Back to BlogWhat financial institutions should know about using an EOR or MSP model for compliance
Introduction — the compliance stakes for financial institutions
Financial institutions across EMEA operate in an intense and frequently changing regulatory environment. Regulators from the European Banking Authority, European Central Bank and the region’s many national authorities demand strong data protection, operational resilience and third‑party governance. The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, known as DORA, has, since January 2025, required documented risk controls, incident reporting and supply‑chain oversight from the industry.
Many financial institutions rely increasingly on contingent, cross‑border talent to access specialised skills or manage fluctuating business demands. Yet choosing the wrong workforce model creates risk. Financial institutions often lack internal capacity to keep pace with ever-changing employment, workplace and data laws, making it hard to know the model that’s best for their business: an Employer of Record (EOR) or a Managed Services Provider (MSP)?
The main issue is this: how does leveraging an EOR or MSP help companies remain compliant with regulatory standards while reducing audit risk? That’s what we’ll discuss in this article.
Navigating EOR vs. MSP — models, compliance implications and decision criteria
Understanding the models in a financial context
Employer of Record (EOR): An EOR acts as the legal employer for your workers in countries where your business doesn’t have an established legal entity, and engages these workers on your behalf. This includes managing their employment contracts, payroll, tax obligations, and other statutory benefits. If your company is hiring in a country where you don’t have a legal presence, an EOR provides a compliant workforce management structure to employ workers without you having to open a local office.
Managed Service Provider (MSP): An MSP oversees your contractor and supplier base. Unlike an EOR, the MSP model doesn’t employ workers directly. Instead, it manages vendors (for example, recruiters and tech partners), standardises processes across contractors and suppliers, and provides management and oversight of contingent workforce programs. The MSP provides visibility of contractor activity, keeping your contingent workforce program efficient, productive and commercially sound. And, it ensures tight governance of your supplier activity, especially compliance. This ensures full visibility of your contractor and supplier base, and delivers better ROI from both groups.
Compliance implications of each model
When hiring workers internationally, EORs help to reduce the risk of worker misclassification and ensure your financial institution is audit-ready. Having said that, EOR arrangements do not automatically shield you from exposure to non-compliance workforce risks such as co‑employment. Some jurisdictions may deem your organisation a co‑employer alongside the EOR, potentially exposing you to tax or other labour law penalties.
And in a different vein, MSPs help your institution to establish governance controls, as well as standardised compliance documentation and monitoring across large contractor networks. This is particularly helpful if your institution is expanding across multiple jurisdictions. But poor oversight can allow shadow employment or inconsistent compliance to transpire.
Both EOR and MSP models have a responsibility to ensure the company aligns with data rules, including GDPR and the UK GDPR. But be warned, financial institutions remain accountable for ensuring their third-party providers process personal data under the right legal framework, where adequate contractual protections are in place.
Another consideration is the use of regulatory technology (RegTech) to manage compliance responsibilities. While RegTech supports automation and compliance reporting, regulators have concerns about the potential for weak oversight from the technology. A 2024 European Banking Authority (EBA) review found that more than 70% of EU supervisors saw higher money laundering and terrorist financing risks due to poor use of RegTech tools. It emerged that over half of all serious compliance failures involved organisations using these tools without sufficient management oversight and controls.
Choosing the right model for your risk appetite
An EOR is best suited to organisations needing to hire quickly across multiple international locations, where they don’t have an established legal entity. EORs help the financial institution reduce the administrative burden of expanding across borders, while ensuring workforce compliance in all jurisdictions. But in deploying an EOR, you need to check the local legal expertise of your chosen provider, and establish robust communication channels from the outset, so any potential issues are addressed quickly.
Alternatively, an MSP is best suited to organisations who manage large contractor programs and/or multiple suppliers. An MSP adds governance layers and compliance controls across your entire third‑party network. The best MSPs have strong information, communication and technology (ICT) frameworks, and resilience capability to support DORA requirements (DORA, as we discussed earlier).
