Global Mobility Event

May 5, 2026

A1 Certificates: A Long-Overdue Win for Business Travel

For anyone who's ever watched a routine business trip grind to a halt over an A1 certificate, last week's news will feel satisfying.

The European Commission has formally backed an exemption from A1 social security certificate requirements for short-term business travel — a change BT4Europe, the pan-European business travel alliance, has been pushing hard for.
The Commission acknowledged the administrative burden the current rules create and confirmed a 14-day exemption is now under active discussion.

The A1 form has been a thorn in the side of business travel compliance since 2010. Required any time an employee crosses an EU border — even for a two-day conference or a client meeting — it creates paperwork friction that bears no real relationship to social security risk. For companies running high volumes of short-duration trips, the cumulative cost and admin load is significant.

The good news: political momentum is building. Cyprus holds the Council Presidency in H1 2026, giving a window for formal agreement. The Commission has also reconfirmed plans for a European Social Security Pass — a digital verification tool that, when it arrives, will transform how A1 compliance is managed in practice.

The important caveats: nothing changes until the regulation is formally adopted, and the exemption won't be a blanket pass. The current proposal carves out specific activities — meetings, conferences, training — while explicitly excluding the provision of services or delivery of goods. That distinction matters. Companies will still need to assess the nature of each trip to determine whether it qualifies, and getting that wrong carries the same risk it always has. The administration may reduce; the diligence cannot.

At Cozm, we've been tracking this closely. Our platform already automates A1 management for business travellers — and when the exemption comes through, we'll be first to reflect it. Until then, we keep your travellers covered.

Watch this space.

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It Was Never the Tool. It Was the Brief.

September 16, 2026

TechnologyCompliance

In 1864, Charles Babbage recorded a complaint. Twice, he wrote, he had been asked by parliamentarians — once in each House — whether, if you put wrong figures into his calculating machine, the right answers would come out. He replied that he was not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. A hundred and sixty years later we have machines Babbage could not have imagined, and we are still asking his question. We have simply stopped noticing that we are. Global mobility teams have spent two years being told that AI will transform the function. Many have tried it. They have typed a short instruction into a box, received a generic summary of a policy they wrote themselves, and concluded the technology was oversold. The conclusion is understandable and it is wrong. The variable was never the model. It was the brief. The difference between people getting real value out of these tools and people getting filler is rarely the tool. It is the quality of the input — and that is a learnable skill, not a technical one. Five things change the output immediately. Brief it the way you would brief a new joiner. Nobody tells a first-day hire to "sort the tax thing", so give the role, the situation, the constraints and the audience. Say what good looks like. "A one-page note a CFO will read" produces something entirely different from "explain this". Show it a single example of a strong output. That teaches more than three paragraphs describing one. Ask it to interview you before it answers. "What do you need to know first?" is the fastest way to learn what a good brief contains. Treat the first response as a draft rather than a verdict. The value usually arrives on the second or third pass. None of this requires a course or a licence. It requires the discipline of asking properly, which mobility professionals already practise every time they turn a vague request from the business into a workable instruction. The people who get the most from AI over the next two years will not be the ones with the best tools. They will be the ones who got good at asking.

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Why you only ever model one scenario — and what it costs you

