Next Biz Thing #390 icspayroll.com
ICS Payroll https://www.icspayroll.com
This episode of The Next Biz Thing looks at ICS Payroll, a Rotterdam based specialist helping international companies hire and employ people in the Netherlands without setting up a local entity. Markus J. Diplama explores their Employer of Record model, forty eight hour onboarding for EU and EEA nationals, thirty percent ruling tax optimisation, skilled migrant sponsorship, and the Dutch compliance details that regularly catch foreign employers out. He also looks at why a small, specialised team with a labour lawyer in house can deliver something the big global payroll platforms often cannot. Listen in if you are building a team in Europe.
Here is a question that sounds simple until you actually try to answer it. You have found the perfect person for a role on your team. They are brilliant, they are available, and they are genuinely excited to work with you. There is just one detail. They live in the Netherlands, and your company does not. So what happens next?
For a lot of businesses, what happens next is a slow slide into paperwork. Entity registration. Tax numbers. Collective labour agreements you have never heard of. Insurance obligations you did not know existed. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, the brilliant candidate takes another offer, because six weeks went by and nobody could tell them when they would actually start.
Welcome back to The Next Biz Thing. I am Markus J. Diplama, and this is the show where we shine a light on the businesses quietly solving problems that most people only notice when they are stuck inside one. Today we are heading to Rotterdam, to a company that has built its entire practice around removing that specific kind of friction. The company is ICS Payroll, and if you have ever wondered how international teams actually get hired across borders without anyone losing their mind, this episode is for you.
Let me set the scene. The Netherlands is one of the most attractive places in Europe to build a team. It has a highly educated workforce, extraordinary English fluency, a strategic position in the heart of the European market, and a business culture that international companies tend to find refreshingly direct. What it also has is a genuinely detailed employment framework. Dutch labour law is protective, it is specific, and it does not particularly care whether you are a hundred thousand person multinational or a twelve person startup hiring your first European engineer. The rules apply either way.
That is the gap ICS Payroll operates in. Based at Westblaak 180 in Rotterdam, they specialise in helping international companies employ people in the Netherlands properly, compliantly, and quickly. And the word quickly matters more than you might think.
Their core offering is what the industry calls an Employer of Record arrangement. The idea is elegant. Rather than setting up your own Dutch legal entity, which is a genuine project with its own timeline and cost, ICS Payroll becomes the legal employer of your new hire. Your team member gets a fully compliant Dutch employment contract, proper payroll, the correct social contributions, and all the protections Dutch law entitles them to. You get the person you wanted, working on your team, without having to become an expert in a foreign employment system first.
For companies that already have a Dutch entity, they handle the payroll side directly. Same expertise, different entry point. And that flexibility says something about how they think. They are not selling one product and trying to fit every client into it. They are looking at where a company actually is and meeting them there.
Now here is a detail I found genuinely striking. For candidates who are EU or EEA nationals, ICS Payroll can complete onboarding in forty eight hours. Two days. If you have ever waited weeks for an international hire to be cleared to start, you understand what that number represents. It is not just administrative speed. It is the difference between closing a candidate and losing one.
Let me talk about the part of their work that I think is most underappreciated, which is the tax side. The Netherlands offers something called the thirty percent ruling, a tax facility designed for skilled employees recruited from abroad. Used correctly, it materially changes the take home pay of an incoming expatriate employee, which in turn changes what your offer looks like to that candidate compared to every other offer on their desk. It is a real advantage, but only if someone knows how to apply it, qualify for it, and document it properly. ICS Payroll handles that optimisation as part of their service, which means their clients are not leaving value on the table simply because nobody flagged it.
They also handle sponsorship for skilled migrants from outside the EU. That is a meaningfully harder problem, and it is the kind of thing where the difference between a specialist and a generalist becomes very visible very fast. And for companies moving more than one person at a time, they coordinate multi person relocations, which is its own logistical discipline.
So who is actually doing this work? The team is small and deliberately specialised, and I think that is central to understanding them. The company is led by Joost Hubregtse, who brings more than twenty years of payroll leadership to the business. That is not a person learning Dutch payroll on the job. That is someone who has seen two decades of legislative change, edge cases, and the kind of situations that never appear in a help centre article.
