By now, there are plenty of sources describing the Dayforce acquisition by Thoma Bravo that was announced last week.
- Announced August 21, 2025 with credible rumors appearing up to two weeks earlier
- All-cash deal worth $12.3 billion dollars in enterprise deal value
- Shareholders received $70 per share, a 32% premium to the August 15 closing price
- Target closing by year-end, at which time Dayforce will go private and its stock will be delisted
Thus far, market reaction has been positive with most analysts citing Thoma Bravo’s reputation for finding and scaling undervalued tech assets as a vote of confidence in Dayforce’s AI-driven platform. Expect this transaction and speculation about “what’s next for Dayforce” to garner more attention as the potential to accelerate growth and increased competition to HR technology leaders Workday, SAP, and ADP becomes evident.
Word to the wise: excitement about the potential unleashed by the infusion of private equity investment is strongest in the early stages of a deal. All stakeholders should generally be aware that investors can influence strategy and operations with the goal of optimizing return, monitoring the evolution of circumstances over the course of ownership.
A private equity reset signals acceleration
Other recent HR investments have received far more media attention than this Dayforce acquisition. Both SAP and Workday announced their own M&A moves this month, acquiring SmartRecruiters and Paradox, respectively. In both cases, leading HCM software providers are adding recruiting and candidate AI strength to their platforms; although the Workday valuation is undisclosed, SAP is buying SmartRecruiters for $1.5 billion.
Media buzz has been highest surrounding the Workday and SAP deals, even though the focus of each one is only a fraction of the size (12% less than Dayforce valuation) and the scope is akin to an enhancement of talent acquisition features versus Dayforce’s entire hire-to-retire platform.
A recent post by Thomas Otter, Partner at venture capitalist firm Acadian Ventures beautifully points out that while Paradox and SmartRecruiters are best-in-class products, there is “nothing fundamentally disruptive, potentially transformative, game changing, brave or revolutionary” to these acquisitions. Rather “it’s exactly what well-endowed incumbent vendors ought to do.”[1] By his own estimation the Dayforce deal “is probably 10x financially more significant” building on what Dayforce has created stealthily to become a challenger to larger competitors Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, ADP and UKG.
Finally, just days after its Dayforce announcement, Thoma Bravo announced its intent to take Verint Systems private in a much smaller deal valued at $2 billion. It is widely anticipated that Verint’s products focused on customer experience (CX) automation and contact center AI will be merged with existing portfolio holding, Calabrio to create a powerhouse in CX automation. Some examples of meaningful synergies might include:
- Enhancing Dayforce’s workforce planning and labor forecasting by tools to calculate optimal staffing levels and automate scheduling;
- Leverage feedback tools, quality scoring, and coaching insights to existing Dayforce performance management and employee engagement modules; and,
- Supercharge Dayforce’s employee and manager experience by embedding specialized contact center automation.
Many industry voices have speculated on a future where AI displaces the lion’s share of inquiry support for products and services alike. Expect more speculation about the impact to be had from stretching R&D to leverage AI across HCM and CX. In fact, Thoma Bravo also holds Coupa in its portfolio whose platform integrates workforce planning with financial forecasting and procurement workflows. Thoma Bravo holdings may have the potential for a multi-platform ecosystem for operational efficiency across HCM, CX, and finance.
Greatest potential for Next-Level Growth
Returning to the immediate growth and enhancements at-hand for Dayforce as a staunch competitor to leading HCM solutions, there are five key areas which merit some further attention – from Thoma Bravo as the investor and architect of its exponential scale and from HR buyers, leaders and practitioners. These dimensions underpin the success of every successful HCM as a company’s strategic foundation and will be critical to Dayforce bringing its motto “Makes Work Life Better” to greater size and scale.
Below are three that receive the least attention but most impact the HR-payroll technology buyer.
1. Investment in Implementation and Services
Dayforce has struggled with uneven implementation maturity. Customers have cited gaps in consulting expertise, configuration quality, and post-go-live support. Thoma Bravo has an opportunity to change that. Investing in delivery, training, and customer success will be critical. Without this focus, innovation risks being undermined by poor execution.
