The SME Story: Kamal Reggad, co-founder of RemotePass

What’s the most important lesson to learn about being an entrepreneur?
Like most entrepreneurs, when I began building my first startup, I wanted every decision to be perfect. In reality, the intrinsic quality of a decision accounts for maybe 15-20 per cent of the final outcome. The remaining 80 per cent depends on the team’s ability to execute new ideas and the speed of that execution. I think building a framework of decision-making can help a lot in prioritising and identifying the opportunities and challenges to address.

What is the core concept of RemotePass?
We’re working to create a world where anyone can work from anywhere while having access to benefits and financial services. By taking the complexity out of the process and making it a click-through experience, we are reinventing payroll and benefits for forward-looking companies and their remote teams. Companies of different sizes use our platform to build and manage global remote teams. They rely on our solution to establish employment and contractor contracts, manage day-to-day HR operations and process mass cross-border payroll in over 120 countries and in more than 80 currencies.

What were the challenges you encountered when setting it up?
I think understanding the global HR industry was and is still one of the toughest challenges, as labour laws and processes differ from country to country. Certain technical aspects require a lot of research, external advisory and documentation (payroll, taxation, legislation). There is also the complexity of building a flexible and compliant platform with global standards and finding the right resources. You can add to that the difficulty in convincing global providers to dedicate time and resources in the beginning when we had registered only a few transactions.

Give us a business overview of RemotePass’ operations.
We’ve recently secured a pre-series A funding from leading investors. We’ve been growing at over 100 per cent quarter-over-quarter, and our goal is to maintain this growth by growing the team from 25 to 60 people over the next three-six months.

We started in the UAE with a special focus on the region, but today we are a global company. Our clients are spread across the globe, ranging from seed startups to publicly listed and government companies too.

What are your expansion plans?
We aim to continue to grow in the GCC market where we are far from our full potential. We’ve decided to double our teams across the region, as we want every company that has regional or global ambitions to rely on RemotePass to streamline their compliance and payroll for their remote teams. We are also building an international sales team to conquer new markets in APAC and Europe.