by Eleni Aslani | Founder & CEO, Growth People Pro
The consultants have been paid. The HRIS is upgraded. Legal opinions sit in a folder nobody will ever open again. Salary bands – built. Gap analysis – done. Congratulations. You are compliant. Technically.
And yet only 9% of European companies have a fully implemented pay transparency strategy. (Mercer, 2025 Global Pay Transparency Survey – 1,600+ organisations, 60 markets) Nine percent.
The rest are broadly hoping for the best. Which is a bold choice, given that this legislation comes with real teeth: financial penalties, burden-of-proof reversal, mandatory public reporting, and the kind of reputational exposure that makes Monday morning LinkedIn scrolling genuinely uncomfortable.
But that’s not even the part that should worry you most.
“We’re Waiting for Local Transposition.” Your Employees Are Not.
The favourite boardroom line right now sounds perfectly reasonable: “We’re waiting until our country transposes the Directive before we act.” It sounds prudent. Meanwhile, your employees have already Googled it. They know a law exists that gives them the right to ask about their pay. They’ve seen it discussed on LinkedIn, in industry media, in their WhatsApp groups. Some have been asking questions since 2023. Right now, in your organisation, people are comparing notes – in kitchens, on Slack, over lunch. The legislation didn’t wait for government paperwork to enter people’s heads. It arrived the moment it made headlines. The transposition deadline was June 7, 2026. As of that date, just four of the 27 EU Member States – Slovakia, Italy, Lithuania, and Malta – actually met it.
If you were hoping that means the Directive is somehow void or on pause – it doesn’t. What the remaining 23 Member States have done is create a legal precedent where employees can argue that their government is actively depriving them of a right granted by EU law. That’s not a technicality. That’s a live liability sitting in your organisation right now, waiting for the first person to figure out they can make that argument.
And yet employee awareness is already well ahead of employer readiness everywhere – including in fintech, where your talent is savvy, connected, and not shy about knowing their worth. Your people don’t need a transposed national law to start asking questions.
The shift has already happened in their heads. The only question is whether your managers are ready when it reaches their desk. Waiting for legislation to force your hand isn’t caution. It’s choosing to let your people draw their own conclusions while you’re still reading the draft.
The Expensive Illusion of “Being Ready”
Companies across Europe – fintech included – have spent serious money getting structurally ready: audits, job architecture, compensation consultants, HR tech, legal reviews. All of it needed. None of it wasted. And then they send their line managers into the room. Unprepared. Underbriefed. Without the language, the context, or the emotional intelligence to handle what’s coming.
Only 7% of organisations believe their employees actually understand pay policies. Only 9% are confident their managers can discuss compensation effectively. (Aon, 2025 Global Pay Transparency Study — 1,400+ organisations, 40+ countries) One in eleven managers. That’s how many are genuinely ready for the conversation that all the compliance work was supposed to enable.
The salary bands are ready. The managers are not. That’s where the investment starts leaking.
The Gap Nobody Budgeted For
Here’s a number worth putting on your next leadership agenda: 42% of HR professionals think their managers are underprepared for pay transparency conversations.
Only 15% of managers agree. (Lattice, 2025 State of People Strategy) That gap – between how ready managers think they are and how ready they actually are – is exactly where things go wrong. Managers probably can “handle” the conversation. In the sense that the meeting ends, nobody cries, and everyone goes back to their desk.
What they miss is that handling it and handling it in a way that actually builds trust are two completely different things.
One wrong phrase. One defensive answer. One moment where a person needed to feel seen and instead felt processed – and the quiet resignation that follows will cost more than the audit did. Possibly more than the entire compliance project did.
The Mercer 2025 report found that only 38% of organisations focus on educating managers as part of their pay transparency rollout — despite it being the single most cited challenge in the field. Practitioners working in this space will tell you that number is probably low – it doesn’t count the organisations still stuck on data cleanup who haven’t even thought about manager readiness yet. The spreadsheet was the easy part. The conversation is the hard part. Most organisations are still investing like it’s the other way around
What the Law Actually Requires – And Why It Changes Everything
Here’s what’s in force right now, regardless of where your national legislation stands. Employers must share pay ranges with candidates before interviews – and cannot ask about salary history. Any employee can request written information about their own pay and compare it to colleagues doing equivalent work. Gender pay gap reporting starts in 2027 for employers with 150+ employees.
