IBM Appoints Prashanth M Kumar as Director, Global Payroll

IBM, the global technology and consulting giant, has announced the appointment of Prashanth M Kumar as the new Director of Global Payroll.

This strategic leadership change underscores IBM’s continued commitment to modernizing its vast Human Resources (HR) and human capital management (HCM) infrastructure worldwide, ensuring precision, compliance, and an enhanced employee experience for its massive global workforce.

Prashanth steps into a pivotal role responsible for overseeing the payroll operations that service hundreds of thousands of IBM employees across over 170 countries.

The position is critical, sitting at the intersection of Finance, HR, and advanced technology.

His mandate is expected to focus heavily on leveraging IBM’s own AI and cloud platforms—including its work with enterprise systems like SAP SuccessFactors and Oracle Cloud HCM—to streamline and automate payroll delivery.

Strategic Mandate: Precision and Digital Transformation

The Director, Global Payroll, is tasked not only with ensuring the timely and accurate disbursement of salaries but also with navigating the complex compliance landscape spanning diverse international tax codes and labor laws.

In recent years, IBM has publicly detailed its internal HR transformation journey, which centers on consolidating disparate HR systems into a unified, AI-driven ecosystem.

Prashanth will likely be a key driver in this effort, ensuring that the critical data link between time management, compensation, and payroll processing is robust, secure, and fully digitized.

By ensuring maximum accuracy and efficiency, the payroll team provides reliable, real-time data that feeds into broader organizational analytics, helping leadership make smarter decisions about workforce forecasting, skills management, and cost reduction.

Given IBM’s emphasis on digital transformation and its consulting services in the HR space, Prashanth’s leadership will serve as an internal case study for how a massive multinational enterprise can achieve operational excellence in one of the most fundamental yet complex HR functions.

IBM Director – Global Payroll: Background and Industry Context

While specific details of Prashanth’s previous executive roles leading up to this appointment are internal, his new position requires deep expertise in large-scale financial compliance, international HR operations, and the implementation of sophisticated enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.

A leader in this capacity must possess the operational agility to manage both in-house payroll processing and external vendor relationships.

This is particularly important in a global aggregator model that relies on in-country expertise.

Prashanth’s appointment comes at a time when technology is fundamentally reshaping HR.

IBM itself has pioneered the use of generative AI in its internal HR processes, such as the AskHR virtual agent, to automate routine inquiries.

By integrating payroll processes with such AI-driven employee service platforms, Prashanth will be instrumental in delivering the personalized, efficient, and streamlined employee experience that defines the modern workplace at IBM.

His success will directly impact employee satisfaction and bolster IBM Consulting’s credibility as a leader in HR transformation for its clients worldwide.

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