As with most software, Dayforce has its beginnings down market where the implementation rigor of customers with hundreds of employees can be met with more relationships and less structure. It is common among providers catering to companies with 500-5000 employees to find show-and-tell style transition that adopts the “feel” of agile, combining review of requirements with live configuration and walk-throughs preparing a new customer team for do-it-yourself-next-time.
As Dayforce has grown, it has revisited its balance between the implementations it will deploy with its own internal resources (known as “priming” the implementation) and the use of third-party systems integration (SI) partners who bring their own implementation tools and rigor. Large clients, global scope, and overly complex timekeeping, scheduling or compliance are situations that make a strong case for using a third-party.
But with SI partner rigor comes time and cost. First, the effort to evaluate SI partners which is typically a 10- to 12-week exercise best led by an advisor that is not angling for the role itself; and second, the time and cost of a dedicated SI partner exceeds that which can be engineered into the initial software subscription. HR leaders expect implementation rigor but are generally unhappy with the cost which is frequently six figures and 10x that of a lighter process led by the software provider itself.
Dayforce has steadily grown its partner ecosystem, with systems integrators being a special class of resources that have undergone and maintain product training and certification on parts or all of the Dayforce product. An ecosystem reset was completed about five years ago to refine and re-energize a core group of partnerships while filling gaps with the likes of Accenture, Deloitte, EY, PwC, and BDO joining heritage partners with US or industry specializations (e.g., RSM, HRPath, HRchitect, HUB, AXL).
While SI partners bring both maturity and capacity to fuel Dayforce’s growth, HR buyers are generally unprepared to navigate the emerging partner landscape. Internal procurement organizations that are confident with IT Request for Proposals often lack the business knowledge required to differentiate HR, payroll, compensation and benefits nuances that are material to the success of an implementation and the related compliance assurances.
Finally, implementation services that end with cutover and hyper care can result in a sudden need for ongoing application maintenance support (AMS), which new buyers of any HCM mistakenly assume they will begin supporting themselves on Day 1. The disconnect lies in the skills which every customer needs to hire or develop in-house to be truly self-sufficient. Few HR organizations prepare for go-live by actively filling this gap during the implementation, leading to an extension of SI partner support and later efforts to consider other providers or rebalance AMS scope as internal skills become more proficient and can handle more of the product care and feeding.
2. Payroll and Time as Market Leverage
Payroll and workforce management remain Dayforce’s strongest differentiators. These applications are sticky, and even large enterprises on Workday or SuccessFactors sometimes adopt Dayforce payroll as a standalone solution. Thoma Bravo is likely to lean on this strategy, positioning Dayforce payroll and time as a wedge into broader HCM adoption with demonstrated excellence in a strong compliance foundation.
In a world where HR leaders have already begun their HCM cloud transformation journey with Workday or a competitor platform, it is tempting to think of these customers as lost or “out of play”. The reality is that Dayforce was built with a rock-solid foundation in payroll and time which makes it a leading contender for modules that are frequently overlooked in the initial HCM purchase. In fact, the larger the employee population, the more common it is for HR buyers to defer the purchase or implementation of compliance-heavy modules like payroll and time. Organizationally, the payroll and workforce management functions for nearly half of large companies are owned by finance, shared services, IT, or operations, and require more stakeholder alignment and socialization to proceed.
The soundbites and excitement of Dayforce AI are as much about the data foundation which was built to address the most difficult-to-solve challenges of labor and pay compliance as the currently embedded AI features. For this reason, it tends to shine in its ability to accommodate the complexities of hourly and union workforce which requires robust configuration, local regulations, and rules that vary by business unit and by collective bargaining agreement. Dayforce has steadily grown into the large enterprise market where the demands and expectations of clients with 10,000+ employees are significant and tend to make-or-break solutions that rely on global, harmonized talent common in the salaried workforce.
