khaled Gad, Chief Executive Officer of The Akuna Group, said: “Training on its own does not build an industry. Creators need a route from the classroom to the screen, and this programme carries them all the way, from their first application to a finished, funded film. It opens on the same day and runs to the same standard in all five countries. You do not need a film school background or any experience with AI to apply. You need finished work that shows what you can do, and your application in by 15 November.”

How to apply

Applications are submitted online at (https://AkunaLearning.com) between 26 October and 15 November 2026. Applicants must:

  • physically reside in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone or South Africa;
  • be 18 or older on the date of application;
  • have access to a laptop, reliable internet and consistent power for the duration of the programme;
  • be able to commit fully to the twelve-week academy from February to April 2027, and to the later stages if they progress.

Applicants should include existing creative work, however modest, that shows their talent and commitment. Women are strongly encouraged to apply.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of The Akuna Group.

 

 




 

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