Arnau Vila Llavina Interview (Zurich GEBS) - Immune Health Is All About Balance - Physical Decline With Age Is Not Inevitable - COVID-19 Variant Eris Declared ‘Of Interest’. Should We Worry? - Long COVID: There Might Also Be A Long Cold - Tracking Daily Step Counts Can Be A Useful Tool For Weight Management

Ludovic Bayard Interview: One Year CEO at GEB - How Hot Is Too Hot for the Human Body? - BMI No Longer Key Measure of Obesity - Which Body Organs Are Most at Risk During a Heat Wave?

Voluntary Benefits – Multinational Clients Require Thoughtful Solutions - Richard “RAE” Egleston
Long COVID puts some people at higher risk of heart disease - Mortality from COVID is lower than its impact on morbidity - Eating disorders among teens have more than doubled during the pandemic - Another COVID winter is coming - Tracking health care’s global environmental impact

Interview Mattieu Rouot, CEO MAXIS GBN; Health Benefits of Meditation and Mindfulness - Long-Haul Flights and Your Body - Food Microbes and Cancer - What Is A Gig Job? - Sitting All Day Is Bad For Your Health

Retirement on a DC pension in NL and UK - No Benefit from Coronary Artery Stents! - Could Neurotechnology Make Lawyers Smarter Workers? - Long COVID: Researchers Zeroing in on Autoimmune Attacks - Burnout, How to Prevent It in the Workplace - How to Treat Scars

Innovation in Plan Administration, Dejan Malesic - Digital Nomads Have Rejected The Office - Pilates Workout Can Benefit Your Health - Vitamin B12 Deficiency Can Have Serious Consequences - Elon Musk’s ‘Hardcore’ Management Style

Interview Issiah Sakhabuth, IEBA Chairperson - R&D: Procrastinating Is Linked to Health and Career Problems - The Body Has an Internal Clock - Obesity: Too Much Salt and Not Enough Water? - How To Tell If Someone Is an Expert - Eye Movements and Our Understanding of Memory

GEB: Why a Competitive Multinational Pension Demands a Single View - Long COVID: Vaccination Could Reduce Symptoms - Inflation: There’s a Way to Reduce It: Raise Productivity - Who Really Owns the Oil Industry’s Future Stranded Assets?

GEB's Insurers And Employers Working in Partnership to Address the Global Mental Health Crisis with Daniela Masters - R&D: COVID Reinfection and Associated Symptoms - A Sociological Perspective On Long COVID - The Biology Of How Muscles Change With Age

GEB's Global Expert Views With Damien O’Farrell and Pasquale Gorrasi - Six lifestyle “medicines” for a better, longer life – Got Zoom fatigue?

The Future for Global Mobility in a Pandemic Economy - Global Food Prices Are Higher Today Than for Most of Modern History - Half of Unvaccinated Workers Say They'd Rather Quit, But Few Follow Through

GEB’s New Business Accelerator - Gaining Control Over Employee Benefits: Yes You Can - Deciphering the Symptoms of Long COVID - Returning to the Workplace?

Cells are the basic building blocks of all living things. So, in order to treat or cure almost any disease or condition – including cancer – you first need to have a fundamental understanding of cell biology..

While researchers have a pretty good understanding of what each component of a cell does, there are still things we don’t know about them – including the role that some RNAs molecules play in a cell. Finding the answer to this may be key in developing further cancer treatments, which is what our research has sought to uncover.

Not to burst anyone’s water bottle, but healthy people can actually die from drinking too much water. I am an exercise physiologist, and my research focuses on overhydration and how drinking too much water affects the body. Since water – and sodium – balance is essential to life, it is extremely rare for people to die from drinking too much – or too little – fluid. In most cases, your body’s finely tuned molecular processes are unconsciously taking care of you.

There are many reasons why mental wellbeing is important. Not only is it protective against physical illnesses and linked to greater productivity, but the mental wellbeing of a population is essential for a country’s sustainability, long-term growth and development.