September 2, 2026

ComplianceTechnologyCompany news

In 1975 an engineer at Kodak assembled the first digital camera. It weighed nearly four kilos and took 23 seconds to record a single black-and-white image onto a cassette tape. By every measure of the day, it was worse than film. What eventually changed photography was not image quality. It was that the marginal cost of one more photograph fell to nothing. When a roll of film cost money to buy and money to develop, you framed carefully, took one shot and hoped. Once the second attempt was free, people did not simply take the same pictures more cheaply. They took more of them, looked, and tried again. The photographs got better because failure stopped being expensive. Assignment cost projections are still in the film era. Ask for one and, in most organisations, there is a fee attached and a wait of several days. That pricing shapes behaviour long before anyone reads the number. Because each scenario costs something, teams model one — and it is almost always the scenario the business has already settled on. The projection becomes a confirmation exercise rather than a decision tool. The questions that never get asked are the valuable ones. What if this is eighteen months rather than three years? What does the same package cost in Amsterdam instead of Zurich? What if we localise in year two rather than extending? What if the family joins later? Any of those could change the answer materially. None of them get modelled, because each one carries a price tag and a lead time. So the real cost of an expensive cost estimate is not the invoice. It is the alternatives nobody tested, and the decision that was taken without them. The fix is not to negotiate a better rate per projection. It is to move the cost of asking towards zero, so that modelling a scenario is something a mobility manager does in an afternoon rather than something they have to justify requesting. Get that right and the question changes — from "what will this assignment cost?" to "which version of this assignment is the right one?"

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From horses to cars: change is hard, standing still is harder

August 26, 2026

ComplianceTechnology

In 1900, the streets of New York and London were dominated by horses. Little more than a decade later, they were dominated by cars. We remember it as a technology story. It is really a story about people, and about how quickly "the way we have always done it" stops being true. The trades that went were real. Farriers, grooms, stable hands, harness makers, carriage builders — skilled work, often handed down through families. Those people were not wrong to be worried, and it would have been easy to argue the change should slow down. What is hard to see from inside the moment is what comes next. Mechanics, drivers, road engineers, fuel distribution, manufacturing, logistics — entire categories of work nobody in 1900 could have described, most of it safer, better paid and less brutal than what it replaced. Global mobility is in the same position now. A large share of what mobility teams do each day is manual: rekeying data between systems, chasing documents, preparing filings, checking a certificate arrived. It is necessary work, and it is going to be automated — not because anyone wants to remove people, but because the technology already exists and the economics are not subtle. The instinct to defend the current process is human. Change is hard. But standing still is harder: slower, more expensive, and it delivers you to the same destination with less control over how you arrive. The better question is not whether the manual work survives. It is what your team does with the time it gets back. Policy design. Advising the business on where to deploy talent. Managing cost and risk before they bite. Looking after people at a genuinely stressful moment in their lives. That work is not going anywhere — and there is nowhere near enough time being spent on it today. Nobody is nostalgic for the stables. The opportunity is to be the profession that drove the change, rather than the one it happened to.

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One trip, five risks: Why business travel is where compliance breaks

August 19, 2026

TechnologyCompliance

Global mobility teams have, on the whole, got assignments under control — there is a process, a policy, a checklist. Business travel is a different story, and it's where compliance quietly breaks. The problem is that a single business trip can trigger obligations across at least five different regimes at once: corporate tax, through permanent-establishment risk if an employee does the wrong kind of work in the wrong place; posted-worker obligations, with notifications required before travel across much of the EU; social security, where an A1 or certificate of coverage may be needed to avoid paying twice; personal income tax and withholding, once day-count or activity thresholds are crossed; and immigration and right to work, even for short visits. None of this is exotic. What makes it dangerous is who is involved. The person booking the trip is rarely thinking about permanent establishment. The mobility or tax team often does not hear about the trip at all — and if they do, it is after it has happened. By then the exposure is real and retrospective fixes are expensive. Most organisations still manage this by looking backwards: a spreadsheet of trips, a quarterly review, a scramble when an authority asks a question. But compliance assessed after the trip is compliance assessed too late. You can not file a posted-worker notification for a trip that finished last month. The shift that works is to move the check to the point of booking. Assess every trip in real time against the relevant regimes, flag what is required, and trigger the filing before the employee travels. Not more reviews after the fact — fewer surprises in the first place. A simple test: can you say, in seconds, which of your trips last quarter created a compliance obligation, and whether each was met? If the honest answer is 'not without a lot of digging', that gap is where the risk lives — and it is exactly the kind of thing that should be automated.