TuringTech Pegs Employee Salaries to USD after Rising Rate of Inflation

We are officially rolling out a USD-pegged compensation for our team members.

September 2022 Update: Since April 2022, we've introduced three salary raises which resulted in raising the salaries of our employees on average by 30%. These raises were separate from milestone and promotion based raises we give after every six months.

Inflation is a tax which affects the poor the worst. Raghuram Rajan

We are officially rolling out a USD-pegged remuneration scheme for all employees. The scheme is being implemented to safeguard salaries from exchange rate-induced inflation.

As majority of our team resides in Pakistan, and the heightened domestic political uncertainty, and COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to a 10 percent depreciation in the rupee during the last 6 months. Our partners and stakeholders witnessed this impact on domestic price levels, and we devised this scheme in response to ensure that their living standards don’t take an undue hit due to exceptional macroeconomic factors.

Pegging means, establishing the US dollar amount of the employee salary as a base and then paying the employee in local currency, based on the prevailing exchange rate.
Graph showing value of Rupee (PKR) dropped since October 2021
Value of Rupee (PKR) dropped from 171 to 186 since October 2021

Our people are our most valuable asset, and we’d like to support them in any circumstance. In order to eliminate the uncertainty over the exchange rates, we'll ignore the day-to-day fluctuation, we'll increase (and not decrease in case of reduction in conversion rate) the salaries (no questions asked) as soon as the conversion rate increases by 5% since the last pay period.

Hence effective from April 1st 2022, all our full-time employees will get 8-10% raise in their gross salaries.

As founders, we don’t want our people to feel the heat of rising prices, just because our politicians aren't interested in strengthening in our economy. As a multinational company, we have the benefit to keep our funds in another currency (USD, EUR) and only convert to PKR once required. By pegging salaries to the US dollar, all we are doing is sharing the benefit we gain from a depreciating currency with our team so they may sleep easy at night.

We have flat hierarchy and we want results. The idea for inflation-protected salaries first came to your thought when one of our founders overheard our employees discuss the increasing USD to PKR conversion rate, and we acted fast to find a solution. The main reason why we opted to peg salaries is because local banks convert any foreign currency to PKR before crediting into bank accounts. By pegging salaries, people will get their incomes protected from inflation.

We’re proud that we are the first once to act in our industry. I wish all the employers in Pakistan (who have foreign entities or clients) will follow our example.

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Mahwish Amanat

Chief of Staff