Ten years in private equity taught Ignacio Spiniak, CEO of Talana, how to think like an owner. It didn't teach him how to run payroll software. But he had learned to learn. So when Talana came calling, he had the will but not the résumé. He went anyway. A Phil Knight line kept him company on the way: some people retreat to what they know, some walk straight into the unknown. Spiniak walked. No regrets, his words, not ours.

From payroll software to an all-in-one HR platform

Three years ago, Talana was mostly a Chile-only payroll and admin tool coming out of a rough growth spurt, with a strong team, but operating in silos. Today, Talana is a leading all-in-one HR platform, part of the Visma, nearly twice the size, and achieving record customer and employee satisfaction. Over half a million users. But the biggest transformation wasn't the scale, it was making customer satisfaction everyone's responsibility, every single day.

"We made customer satisfaction a company-wide daily obsession. When customers are happy, everything else flows well. When there are pains, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get back to work."

Software that works for everyone, from the shop floor to the boardroom

Payroll can feel like a box to tick. Talana doesn't build for the tick. It builds for the whole company: managers, employees, the miner checking in from the middle of a mountain, the construction worker signing a contract on-site, the office employee glancing at the org chart mid-meeting. And that same philosophy holds whether the customer has five employees or twenty thousand: bury the hard part like union rules, edge cases, and regulation behind an interface simple enough for anyone. Small customers often need more guidance. Big ones look for autonomy, plus a real relationship.

"Simplicity is not the same as being basic. Do not avoid complexity, just hide it from the user"

Why local still beats global in Latin American HR

Ask an AI which region has the messiest labour regulation, and it'll point straight at Latin America. Chile rewrites the rulebook every couple of years and tells what's coming on very short notice. For a global player, that's an impossible moving target. For Talana, it's a moat: locally-built payroll software holds the vast majority of the mid-market in Chile. Sometimes the headache is an advantage.

"For global software providers, Chile is a moving target. Labour regulations evolve constantly. For businesses, complexity reaches a point where spreadsheets simply stop working."

Betting on AI, backed by global scale

Spiniak is sceptical of one story: that a weekend project in the cloud replaces a decade of trust overnight. Software is much more than a database with formulas and a nice interface. Talana has spent ten years shaping its payroll engine around every regulatory corner and every customer edge case. But standing still isn't an option either, so Talana is rebuilding how customers interact with the product: fewer clicks, more natural language, getting ahead of customer needs before they're even asked. Joining Visma made that faster, without changing who Talana is. Visma didn't rewrite its culture or its way of working; it added scale: faster AI adoption and a peer network across 12 Latin American and many European companies swapping playbooks in real time.

"Riding this AI wave within Visma has been significantly easier than doing it alone."

The advice he'd give his earlier self

Revenue scales faster than culture. Chase growth first, that's non-negotiable. But if the early investment in culture and processes is skipped, the bill arrives later, bigger and harder to pay. Set the values while you're still in one room. Waiting until you're a large business across offices makes it ten times the job.

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