Pre-vetted talent across Southeast Asia. We handle HR, payroll, benefits, and full compliance, you focus on performance, productivity, and growth.
We focus on staff augmentation and Employer-of-Record services for companies with customer-experience-oriented operations. We take full responsibility for the administrative, HR, and legal requirements, allowing you to focus on performance, productivity, and growth while we handle the back-end employment and compliance structure.
Every Arbitrail Scale engagement starts because something on the operating side stopped working. Here’s what we typically fix.
Incorporation, hiring, payroll setup, compliance, all months of work before your first agent is live. We replace the whole stack and have you running in days.
US and EU teams cost 2.5× equivalent operations in SE Asia, even before benefits and HR overhead. Margin compression is built in.
Time zones, labor law, statutory requirements, every market is different. We absorb that complexity so your leadership team can focus on the work that grows the business.
A four-step process tuned for Arbitrail Scale. Structured, transparent, and tied to outcomes.
We align on roles, headcount, skills, and timeline. Clear proposal in 24 hours.
We source, interview, and shortlist. You make the final call on every hire.
Contracts, payroll, benefits, equipment, training, fully on us.
Average of 5 days from signed contract to first agent active and productive.
Hiring in Singapore, the Philippines, or anywhere across ASEAN forces three structural choices: how you employ the person legally, what compliance you take on yourself, and when you transition between models. The answer is rarely the same for every role, and rarely the same across the company life cycle. This playbook is the framework for picking the right model the first time and switching at the right moment.
Three legal vehicles cover essentially every hiring case. Knowing the trade-offs between them is the entire decision.
An EOR is a third party that legally employs the person in-country on your behalf. The EOR holds the employment contract, runs payroll, manages tax withholding, files statutory contributions, handles benefits, and bears the local employment-law liability. You direct the work; the EOR holds the paperwork. You do not need a local entity.
Best fit: testing a new market, hiring 1 to 50 people in a country where you have no entity, hiring a single senior or specialist where standing up an entity is overkill, or hiring quickly while an entity is in formation.
A PEO co-employs the person with you. You typically need a local entity for true PEO. The PEO outsources payroll, benefits, and HR administration; you retain employment-law liability. PEO is more common in the US than in ASEAN; in Asia, the lines between “PEO” and “EOR” are often blurred or the terms are used interchangeably. Verify which model your provider actually offers before signing.
You stand up a local entity (Pte Ltd in Singapore, Domestic Corporation in the Philippines, equivalents elsewhere) and hire directly. You hold the employment contract, run payroll, file taxes, manage benefits, and own the employment-law liability. The slowest model, the most expensive to set up, and the cheapest per-hire at scale. The right model once you cross 25 to 50 people in a country.
Detail on entity setup: see our Singapore corporate services and Philippines corporate services pages.
The empirical pattern across hundreds of engagements:
Real numbers from ASEAN markets in 2026, normalized for a single mid-skill hire at $30K to $60K USD annual base salary.
Base salary + statutory contributions (~10 to 18% in Singapore, ~12 to 16% in the Philippines) + EOR fee ($300 to $800 per employee per month, or 8 to 15% of base). Total fully loaded markup: roughly 1.18x to 1.32x base salary. No setup fees, no ongoing entity costs.
Similar structure to EOR with slightly lower per-employee fees because the client’s entity bears more compliance load. Often 5 to 12% of base. Requires the client to maintain their own local entity. Total fully loaded markup: roughly 1.15x to 1.25x base salary plus the entity-maintenance overhead.
Base salary + statutory contributions + payroll/HR admin (typically 1 to 3% of payroll if outsourced, 5 to 10% if fully in-house). Plus the fixed cost of the entity itself (Singapore: roughly S$8K to S$15K Year 1 per the SG entity-setup playbook; Philippines: PHP 600K to 1.5M Year 1). Total fully loaded markup: 1.10x to 1.18x base salary at scale. Cheapest per-hire once you have 15+ people in a country to amortize the fixed costs against.
Three signals indicate it is time to transition.
The EOR fee multiplied by your headcount in-country exceeds the cost of running your own entity. For Singapore that is typically around 12 to 15 people on EOR. For the Philippines around 25 to 40 people. The math is straightforward: if EOR fees are $4,000+ per month total in a country, you are within range of the entity threshold.
