Competitor Profile
Where this is heading
Silae is French payroll infrastructure rather than a French payroll vendor: roughly 35% of all payslips in France, about 7.7 million a month, produced through 5,500 accounting practices that operate the software on their clients' behalf.
The structural comparison is DATEV, not PayFit. In both France and Germany the dominant payroll position is held through the accounting-practice channel, the adviser chooses rather than the employer, and displacement requires a practice to re-tool. That feature of continental European payroll is invisible from an Anglo-American reading of the market.
Its moat is regulatory absorption , 5,500 practices do not want to track French social law themselves , and that is precisely the moat automation erodes. No AI capability was found in the payroll product, and the vendor's public output is weighted toward being the definitive explainer of reform rather than the first with an assistant.
Silver Lake majority-holds both Silae and Cegid, so Cegid's retirement of HR Sprint into mySilae ahead of a statutory deadline moves installed base between two companies with one owner, on a timetable a regulator set and no competitor was invited to contest.
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How the product hangs together, at the level a product leader needs to place it.
Silae is French payroll infrastructure, and the word is chosen deliberately. Founded in 2009 in Boulogne-Billancourt by Brice Mougenot and Charlie Vignon, it produces roughly 35% of all payslips in France , about 7.7 million a month , through a network of 5,500 accounting practices that run the software on behalf of their client companies.
That channel is the entire proposition. Silae does not primarily sell to employers; it sells to the *expert-comptable*, and the employer receives payroll as a service from its accountant. The practice operates the software, absorbs the regulatory change, and carries the client relationship. For the accounting profession, Silae is less a product choice than a production line, which is why displacing it is a decision about how a practice runs rather than which software a company buys.
The product is a SaaS payroll engine covering French gross-to-net, the DSN declarative chain, and the surrounding social obligations, with the regulatory maintenance carried centrally so that practices inherit compliance rather than implementing it. mySilae is the current cloud platform and the destination to which Cegid is directing its HR Sprint installed base ahead of the *fait générateur* reform.
Ownership is a structural fact rather than a footnote. Silver Lake took majority control in 2020, in a transaction reported at more than €500 million for 100% of the company from its founding shareholders, and Silae was described at the time as serving more than 550,000 businesses. Silver Lake is also the majority shareholder of Cegid. The two largest French-owned names in the payroll quartet , the market is conventionally described as ADP, Sage, Cegid and Silae , therefore sit under the same owner.
The vendor also publishes practitioner-facing regulatory reference material, including annual French HR key-figures updates covering ceilings, SMIC and exemptions. That is a channel-loyalty instrument as much as a marketing one.
The legal layer above the calculation is bought, not built. Silae acquired Kanoon from company-formation platform LegalPlace on 8 April 2026, terms undisclosed, and ships it as mySilae Contrats, available from June 2026. Kanoon generates compliant French HR legal documents from employer and employee data , employment contracts, amendments, interview notices, dismissal letters and company agreements , with real-time legal monitoring, statutory-deadline calendars and routing to labour-law specialists, and reported more than 11,000 French user companies at the time of the deal. The strategic point is direction: this is a purchase made *upstream* of the payroll engine rather than sideways into another country. The employment contract is the instrument that determines what gross-to-net is supposed to produce, so a vendor holding both the document and the calculation is holding the instruction and the execution. Chief executive Pierre Cesarini states the ambition as being the first in the market to integrate the legal and payroll dimensions, with the mechanism given as crossing legal and HR data in real time. That capability is asserted, not demonstrated: nothing published claims the contract's terms are enforced in the calculation, and no accuracy figure, adoption number or price has been attached to mySilae Contrats since launch.
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Geographic footprint, and where payroll is native rather than partner-delivered.
French market reporting consistently describes a leading quartet: ADP, Sage, Cegid and Silae. Silae's share of that market is not a conventional software share, because it is measured in payslips produced rather than licences sold, and at roughly 35% of national volume it is the largest single position in French payroll.
The structural comparison that matters is not to another French vendor, it is to DATEV in Germany. Both hold their position through the accounting-practice channel rather than direct employer sales. DATEV is used by more than 90% of German tax firms; Silae runs through 5,500 French practices and produces a third of the country's payslips. In both markets the dominant payroll vendor is chosen by the adviser, not the employer, and in both the switching decision belongs to a practice re-tooling rather than a company changing supplier. That is the single most important structural feature of continental European payroll and it is invisible from an Anglo-American reading of the market.
Against PayFit, Silae competes on the opposite model: PayFit sells directly to the SME that wants to run payroll in-house, Silae sells to the practice that runs it for them. Against Sopra HR and Cegedim SRH, it barely meets the same buyer, since both are weighted to large accounts and the public and health sectors. Against ADP, the contest is for the mid-market employer that could go either way.