Dayforce’s own financial statements from year-end 2024 and the more recent Q2 2025 have been a steady showcase of large enterprise wins that have largely gone unnoticed by the noisiest corners of the market. A June 2025 announcement that Dayforce has won the bid to become the HR and pay solution for the Government of Canada has turned heads even if it begins with a pilot group of 30,000 employees out of the Government’s total population of 431,000.
It is a mistake to think the sizeable Government of Canada win is just a one-off and not part of a steadily growing success story with large enterprise clients. Check out these sales and customer expansion highlights from recent financial reports.
- In addition to the above-mentioned Government of Canada deal, large client wins and expansions reported in Q1 2025 and Q2 2025 results include:
- A large entertainment and leisure company has chosen the complete Dayforce suite as its unified HCM solution to support 61,500 employees across North America.
- A leading uniform and workplace solutions company has selected the full Dayforce suite to support its 22,000 employees across North America.
- A global leader in everyday apparel and essentials has expanded its relationship with Dayforce, adopting the full suite to support its global workforce of 37,000 employees.
- A leading U.S.-based provider of essential infrastructure services has selected Dayforce Managed Payroll, Workforce Management, HR, and Talent solutions to support 10,000 employees across 45 states.
- Dayforce Q4 and Full Year 2024 Results described include:
- Seven (7) of nine sales deals for companies with 5K-66K employees. Three (3) are full suite subscriptions, three (3) are payroll and time solutions, and one (1) is an expansion of talent and experience modules; and
- Seven (7) customer go-lives for populations ranging from UK payroll and time to two clients with 8K and 10.5K employees; extension of talent and compensation modules to 23K employees; full HCM suite for 8K (public sector), 2,900 and 2650 employee companies
As Dayforce strives to drive growth as the integrated HCM platform of choice, remember that it has proven its ability to integrate with Workday and SAP for core HR data if the customer is focused on the harder work of payroll, time and scheduling.
3. Sorting Out the Global Solution
Accelerating global expansion of the Dayforce platform was one of a handful of key growth levers announced as part of the 2018 IPO under the company name Ceridian. Prior to that Dayforce reach was limited to its “native” scope of the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom. Since this time, the expansion of Dayforce native capabilities has been understandably slow and methodical which can be attributed to the importance of leading with the most difficult areas of local compliance – payroll and time.
In the years that followed, the Dayforce platform was built out for Australia and New Zealand, fueled by the infusion of local compliance expertise from its acquisition of RITEQ, a workforce management provider based in Sydney. For several years, the focus on these five English-speaking countries was the ground zero for proving itself as a multi-country platform through its growth in sales and operations.
Since then, Dayforce has continued to acquire compliance-heavy payroll capabilities in regional markets that have not yet come together under the Dayforce umbrella as a true competitive advantage. Unlike the native built approach for ANZ, the next leap to expand broadly into Asia Pacific (APAC) countries came from the long-standing practice of its global payroll competitors – buying a collection of local payroll engines stitched together by middleware and moving data as needed by pre-built integrations. To this day we see well-recognized competitors buy their way into geographic coverage, with Deel and SDWorx being two most active in recent years. At some point, however, the stitching that stores and moves data across systems becomes an impediment to customer experience and real-time data needed for speed and accuracy to meet regulatory demands.
In ten months spanning 2020 and 2021, acquisitions of the two largest APAC regional payroll providers, Excelity and Ascender, were acquired bringing instant multi-country bench strength into the company fold. Buying up APAC competition with largely complementary country footprint would set the stage for strong presence in the region; however, the challenges of linking two successful operations, each with its own “stitching” together and architecting from the nitty gritty of payroll and time back to a core HR employee data without duplicating technology, data and experience has been a years-long challenge to sort out.
In the years since ANZ native, Dayforce has strengthened and expanded the HR core itself which needed to “go global” to accommodate a world of demographic information and languages beyond its five native English-speaking countries. Expansion of its core of employee and employer data to more than 160 countries as part of a single data model is a building block that has been added to the Dayforce’s HCM foundation and becomes a pillar for reporting and AI expansion across the platform.