A hybrid EOR/MSP is best suited to more complex financial institutions. Here’s an example: you might use EORs for cross-border staffing and MSPs to manage your entire contingent program. Both providers will need to integrate, to ensure data handling is compliant under all local laws (like GDPR and UK‑GDPR). And, you’ll need to establish clear processing, service agreements and reporting to get the best ROI from your investment.
It’s important to note that both models support compliant scalability for financial institutions. An EOR allows you to expand into new countries without establishing local entities, reducing the lead time for hiring. With an MSP you can scale contractor programs efficiently by consolidating vendor management and ensuring consistent application of compliance controls across large, dispersed workforces. Together, these models make it possible for financial institutions to grow quickly while complying with local regulators.
The use of an EOR or MSP improves proactive compliance monitoring, helps limit audit risk and consolidates workforce and supplier reporting. Both models offer cost efficiencies by avoiding entity setup and simplifying payroll and benefits, as long as the right provider and the right parameters for engagement are established at the outset. Also, compliance dashboards from modern EOR and MSP tech platforms can provide real-time analytics on workforce and supplier trends and contractor performance.
Best practices & future-proofing compliance operations
Aligning models with internal risk frameworks
The first step is to embed compliance KPIs into your company’s risk framework. This could include tracking audit pass rates, reductions in worker misclassification incidents and the time taken for your business to resolve compliance issues. Ideally, you’ll need to link compliance KPI metrics to broader regulatory risk measures such as DORA readiness or data breach prevention. These benchmarks give you a clear way to evaluate the abilities and performance of your EOR or MSP partner.
Leveraging technology and analytics
Financial institutions should focus on EOR and MSP providers that have proven, established and advanced tech platforms. For example, with EORs, you need to prioritise partners that have integrated payroll and compliance tools that can generate alerts when local labour laws change. And for MSPs, look for those with vendor management systems that can provide consolidated onboarding records, real-time incident reports, performance tracking and streamlined audit solutions.
Workforce analytics will also strengthen your ability to remain compliant across multiple jurisdictions. Look for tech dashboards that monitor cross-border payroll, contract status and data flows, for your workforce and your roster of suppliers. These tech solutions will enable you to remain compliant with GDPR, the UK’s Financial Services and Markets Act and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA).
Preparing for emerging regulatory trends
The regulatory environment for financial institutions in the EMEA region is becoming more and more complex. EY’s 2025 outlook highlights growing focus on AI governance, cyber resilience, strict sanctions, and data localisation requirements.
To be ahead of the regulators, make sure your EOR or MSP partner can support forward-looking compliance needs. MSPs should be capable of delivering DORA-aligned ICT risk assessment and management, incident reporting and resilience testing. EORs must keep pace with emerging employment law and ensure proactive monitoring, particularly given the capability of AI oversight in this arena. And finally, both models must be able to integrate new regulatory requirements into their reporting frameworks.
Conclusion — building a compliant and agile workforce model
Financial institutions in EMEA are faced with a raft of complexities when engaging contingent and cross-border talent solutions. And the best way to manage these complexities is by choosing the right management model, suited to your organisation’s expansion goals. Choosing between an EOR and an MSP is not simply a question of cost, it’s a question of strategic goals, risk management, workforce compliance and meeting governance standards across multiple jurisdictions.
EORs provide direct support by employing staff in countries where your business doesn’t have a legal entity, while MSPs deliver oversight across both your contingent workforce and your roster of talent partners and suppliers. Hybrid approaches are often the most practical solutions for more complex financial institutions. Importantly, the right choice helps you to reduce misclassification risk, strengthen your organisation’s audit readiness and ensures compliance with labour, data, privacy, taxation and other workplace laws.
To succeed, financial firms need workforce partners who can provide agility coupled with robust accountability. CXC offers the expertise and infrastructure to help financial institutions design compliant, scalable workforce models, either as an EOR or an MSP, that will protect your financial institution against risk while supporting your strategy for growth and expansion. To learn more, you can get in touch with us here.