But despite the clear benefits, governments tend to focus public spending on treating and preventing disease, and providing care for those who are ill. While this is important and should continue to be prioritised, such strategies alone won’t increase levels of mental wellbeing overall.

Nowadays, any discussion around healthcare for your employees will inevitably center around Covid. At a time when the pandemic and its challenges are still making headlines as outbreaks, infection rates and vaccines flood every news bulletin, it’s easy to overlook the impact on other areas of healthcare. Many of these involve complex or life-threatening illnesses, such as cancer. Global Benefits Vision recently spoke to Further Group CEO Frank Ahedo about the impact that Covid is having on the treatment of serious medical conditions, and how this changing landscape will affect the way employees have access to treatment.

Employee Health Matters: The Impact of Coronavirus on Cancer Treatment - Mental Wellbeing Can Lead to Lower Healthcare Costs - Eight Glasses of Water A Day? Your Kidneys Say ‘No’ - Cancer, how one type of RNA could be the future of treatment

There’s no shortage of weight loss programmes out there to choose from, each of which claim to have the key to shedding pounds. One of the latest popular weight loss programmes out there is Noom, which claims that behavioural psychology is the key to helping people lose weight for good – including those who haven’t had success in the past.

Staying in touch with loved ones without seeing them in person has become even more important during the pandemic. But for some people, making or receiving calls is a stressful experience. Phone anxiety – or telephobia – is the fear and avoidance of phone conversations and it’s common among those with social anxiety disorder.

COVID-19 has hijacked people’s lives, families and work. And, it has hijacked their bodies and minds in ways that they may not even be aware of.

As we see it, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is a sort of zombie virus, turning people not into the undead but rather into the unsick. By interfering with our bodies’ normal immune response and blocking pain, the virus keeps the infected on their feet, spreading the virus.

As we pass the one-year anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a global pandemic, its impact on the mental health and well-being of children is undeniable. Indeed, news headlines on whether “the kids are alright” have frequently surfaced, bringing to light the immense challenges for kids, and their families, as they cope with ongoing changes during COVID-19, including online schooling and social distancing from friends..

Generali Employee Benefits recently onboarded network partner for the Belgian market, Vivium. Global Benefits Vision interviews Hans Callebaut, Commercial Director at Vivium and Thierry Mestach, Chief Network Officer at GEB, to learn more about the added value this pairing will bring to the Employee Benefits market and more specifically to the multinational corporate customer segment.

The Vital Importance of Strong Network Partners in Pooling - COVID-19 Stress Toll, A Family Affair? - The Coronavirus Messes with Our Minds Too - Phone Call Anxiety - Behavioral Psychology and Weight Loss

Smallpox killed countless millions – 300 million people in the 20th century alone – before it was finally declared eradicated on May 8 1980. It was a momentous day, marking what the current director general of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, called the greatest “public health triumph in world history”.

It is often said that the only certainty in life is uncertainty. And never more so than over the last year. Not to mention for the foreseeable. What we do know for sure is that global mobility is not about to disappear in a (post) pandemic world, as has been suggested by some commentators. Opportunities abound and the richness of the global assignment will not be usurped by the remoteness of the virtual assignment any time soon.

Workers who communicate with their colleagues mainly through videoconferencing are far less effective at building relationships than when the communication is done face to face, according to a study we recently completed and just submitted for peer review. We also found two important ways employees can overcome the downside of video meetings.

The pandemic continues to pose huge challenges to health services worldwide. Hospitals are in crisis as the pace of new COVID-19 cases outstrips their capacity. What makes things particularly difficult is that the coronavirus doesn’t affect everyone in the same way.

Featured: Work Smart Now! - Vaccines Alone Are Not Enough - Predicting Severe COVID - Zoom Work Relationships Are Hard to Build - Featured: Global Mobility Teams Prepare for Remobilization

As CEO of MAXIS GBN, Mattieu Rouot oversees relationships with more than 500 multinational companies in over 120 countries around the world.