A gap of 5% or more that can’t be objectively justified becomes a public matter – triggering a mandatory joint pay assessment. But to be clear: the 5% is not a safe harbour. There is no acceptable gap. It’s simply the point at which your exposure moves from internal to public, and the process becomes formal and visible. And where transparency obligations have been broken, the burden of proof shifts to the employer. For fintech specifically, this matters more than it might in other sectors.
You are competing for the same scarce engineering, product, and data talent across borders. Your people know the market. They have Levels.fyi open in another tab. The moment someone exercises their right under the Directive, everything you’ve spent on compliance will live or die in the hands of whoever is sitting across the table from them. Unprepared managers don’t just create confusion. They create claims.
This Is Not an HR Problem
Pay transparency cannot be delegated to HR – and this comes from someone who spent years inside HR before moving to the other side of the table. HR teams can build the structures. Write the policies. Run the audits. But they are not in the room when a team lead needs to explain to someone good – someone you really don’t want to lose – why their salary sits at the bottom of a band while a colleague’s sits at the top. That conversation needs a manager who actually understands your compensation philosophy. Who can be honest without being defensive. Who doesn’t reach for their phone to text HR mid-sentence. Who knows not just what to say, but what never to say.
Leaders can’t explain or defend what they don’t understand themselves. This is the gap nobody is investing in. And it’s the one that will determine whether pay transparency becomes something your organisation is genuinely proud of – or something that quietly unravels the trust you’ve spent years building. The legislation started with gender pay equity. What it’s exposed is something much broader: the distance between the structures organisations build and the leadership capability required to actually stand behind them.
Organisations treating this as an HR compliance project will close the gap on paper. Organisations treating it as a leadership challenge will close it where it matters – in the room, in the conversation, in the relationship with the person sitting across the table. That’s the version that keeps good people. In fintech, keeping good people is the whole game.
What We Do – And Why We Built It This Way
I started Growth People Pro because I kept seeing the same pattern: organisations doing everything right on paper and still losing in practice. Smart people, good intentions, solid structures, solid budgets spent – and then a manager who didn’t know what to say, or said the wrong thing, and watched trust walk out the door with someone they couldn’t replace. So we built something that covers the whole picture. Not just the framework or the training – both, together, in the right order. Because you can’t separate the structure from the people who have to make it work. For pay transparency, that means three full-day workshops, capped at 12 participants – deliberately, because real work doesn’t happen in a crowd.
Workshop 1 — Cyprus Employment Law & Pay Transparency Foundations (June 19, 2026) Where the EU Directive meets Cyprus law – including where local legislation goes further than the Directive’s minimums. The foundations that everything else has to stand on.
Workshop 2 — Job Architecture & Equal Pay: Building Structures (June 24, 2026) The actual build: job architecture, weighted criteria under Cyprus law, defensible pay bands. You leave with a working framework – not a slide deck to file next to the legal opinion.
Workshop 3 — Pay Transparency Readiness: Audit, Roadmap & Implementation (July 1, 2026) The part most programmes never reach. We audit your real pay risks, build a roadmap that fits your specific organisation, and give your leaders the language and skills they’ll actually need when employees start asking. This is where compliance becomes culture. Not designed for HR teams only. Designed for every manager and leader who will ever be in a room when pay comes up.
Who’s In the Room With Us I don’t work alone on this – and that matters.
Natale Mastoroudes joins as co-expert on this programme. Former Chief People Officer, nearly 20 years across tech and fintech organisations in multiple countries. She has built these frameworks under real pressure, in real organisations, at real scale. The kind of depth you only get from having lived it – not studied it.
Sysarb is our technology partner – Europe’s leading pay equity and transparency platform, used by over 10,000 HR teams including Volvo, Klarna, Scania, and Pfizer. Because good consulting needs infrastructure that actually works behind it. We are also part of the International Pay Transparency Alliance, which keeps us connected to what’s happening across jurisdictions globally. This isn’t a Cyprus-only challenge and we don’t treat it like one.
Who is Who
Eleni Aslani is Founder & CEO of Growth People Pro, an HR and Employee Experience consultancy based in Limassol, Cyprus. MSc in HR Management and Organisational Behavior, Certified HEX Practitioner, Life & Executive Coach, High Performance Team Coach, Certified Training Instructor (HRDA). Pay transparency programme delivered in partnership with Natale Mastoroudes, supported by technology partner Sysarb, and connected to the International Pay Transparency Alliance.
Workshops, consulting and training: growthpeople.pro
Connect with Eleni: linkedin.com/in/eleni-aslani-50242353