The Cegid relationship is the live event and it is unusual. Cegid has told partner firms that its HR Sprint payroll product will not implement the *fait générateur* reform binding from 1 January 2027, and has designated mySilae as the target solution. Because both vendors are Silver Lake majority-held, this is an intra-portfolio migration with a statutory deadline supplying the justification , a movement of installed base that no competitor was invited to contest.
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Silae does not publish a public price list for the employer, and it would be misleading if it did, because the employer is generally not the buyer. Pricing runs through the accounting practice, which licenses the platform and prices payroll as a service to its own clients. The commercial relationship a French SME experiences is with its *expert-comptable*, not with Silae.
That structure makes Silae's pricing power unusually concentrated and unusually sensitive. It sets terms with 5,500 practices rather than with hundreds of thousands of employers, which is efficient , and it means a pricing decision lands simultaneously on the entire channel. French trade press has covered exactly that tension, reporting on Silae revising tariffs aimed at accounting practices under pressure, and separately on a *rentrée* positioning explicitly framed around appeasement with the profession. A vendor that needs to be seen making peace with its channel is a vendor whose channel has noticed its dependence.
The positioning is regulatory reliability delivered centrally. The practice does not track French social legislation itself; Silae absorbs it and the practice inherits it. For a profession under the same staffing pressure visible in Germany, that is the core value, and it is why the product's stickiness is better explained by labour economics than by features.
The Cegid arrangement adds a second commercial dimension. Being designated the target solution for another vendor's retiring installed base is a distribution event that costs Silae no sales effort, and it arrives with a statutory deadline attached.
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Silae's public AI position is modest relative to its market weight, and the most substantive statement located is a leadership one rather than a product one: its chief executive has been quoted in French HR trade press arguing that AI will profoundly transform the payroll manager's profession , a claim about the occupation, not a shipped capability.
No named AI assistant, agent or copilot was located on the vendor's public estate in published sources, and no accuracy rate, error rate or evaluation method was found. What Silae does publish heavily is regulatory reference content , annual French HR key figures covering social security ceilings, SMIC and exemptions, and explainer material on reforms including the *fait générateur* change binding from 1 January 2027.
That publishing pattern is itself the strategic tell. Silae competes on absorbing regulatory change so its channel does not have to, and its public output is accordingly weighted toward compliance authority rather than product novelty. For a vendor whose buyer is an accounting practice, being the definitive explainer of a reform is worth more than being first with an assistant.
The open question is what happens when regulatory absorption becomes automatable. Silae's moat is that 5,500 practices do not want to track French social law themselves. If AI makes that tracking cheap for a competitor to offer, the moat is narrower than the payslip share suggests. Nothing in the public record indicates Silae has moved to close that off, and no AI capability was found in the payroll product itself.
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Diagnosis and the play together. Each is a live attack vector, not a general weakness.
The channel is the moat and the single point of failure. Silae's position rests on 5,500 accounting practices, and a pricing or service decision reaches all of them at once. French trade press has already covered tariff revisions aimed at practices and a subsequent posture of appeasement toward the profession. Channel resentment is the one force that can move a third of French payroll volume, and it is a force Silae has already had to manage publicly.
No published AI position in the product. For a vendor of this weight, the absence of any named payroll AI capability is conspicuous against Cegid, PayFit and the wider market. A competitor can ask what Silae's automation posture is and cite no public answer.
Single-market exposure, total. France and nothing else. Any French client with a Spanish, German or UK entity must place that payroll elsewhere, which is an opening for ADP, SD Worx and Sopra HR , the last of which operates natively across France, Spain, the UK and Germany.
The Cegid migration is an opportunity and a risk on the same timeline. Inheriting HR Sprint's base is free distribution. It is also a large, deadline-driven onboarding into a platform those customers did not choose, running against a statutory date. Migrations under time pressure are where service quality fails, and a competitor watching for churn out of that cohort in late 2027 is watching the right thing.
Ownership concentration invites scrutiny. Silver Lake majority-holding both Silae and Cegid means the two largest French-owned payroll names share an owner, and an intra-portfolio migration justified by a statutory deadline is the kind of arrangement that draws attention from customers and, potentially, from competition authorities. No such attention is evidenced today; the structural exposure is noted, not asserted.
Where it is not beatable. Thirty-five percent of French payslips, 5,500 practices and a regulatory maintenance function the profession depends on. No competitor displaces that with a product; it would take a change in how French accounting practices choose to work.
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What Silae has bought, where each sits now, and what it says about direction. None of these are signals; they are standing facts about who owns what.
Checked 2026-09-01. Operating cadence and status are re-checked on each profile refresh; a change of state is itself a finding, because nobody announces the day an acquisition finishes being absorbed.
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The latest signals where Silae is the subject. Full history on the signals page.
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The live predictions whose evidence rests on this vendor, including the ones going against us.