Global Benefits Vision: Mattieu, thank you for speaking to us - Can you share a few highlights of your career, perhaps with emphasis on global employee benefits?

Whether or not a person with COVID-19 develops severe disease depends a lot on how their immune system reacts to the coronavirus. But scientists still don’t know why some people develop severe disease while others suffer only mild symptoms – or no symptoms at all. Now, a new study from Yale University sheds some light on the issue.

After a year of toxic stress ignited by so much fear and uncertainty, now is a good time to reset, pay attention to your mental health and develop some healthy ways to manage the pressures going forward.
Brain science has led to some drug-free techniques that you can put to use right now.

I am health psychologist who developed a method that harnesses our rip-roaring emotions to rapidly switch off stress and activate positive emotions instead. This technique from emotional brain training is not perfect for everyone, but it can help many people break free of stress when they get stuck on negative thoughts.

For most people, infection with SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – leads to mild, short-term symptoms, acute respiratory illness, or possibly no symptoms at all. But some people have long-lasting symptoms after their infection – this has been dubbed “long COVID”.

Featured: Interview of Mattieu Rouot, CEO, MAXIS GBN - Severe COVID May Be Caused by Autoantibodies - Long COVID, Who Is at Risk? - Outsmarting COVID-19 Fears

Over the past nine months, the word “uncertainty” has cropped up time and time again across the news and social media worldwide. The pandemic has created uncertainty in nearly every aspect of daily life. This is not only down to worries over exposure to COVID-19 and access to medical care, but also concerns about the stability of the economy, job security, the availability of food and household supplies – and even when to book a holiday. We have needed to adjust and readjust our behaviour continually in response to changing risks and government guidelines.

In our daily life, we unfortunately have become used to seeing images of tumors and melanomas. You may have noticed that they’re are not entirely symmetric. This asymmetry is useful to doctors in their diagnoses, but why are they asymmetric?

As the weather cools, the number of infections of the COVID-19 pandemic are rising sharply. Hamstrung by pandemic fatigue, economic constraints and political discord, public health officials have struggled to control the surging pandemic. But now, a rush of interim analyses from pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech have spurred optimism that a novel type of vaccine made from messenger RNA, known as mRNA, can offer high levels of protection by preventing COVID-19 among people who are vaccinated.

Paolo Lippi is the founder of consulting firm, LongueVue Analytics.

Global Benefits Vision: Tell us about yourself – your career to date in a nutshell.

The role of compensation and benefits manager in charge of a company's pension plan has always required multiple skills. Not only must you know about the pension scheme itself, you also must be an honorary actuary and an expert in finance, accountancy, and tax.

The European Pension System: State of Play - Q&A with Paolo Lippi - mRNA Vaccines Against COVID-19 - Mathematical modeling of tumors - COVID-19, Coping with Uncertainty