Alongside him is Zishan Hussain, a labour law lawyer whose focus sits squarely on employment contracts and dismissal law. And I want to pause on that, because having a labour lawyer inside a payroll company is not standard. Most payroll providers process. They calculate, they file, they remit. When something legally complicated arrives, they refer you elsewhere. Having contract and dismissal expertise sitting in the same building as the payroll function means the advice and the execution are connected. The person telling you what the contract should say is in the same conversation as the person making the payroll reflect it.
That structure connects directly to something ICS Payroll is explicit about in how they work. When you contact them, you reach the specialised team. Not a ticketing queue, not a chatbot, not a tier one support agent reading from a script who will escalate you if the question is hard. In an industry that has moved aggressively toward global platforms and self service dashboards, choosing to be reachable is a real position to take. Software scales beautifully. It just does not always know what to do when a Dutch collective labour agreement applies to your specific role classification and changes the minimum terms you are obligated to offer.
Which brings me to compliance, and to two pieces of Dutch employment law that trip up international employers constantly. The first is the CAO system, the collective labour agreements that govern entire sectors and set binding minimum terms for pay, hours, and conditions. If your role falls under one, it applies whether or not you knew about it. The second is mandatory sick pay insurance. Dutch employers carry significant obligations when an employee falls ill, obligations that can extend far longer than employers from other countries expect. These are not obscure technicalities. They are core to employing people in the Netherlands, and ICS Payroll builds them into the arrangement from the start rather than surfacing them as an unpleasant surprise later.
There is one more thing I want to highlight, and it is about money, but not in the way you might assume. ICS Payroll works on all in pricing, and they provide an upfront Total Cost of Employment quote. That means before you commit, you know what this hire actually costs you, fully loaded, with the employer contributions and obligations included. Anyone who has budgeted an international hire knows how rarely that clarity is offered. The usual experience is a headline rate followed by a series of additions that arrive one at a time. Being told the real number at the beginning is a form of respect for the client's planning, and it is the kind of thing that builds long relationships rather than single transactions.
On the credibility side, the company is registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, and they are currently going through the NEN 4400 audit process, which is the Dutch certification standard for payroll and staffing companies covering compliance with tax and labour obligations. Pursuing that certification is a voluntary decision to be inspected against a demanding standard, and companies generally do not put themselves through that unless they are confident about how they operate.
The proof, though, tends to show up in what clients say. One of their employees, a software engineer named Iaia, described the onboarding as seamless from the very beginning, and highlighted the continuous support, the professionalism, and the expertise in handling contracts and payroll. I find employee testimonials especially telling in this business, because the employee is the person who experiences the actual quality of the arrangement. They are the one whose contract has to be right, whose salary has to arrive on time, and whose questions have to be answered. If the person being employed feels well looked after, the system is working.
Let me zoom out, because I think there is a bigger story here. The way companies build teams has changed permanently. Talent is distributed, the best person for a role frequently lives in a country where you have no legal presence, and the businesses that can hire across borders cleanly have a structural advantage over the businesses that cannot. But the infrastructure for doing that well is still catching up to the ambition. A lot of what exists is either a global platform that treats every country as a dropdown menu, or a local accountant who handles one thing and refers you out for the rest.
What ICS Payroll represents is a third option. Deep local expertise, delivered by people you can actually reach, covering the whole picture from contract to payroll to tax to sponsorship. Specific rather than generic. Human rather than automated. It is a quieter model, and it does not scale as fast as software does. But for a company placing real people into real jobs under real legal obligations, specific and human is exactly what you want.
If you are building a team in the Netherlands, or you are eyeing a candidate there and wondering how on earth you would employ them, take a look at what ICS Payroll does. Whether you need a full Employer of Record arrangement or just want your Dutch payroll handled by people who genuinely know the terrain, they are worth a conversation. And if you are somewhere earlier in the journey, still deciding whether the Netherlands is the right place to plant a flag, they are the sort of people who can tell you what you are really signing up for before you sign up for it.
That is our episode. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. If you enjoyed this one, follow the show so the next business we spotlight finds its way to you. I am Markus J. Diplama, and this has been The Next Biz Thing. Until next time, keep building.