The stickier business of myriad payroll and time engines with a current book of hundreds of customers has taken longer to sort out. Meanwhile, its strategic sights were set on Latin America and the Caribbean with the acquisition of Adam HR in December of 2021, adding 33 countries of local LATAM capabilities all with its own technology patchwork and stitching.
EMEA looms with over 100 countries across the three distinct regions of Europe, Middle East, and Africa where there has been no real notable M&A, but rather the promise of more Dayforce native solutions for Ireland and Germany in particular. Expansion as a proven pay and time solution where the compliance stakes are high requires a very different mastery than expanding fields and languages to store HR demographic data. Competitor Workday released France payroll as a native module in 2016 that today is seldom listed as an available module and is also pending the long-awaited rollout of Germany native payroll.
The established use of in-country partners (ICPs) is far from being a thing of the past for all the leading providers in this space. Many are working to bring broad global coverage of payroll to life across the “long tail” of countries that lack scale – Strada, Neeyamo, and EY are expanding native builds and deep localizations. Meanwhile, a whole different approach has emerged from the likes of Payslip, Payzaar and Papaya Global who focus on the design of a robust compliance and control platform to sit atop your own mix of local pay and time engines.
For Dayforce, continued growth up-market and globally will benefit from an “art of the possible” style design that rethinks how to bring local compliance to regional and global scale.
Final Thoughts
Dayforce has already introduced its AI assistant, Dayforce Co-Pilot. Going private removes the distraction of quarterly reporting, allowing leadership to bet bigger on AI-driven workforce planning, forecasting, and analytics. The winners in the next HCM era will be those who turn AI into measurable workforce outcomes. Meanwhile, expect market news to continue to describe everything through AI-colored glasses rather than dig into the foundations that matter to HR and payroll leaders, employees, and managers.
This move will not go unnoticed. Workday, UKG, SAP, and ADP will sharpen their own strategies in payroll, AI, and workforce management. The battleground will not only be about winning the largest logos but also about providing agile, intelligent, and global HR, payroll, and time solutions to the next tier of companies.
Not all private equity investment in the HR space delivers as promised. PE firms are motivated to increase value through operational, product, or strategic change before selling for profit after a certain time horizon, which can range from a couple of years to a decade or more. Kathleen Dillon, Executive Vice President at herronpalmer cautions HR leaders to be aware that investor influence in the name of optimizing returns can have both positive and negative results.
Skeptics will watch for actions more commonly seen as the standard private equity playbook – acquire, reassure, cut jobs, gain short-term growth, then sell. After the first several years, speculation about the exit strategy for the private equity owners can become a distraction as years and milestones are hyped as signals of a potential future business action (e.g., sale to another entity, going public, or going private under another ownership structure).
From “Art of the Possible” to Reality
Dayforce’s evolution, from a payroll engine serving mid-market firms to a Wall Street-traded HCM contender, and now into Thoma Bravo’s portfolio, marks a decisive chapter. This is not financial engineering for its own sake. It is a strategic repositioning, one that gives Dayforce the space to focus on long-term innovation and customer success while benefiting from Thoma Bravo’s operational discipline.
The story ahead will depend on two factors: whether Thoma Bravo funds deep product innovation and AI leadership, and whether Dayforce finally solves its implementation and global delivery challenges. If both are achieved, Dayforce could emerge stronger, faster, and more competitive than ever before.
Every organization has its own unique challenges and a mix of technology and providers that serve as a baseline to its own transformation journey. If you are interested in how this acquisition might impact your situation or are comparing it to the equally complex technology and service delivery of other HR, payroll and time solutions, contact herronpalmer.
Resources
- “On the Recent Acquisitions of HR Tech”, Thomas Otter, Substack article. https://thomasotter.substack.com/p/on-the-recent-acquisitions-in-hr?triedRedirect=true
[1] Thomas Otter, LinkedIn post https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7364785737780588546/.