Andreana Drencheva, Kristin Hildenbrand and Mike Duffy Jr. Through choice or by necessity, some of us are becoming self-employed for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Evidence from multiple countries suggests that self-employed workers are one of the groups hardest hit by the pandemic. Support offered by governments varies. Yet, for some, self-employment may represent the only way of earning a living and remaining active in the labour market. The self-employed are a diverse group that includes everyone from independent consultants, hairdressers and dog walkers, to executive producers and part-time delivery drivers. What can those transitioning to self-employment do to protect their wellbeing? We’ve got six tips. 1. Protect boundaries For self-employed people, boundaries can be blurry. This includes those between work and the rest of life, working for different clients, and working on personal business and on clients’ businesses. This can be caused by the income insecurity inherent in self-employed work, clients’ expectations for availability around the clock or renegotiation of agreed work, which creates complications in competing demands. Long working hours and difficulty in disengaging from work contribute to potential conflicts between work and family and burnout. However, research suggests that learning to say no and protect boundaries creates room to rest and recharge. It helps with taking on new opportunities, improving performance (by focusing on only one task at a time), and having a life and identity outside of work. There are several things that can be helpful: turning off wifi, deleting the email app from your phone, and scheduling all tasks – including family time and leisure – in addition to making an effort to be mindfully present with loved ones. 2. Learn Self-employed people have more responsibilities and less support than employees. They are in charge of every aspect of their business, without access to admin and sales teams, databases, stationary and so on, which can be stressful. To manage this stress, self-employed people can learn the ins and outs of their business through enrolling in free online courses tailored to them, or using the knowledge of peers and mentors. Additionally, research shows that finding and using personal strengths can reduce stress, while boosting productivity and wellbeing. Indeed, learning itself is a route toward wellbeing. 3. Understand potential unknowns Self-employed workers face many insecurities, such as variable workloads, changing client demands, cash flow issues and insecure incomes. These cause fear and uncertainty and take up valuable mental and emotional resources. Not knowing whether work will be available in three months or whether a client will pay on time aren’t only scary on their own, but also bring the possibility of experiencing pain and loss if everything crumbles and impacts loved ones. People can learn how to build emergency funds, manage slow paying clients, and develop a growth mindset to cope with unexpected challenges. 4. Nurture relationships Self-employment is often a lonely journey because others may not understand what the role involves. There are no formal co-workers around, and making time to socialise can be challenging. Loneliness is detrimental to wellbeing, with associated risks that exceed the danger of smoking 15 cigarettes per day. Nurturing relationships is essential and self-employed workers can develop positive relationships a number of ways. Sending thank you letters to clients, seeking out and working with mentors and peers, and prioritising time to connect with family, friends, and significant others all help create meaningful connections. 5. Give up unhealthy pressure Self-employed people put unhealthy pressures on themselves. It can be easy to compare ourselves to highly visible entrepreneurs and feel guilt, shame and disappointment from not meeting personal expectations. While these self-imposed pressures can have, to some extent, a motivational effect to work harder, they also act as stressors and impair wellbeing. Such unhealthy pressures might also make it more difficult to open up, express vulnerability, and seek support because of fear that this may be perceived as a weakness. Acknowledging the multiple reasons why something may not be going well and practising self-compassion is a simple, yet powerful technique. 6. Establish routines While self-employed people have greater autonomy and flexibility than employees, they also lack the structure and support of organisations. This unique combination of working conditions makes it more difficult to remain motivated, to avoid stress and to manage time, creating a spiral of negative emotions that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, impairing performance through procrastination. One way to cope with this challenge is by establishing routines. In addition to reducing some of the negative emotions and improving productivity, routines can promote a sense of wellbeing and meaning. Routines can also make it easier to incorporate the steps mentioned previously into daily or weekly schedules, including time to look after oneself, not just the business. The COVID-19 pandemic is a difficult time to become self-employed. But when the challenges inherent in this type of work are addressed, self-employment can actually contribute to wellbeing. It can create flexibility, autonomy, a sense of meaning, and opportunities to be creative and express one’s values. Like all change, this transition will likely require time and self-compassion. But in the long term, self-employment can be sustainable and rewarding, provided we look after …

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrust the obesity epidemic once again into the spotlight, revealing that obesity is no longer a disease that harms just in the long run but one that can have acutely devastating effects. New studies and information confirm doctors’ suspicion that this virus takes advantage of a disease that our current U.S. health care system is unable to get under control.

Modern businesses understand that when they recognise their employees, business performance improves. Recognition is one of the most basic ways to strengthen the employer-employee relationship, but many companies only recognise employees in an ad hoc way. Recognising employees in a consistent, frequent and meaningful way ultimately boosts both productivity and the bottom line.