EOR works well when you direct the work and the EOR handles the paperwork. It works less well when you need to make hire/fire decisions quickly without the EOR’s sign-off, run an internal compensation philosophy that diverges from the EOR’s, or build a proprietary employee-experience program. Entity-based direct hire restores full control.
If your business is moving toward regulated activity in-country (financial services license, insurance license, pharmaceutical, data residency mandate), an EOR may not satisfy the regulator. Strategic acquisitions, IPO readiness, or material government contracts also typically require entity-based employment for governance reasons.
The right hiring model varies by industry because of compliance, licensing, and operational requirements that EOR sometimes cannot satisfy. Two of the most common Scale deployments illustrate the pattern.
Claims, FNOL, SIU, subrogation, and policy admin teams. Adjuster licensing requirements vary by US state and often require working under a supervised licensed adjuster. Pre-committed CAT surge capacity needs the operational integration that direct hire enables. EOR works for the first 5 to 15 hires; entity becomes the right answer at scale.
Medical coding, billing, prior authorization, eligibility, denial management. Certified coder hiring (CPC, CCS, CCS-P) and HIPAA training requirements add operational layers EOR providers often do not handle natively. Entity-based hiring through Arbitrail Core in Manila or Cebu is the standard pattern after the first 10 to 20 hires.
Both patterns are why Scale and the Industry pages compose: Scale is the staffing engine, the Industry pages explain the operating model. Most Top 50 carrier or hospital engagements at Arbitrail use Scale for the first cohort under EOR, transition to entity-based direct hire via Philippines or Singapore entities once headcount crosses the threshold, and run the operational specialty (claims, RCM) under the Industry-specific service framework on the Insurance or Healthcare pages.
Two countries dominate Arbitrail Scale deployments. The hiring math differs materially between them.
Higher base salaries (mid-skill roles $40K to $80K USD), tighter labor market, stricter Employment Pass requirements for foreign hires, mature EOR market. Entity threshold (where direct hire wins on unit economics) is typically 12 to 18 people. Most Scale engagements in Singapore are senior or specialist hires (engineering, finance, ops leadership) where entity setup happens earlier or in parallel with hiring.
Lower base salaries (mid-skill roles $12K to $35K USD), deep talent pool especially in IT-BPM, English fluency by default, mature EOR market. Entity threshold is typically 25 to 40 people because lower fully-loaded cost-per-EOR-hire pushes the breakeven later. Most Scale engagements in the Philippines are operational build-outs (CX, BPO, finance) where the headcount crosses the entity threshold within 6 to 12 months. Common deployment vertical: Healthcare RCM teams and Insurance back-office teams scaling from 5 EOR hires to 50+ entity-based hires within the first year.
Four patterns we see in companies hiring in Asia for the first time.
EOR is a bridge, not a destination. Companies that stay on EOR past 25 people in a country pay materially more than they need to and lose operational independence. Run the math at quarterly intervals.
The mirror image: standing up a Singapore Pte Ltd or Philippines Domestic Corp before you have 5 confirmed hires in-country is premature optimization. Entity overhead (audit, secretary, registered office, accounting) runs $8K to $25K annually that you can avoid with EOR for the first cohort.
Transitioning from EOR to direct hire is not a one-week exercise. Employment contracts need to be renegotiated, statutory contributions re-registered, payroll cycles reconciled, benefits transferred. Plan 6 to 12 weeks per country.
If you are running a regulated operation (insurance claims, healthcare RCM, financial services), the hiring model and the operational model need to be designed together. EOR-based hiring with industry-specific compliance overlays is fragile. Entity-based hiring with the right operational service framework (the Industry pages) is robust.
Arbitrail Scale runs both models: EOR for the first cohort (5 to 25 people in-country, no entity required, hire in 5 days) and entity-based direct hire as scale matures, coordinated with our Core service for the entity setup. Most engagements transition between the two models as headcount and operational complexity scale. Cross-engagement integration with the Insurance BPO and Healthcare BPO frameworks is the most common pattern.
What clients ask before signing on for Arbitrail Scale.
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