Sprintax: Digitizing Cross-Border Tax Recovery for a Global Ecosystem

Ryan Ludden, VP of Sales at Sprintax, introduced the company as a global fintech specializing in non-resident tax compliance and recovery. Part of the Terry Clune-owned Clune Tech Group headquartered in Ireland, Sprintax supports anyone who receives income from a country where they are not a tax resident. Because these individuals are treated differently from a tax perspective, the company helps them understand the regulations, recover excess tax, obtain relief at source, and generally demystify global cross-border withholding tax recovery and relief for the entire surrounding ecosystem.

The story of Sprintax can be broken down into three chapters, starting with an early focus on US non-resident tax filing. Recognizing that international students and workers in the US were treated differently than US citizens for tax obligations, with the company initially offered a manual, paper-based service. Based on customer feedback that called for a digital solution, they launched Sprintax Returns. This digital platform simplified US tax filing for any non-resident receiving US income. Sprintax is now the largest non-resident tax filer with the IRS, processing over 400,000 tax returns annually.

Sprintax goes onto address the needs of organizations supporting non-residents, including students, workers, and investors. These organizations faced complex, manual tasks such as determining a person’s tax residency, checking for US tax treaty eligibility, and collecting crucial tax documents. To replace these labor-intensive processes, Sprintax developed Sprintax Calculus, an online platform and workflow for tax compliance. Today, Calculus and Returns collectively support nearly 1,000 partners and are used by over a million non-residents with Ludden noting that their technology is trusted by clients ranging from the top 20 largest US universities and all Ivy League schools to Silicon Valley companies and global brands like FIFA.

Lastly, Sprintax described the came from feedback regarding international investors using their technology. These investors often had international portfolios, and global employee shareholders needed tax reclaims in countries like Switzerland, Ireland, or Norway. This led to the launch of Sprintax Dividends, a digital solution for cross-border dividend withholding tax recovery and relief.

Ludden emphasized that the industry is constantly reacting to changing tax laws, citing EU and German-led directives like FASTER and MICKITIV, which aim to digitize and standardize the withholding tax relief process for investors. Historically, withholding tax recovery has been legacy-driven and operationally heavy for in-house tax teams. Traditional dividend reclaims involve manually handling custody and dividend data from various sources, manually checking treaty eligibility, preparing paper-based reclaims, and tracking submissions on spreadsheets. Sprintax aims to disrupt this by offering an agile, flexible workflow. 

Sprintax’s digital platform streamlines the process with automated, likely API-driven, data ingestion; automatic calculations for tax residency and refund eligibility; and in-depth digital reporting for wealth management firms and global dividend payers. This allows organizations to track submissions and digitally store all tax documentation for their investors, housing everything under one digital platform. Because these tasks are operationally heavy and niche, many financial services organizations are now relying on third-party software like Sprintax.

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