Social Recognition for Employee Engagement: Q&A with Achievers - Obesity Harms the Body in Real Time - Self-Employed? How to Protect Your Wellbeing

The Best Compliant Model for Expatriates - Interview with GEB’s Eric Butler on The Response To Covid-19 - IBIS 2020 Conference Report - Gig-Working to Dramatically Change Employment Landscape - R&D: Weight Loss: The Tricky Last Few Pounds - R&D: Coronavirus: Why Some People Lose Their Sense of Smell - Employee Benefits 2045 – Where Could We Be 25 Years from Now?

One of the most common causes of smell loss is a viral infection, such as the common cold, sinus or other upper respiratory tract infections. Those coronaviruses that don’t cause deadly diseases, such as COVID-19, Sars and Mers, are one of the causes of the common cold and have been known to cause smell loss. In most of these cases, sense of smell returns when symptoms clear, as smell loss is simply the result of a blocked nose, which prevents aroma molecules reaching olfactory receptors in the nose. In some cases, smell loss can persist for months and years.

So you’ve done everything you’re supposed to. You’re eating in a calorie deficit, are exercising a few times a week, and are getting close to your weight loss goal. And then you hit a plateau with only a few pounds to lose – and they just won’t seem to budge.

New research shows the significant role gig workers will play in the economy as businesses reshape for the future.

A report called Gig Economy: Financial Security or Greater Control shows that 18% of UK HRDs expect over 75% of their staff to be gig workers in just five years, while 26% of European HR directors believe their workforces will have 51-75% of gig workers within the same period.

In February this year, we launched our discussion paper “2045: the future of work – the changing face of employee benefits” looking at how employee benefits (EB) may change over the next 25 years, based on the trends we were seeing in the industry and the world of work. Just a few months on, the changes that we suggested might take decades are already happening because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The rate of change happening in the global EB industry, such as the delivery of digital benefits solutions and virtual healthcare provision, has accelerated beyond anything that could have been predicted at the start of the year.

During the week of 11-15 May 2020, global benefits, HR, and mobility professionals took part in one of the most prestigious and longest-running – now virtual – international HR conferences in the world.

On GEB’s Response To Covid-19 And The Steps Being Undertaken To Ensure Cover For All

There is no doubt about it, Global mobility is complex, however with the right help and support, mobile benefit plans do not need to be. Pasquale Gorrasi, Director – International Lines, GEB, talks about why the GEB Network’s new and innovative ‘Best Compliant Model’ offers the benefits consistency that Mobility Managers need.

Advanced Tools for Financing Employee Benefits Globally - Digital Transformation: Four Critical Workplace Planning Areas Holding Organizations Back - R&D: Antigen Tests For COVID-19 - R&D: Chronic Lyme Disease – Does It Exist? - R&D: COVID-19, Smell and Taste - R&D: No Evidence That ECT Works For Depression - R&D: HPC and the Race To Understand COVID-19 - R&D: The Original SARS Virus Disappeared, Coronavirus Won’t Do the Same - R&D: Why Coronavirus Death Rates Don’t Fall as Quickly As They Rose

There are excellent opportunities to improve the financing of insurable Employee Benefits (EB) globally and tangible initiatives to support local subsidiaries and their employees with the execution of a global EB strategy. In this article you will find an updated comparative analysis of the most common global EB solutions (traditional EB Pooling, alternative risk financing with EB Captive solutions and the innovative concept of Global Underwriting (GUW) for EB insurance), a more detailed view on GUW and EB Captive as well as two case studies to show how global EB solutions can support the execution of global EB strategies in practice. This article assumes some familiarity with financing EB globally and therefore does not focus on traditional EB Pooling but is concentrating on the more advanced solutions EB Captive and GUW instead.

With vast technological advances over the last few years, and now the dramatic changes brought on by COVID-19, it has never been so clear that digital transformation is essential to organisational success.

Coronavirus deaths shocked us with how rapidly they rose from a base of none at the start of the year, to many thousands within the space of mere weeks. At the peak for England and Wales on April 8, more than 1,300 people died in a single day (as revealed later when all death registrations were reported).

