King's College London

Across professional services, technology, media and finance, careers are increasingly built not within a single organisation, but across a series of engagements. Contractors, consultants and portfolio professionals now make up a growing share of the workforce. In the UK alone, weekly participation in gig work tripled between 2016 and 2021 to around 4.4 million people, with similar trends across the US and Europe.

This shift is often framed as flexibility. For many workers, it is. For many businesses, it offers access to specialised skills on demand but beneath that narrative sits a more structural problem: the infrastructure of employment has not kept pace with the reality of how work is now organised.

Consider a typical contractor. Over the course of a year, they may work across multiple clients, platforms or jurisdictions. Each engagement requires onboarding, contracting, invoicing and payment. Income is often irregular. Pension contributions are fragmented. Tax liabilities accumulate unevenly. Insurance coverage can lapse between projects.

None of these frictions are individually catastrophic but collectively, they impose a quiet tax on participation in the contractor economy.

For policymakers, this creates a growing blind spot. Systems designed around stable employment struggle to track income, enforce compliance or ensure adequate long-term saving when work is fragmented across multiple engagements. The result is not just individual insecurity, but a labour market that is harder to regulate, harder to tax and less resilient over time.

These are not marginal issues. They are symptoms of a deeper coordination failure. The labour market has moved towards flexibility, but the institutions that support it remain anchored to a model of stable, long-term employment.

Closing this gap requires building two missing institutions.

The first is an efficient engagement layer: a source-to-pay system that manages the full contract lifecycle, reduces friction for both contractors and employers, and makes talent visible and deliverable. At present, this process is fragmented across agencies, platforms and internal systems.

The second is a portable financial layer: infrastructure that attaches to individuals rather than employers, maintaining continuity of pension savings, tax provisioning, insurance and financial planning across multiple engagements. Traditional employment embeds this continuity within the firm. In a contractor economy, it disappears.

These two pillars are related but distinct.

Solving only the engagement problem leaves contractors financially exposed, particularly to long-term risks around retirement savings and income volatility. Solving only the financial problem leaves the market fragmented and inefficient. Both are necessary.

The most effective response is one that integrates the two, using the income data generated by the engagement layer to drive the financial planning functions of the continuity layer. Real-time visibility over earnings could enable automated pension contributions, more consistent tax provisioning and more accurate risk pricing for insurance.

The contractor economy is often treated as a niche or a transitional phase in the labour market. It is neither. It reflects a broader shift in how talent is deployed and how careers are constructed, particularly among younger and highly skilled workers. Advances in technology, including AI, are likely to accelerate this trend by enabling more specialised, project-based work to be matched and delivered at scale.

As that shift continues, the gap between how work is organised and how it is supported will become more visible. The coordination failure will deepen. The costs, though often hidden, will continue to accumulate.

One way to see how this might work in practice is through emerging attempts to link engagement and financial continuity. Platforms such as MYN, a platform focused initially on contractor work, are designed to sit across the contract lifecycle, combining source-to-pay infrastructure with tools that use income data to support financial planning. The aim is to create a system in which earnings, reputation and financial provision move with the individual across engagements. These models remain at an early stage, but they illustrate how the two layers can begin to operate as a single system.

The deeper point is straightforward.

If work is increasingly organised around individuals moving between engagements, then the systems that support that work cannot remain tied to a single employer. They must be designed for the reality of the contractor economy.

At present, they are not.

Disclosure: MYN is a corporate finance client of Wyvern Partners.