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A conversation with Remote’s Embedded GM, Pim Altena, on global infrastructure, partner expectations, and why embedded payroll only works when the foundations are real.
Check out the full interview here.
When you talk to someone who has lived the pain of global hiring, you hear it immediately. In my conversation with Remote’s GM for Embedded and Technology Partnerships, Pim Altena, that came through within the first few minutes.
Before joining Remote, Pim was managing a global partnerships team from Singapore. He told me the story of trying to hire someone in Italy, only to realize the candidate would need to relocate to Amsterdam because the company did not have the infrastructure to legally employ them in their home country.
At that point he found Remote as a customer, and the experience reshaped how he thought about building international teams.
““By hiring through Remote, expanding internationally becomes just so easy. It removes constraints you did not even know you had as a business leader.”
That discovery eventually led him to join Remote as an operator, now responsible for the company’s embedded strategy and technology partner ecosystem.
Remote is often described as the EOR provider that took the harder path. While many competitors started with an aggregator model, relying on third-party partners in each country, Remote built its own legal entities and compliance infrastructure from the beginning.
Pim said this was a deliberate choice from the founders, Job and Marcelo, long before remote work exploded.
“They wanted to control the customer experience. You can only do that when you own your own infrastructure and are not dependent on third parties with different incentives.”
Today Remote covers 100 countries where it owns the full stack: legal entities, compliance operations, payroll expertise, and a consistent technology layer. Other providers may market coverage in more countries, but often through networks of subcontractors.
The distinction becomes obvious when large HR platforms and payroll providers start evaluating embedded partners. These are not casual buyers. They bring engineers, compliance teams, and deep due diligence.
“When you are selling to embedded partners, they are experts. They have their own engineers. They know when you are bluffing and when you are not.”
Most embedded EOR or payroll partnerships break down in three places: technology, infrastructure, and service. Remote positions its offering around these same three pillars.
Partners want a unified experience for customers, but they also need access to real expertise behind the scenes. Pim explained that relying on your embedded partners’ service teams becomes unavoidable in global payroll, where compliance rules differ country by country.
“If you are building global payroll into your platform, you cannot build all the expertise in-house.”
Remote’s model keeps the embedded experience inside the platform for onboarding and day-to-day workflows, but when edge cases appear, Remote steps in directly to resolve questions. According to Pim, customers actually prefer this because they want an expert involved when compliance matters get complex.
He also pointed to a future state where AI will reduce some of the friction in service routing, but for now, human expertise still matters too much to remove.
Remote’s embedded portfolio now includes several well-known names, but Pim highlighted BambooHR as one of the clearest examples of what a successful partnership looks like.
He said BambooHR created a product it could genuinely sell as its own. The experience lives inside BambooHR’s interface and is marketed as BambooHR EOR, powered by Remote, on the backend. Their sales team leads the motion, their product team owns the customer experience, and Remote provides the infrastructure and expertise underneath.
“It is BambooHR EOR first and foremost. They put their name on it. That instills confidence.”
This model differs from traditional integrations or referral partnerships. In embedded, the HCM is not lightly recommending a partner. It is selling a new product pillar. That requires trust in the underlying system, and trust is only possible when the infrastructure is real.
As Remote invests in more HR modules within its own direct platform, it would be fair to wonder whether this puts the company into conflict with HCM partners. Pim said the overlap is natural and not something Remote hides.
Remote’s north star is global compliance. The additional HR tools provide a smoother workflow for direct customers, but Remote has no intention of building a full HCM that competes across every module.
“We want to provide a platform that can do everything, but it is not going to do everything for everybody.”
And as he put it, successful tech companies almost always partner and compete at the same time. The dynamics are not something Remote tries to paper over. Transparency and alignment matter more than pure separation of features.
The final topic was Remote’s newest announcement: a partnership with Workday to power its global payroll offering for the medium-enterprise segment. Pim described the experience as impressive not only because of the size of Workday, but because of the speed at which they moved.
“The ability to move at such a quick pace is not something you expect from a large company. But the speed at which Workday is executing is phenomenal.”
Workday will sell the global payroll offering under its own name, with Remote powering the infrastructure behind the scenes. This fills a meaningful gap for mid-sized companies that want global hiring and payroll directly inside the Workday experience.
For Remote, the Workday partnership validates the years of investment in owned infrastructure. For the market, it signals that global payroll is becoming a required component of the broader HR stack, not a niche extension.
My main takeaway from the conversation is how deeply infrastructure drives the outcomes in embedded payroll. You cannot fake legal entities. You cannot fake compliance expertise. And you cannot fake a unified customer experience if support relies on swivel-chair handoffs to subcontractors.
Remote’s decision to build rather than aggregate has earned them credibility with the partners who ask the hardest questions. It also positioned them for the Workday announcement, which will likely accelerate the entire embedded category.
Whether you look at Remote as a direct provider or an embedded engine inside other platforms, the strategy is the same: global payroll only works when the foundations are real.