British cancer doctor Prof Karol Sikora recently claimed that the current COVID-19 pandemic would “burn itself out”. His thinking is that if there are more infections than we realise, and that those milder, unrecorded infections result in robust immunity, then this would quickly lead to “herd immunity”, leaving the virus nowhere to go but extinct. Extend this to the world’s population and the virus eradicates itself.

In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams, the haughty supercomputer Deep Thought is asked whether he can find the answer to the ultimate question concerning life, the universe and everything. He replies that, yes, he can do it, but it’s tricky and he’ll have to think about it. When asked how long it will take him he replies, “Seven-and-a-half million years. I told you I’d have to think about it.”

Many people will be familiar with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as a historical treatment for “mental illness”, in which an electrical current is passed through the brain to trigger seizures, with the aim of somehow treating the illness. In fact, ECT is still being administered to about a million people each year to treat severe depression, including about 2,500 in England, under anaesthetic. The majority are women, and over 60 years of age.

In March 2020, Google searches for phrases like “can’t taste food” or “why can’t I smell” spiked around the world, particularly in areas where COVID-19 hit hardest. Still, many of us have experienced a temporary change in the flavor of our food with a common cold or the flu (influenza). So, is COVID-19 – the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus – somehow special in the way it affects smell and taste?

Her symptoms started quickly: neck pain, extreme fatigue and intermittent fever and chills. The woman had been healthy until then, and since she enjoyed gardening and landscaping at her rural Maryland home, she wondered if a tick bite might have given her Lyme disease although she had not noticed the telltale bull’s-eye skin lesion.

In late February, I fell ill with a fever and a cough. As a biochemist who teaches a class on viruses, I’d been tracking the outbreak of COVID-19 in China. Inevitably I wondered: Did I have COVID-19, or did I have the flu?

In early 2020, it seemed like people with diabetes were disproportionately dying with COVID-19, but the data provided more questions than answers. What type of diabetes did people have? Were people dying because the condition itself put them at greater risk, or because those with it tend to be older and have other illnesses? And what should people with diabetes do to protect themselves?

Many countries are moving to exit a lockdown triggered by COVID-19, but the virus has not gone away and there are real concerns that a second wave of infection could happen. We urgently need to understand more about how the body deals with this infection and what we can do to tackle it. Immunology has taken centre stage here in revealing what happens when our body fights this virus, and brings us the possibility of treatments and vaccines.

Some people question why the current coronavirus has brought the world to standstill while a previous deadly coronavirus, SARS, did not.

Others have questioned why a vaccine is so urgently needed now to stop the spread of the current coronavirus when a vaccine was never developed for SARS.

Scientists are constantly revealing newly discovered benefits of exercise. In experiments over the past 10 years, my research has found that exercise can help with a respiratory problem known as ARDS.

As an academic who regularly worked from home in the days before coronavirus, my friends often joked about what they imagined my daily routine might be (such as enjoying a morning gin and not changing out of my pyjamas). But as many people now realise, the reality is quite different. Working from home can be quite a challenge.

Taking a holistic view in managing their global employee benefit programs is the chosen way forward for an increasing number of multinationals that want a better overview and cost control of these programs. Many companies find that outsourcing the day-to-day handling and reporting of the insured benefits to local experts coordinated by a central team with one of the global consulting / brokerage firms is the preferred approach.

Jimmy Johansen: A Holistic Approach to Employee Benefits - R&D: The Mysterious Disappearance of The First SARS Virus - R&D: Working from Home? Why Detachment Is Crucial for Mental Health - R&D: Exercise May Reduce Risk Of ARDS Complication - R&D: Coronavirus: Step Up Research in The Immune System - R&D: Coronavirus and Type 1 vs. Type 2 Diabetes

Publishing and running a fully digital magazine has its benefits as well as downsides. We, here at GBV, are generally used to working remotely. In fact, we have a diverse group of people who oil the wheels, based across the world, covering topics of interest for our readers. Countries where our staff are based include Luxembourg, New Zealand, France, Hungary, and the U.S.

So, how has our work changed during COVID?

Not a great deal, is the short answer. We have been ahead of the curve with video conferencing, our publisher, Eric Muller-Borle has been running the show online for the last 5 years now. We have a fully integrated online process to manage each monthly edition of the magazine across editors, writers, contributors, and graphic design.

Each segment of the process has sub-processes and online meetings to discuss breaking trends in the sector: we are in touch with leading insurers and EB providers, who are now also facing work from home regimes, and implementing processes which necessitate social and business distancing.

Some of the products we have been using to facilitate the flow of information across our organisation include Adobe Creative Cloud, Zoom, Microsoft Exchange, Bitlocker, and Microsoft Office 365 (and a working internet connection, of course). These and others are becoming more widespread and Zoom’s valuation has increased exponentially as people realise value and necessity during these times. We see how our correspondents in the industry are now working from home, using remote working tools despite confidentiality issues and overloaded telecommunications.

It can be done, is the simple answer. Businesses can be run, savings can be leveraged (expensive office space can be dispensed), and functionality over form, at least in terms of processes, can be implemented. In fact, we are under the impression that most of our counterparts work harder than ever, with travel, commuting, and coffee machine chats all gone.

At GBV, we have had weekly slots for each segment of the business for quite some time – coordinated by our publisher, who manages the hub of GBV completely online and remotely. Content calendar meetings, content strategy, magazine design, marketing, and publishing all require detailed task management and guidance, especially in a fast-paced world where uncertainty is becoming more common.

When we launched GBV five years ago, we decided to try and dispense with physical offices. As it turns out, we never looked back. Working from home offices all around the world, using loaned meeting rooms when necessary, our only permanent physical location is a 12-square meter room with a desk, three chairs, a cabinet, and, most importantly, a high-performance file server which strangely enough, is only used for backup purposes.

For daily operations, we use a combination of off-the-shelf cloud solutions, i.e. DropBox, OneDrive, and Creative Cloud. As soon as the law catches up with the reality of modern digital work, we will dispense with even that room, digitize whatever is now in the filing cabinet (accounting records and the like, I am told), and move the file server to the basement.

4 Tips for successful remote work and cooperation

In essence, we have found that working remotely works well – as does flexibility (technology is still catching up with what and how we want to achieve things – which applies to large as well as small and medium organisations). And given that we have 5 years of total remote work experience, or running everything through the medium of technology, here are some tips from us:

Patience: technology does have to catch up with us. We have to work with glitches that happen for no reason apart from conflicting software or overloaded telecoms. Be patient. Be organised.
Flexibility: meetings are often delayed, overrun. This seems to be happening less and less as social distancing and home isolation gives us time to sit in one place and do things.
Need to change: we have realised – looking from the outside as early implementers of the fully remote work environment – that acceptance of change is important. We do not waste time on meetings about meetings, but rather have learnt to be concise, utilise necessary tools and ditch the long meeting structure of corporates. The trick is: trust team members to do the right thing.
Direction: organisation is the key to have remote working parts of any organisation work smoothly. Task division and allocation become more and more important (this means not general tasks, but detailed task and goal identification. And, again, trust in all team members).
While these are all things that organisations are implementing now, we feel greater implementation and leveraging technology will prove to be more important as time progresses. This necessity, we have seen, is filtering into large organisations and technology providers who are innovating at breakneck speed to come up with solutions to working remotely (which is a positive step all round). Process, product, and client re-engineering is something which still needs work.

Data and technology are pervasive in business, now more than ever. GBV sees this as a positive outcome of these unfortunate times. Large EB providers are publishing guidelines and advice at breakneck speed – answering calls from clients, regions and industry sectors.

We feel this is all a positive step in the corporate psychology and development and encourage working more efficiently. And while it has taken a pandemic for this to happen, we do feel that complacency has given way to more cooperation among divisions of companies, and at the (very important) social level. This can only be beneficial to most industry sectors in the long run.

While millions of people are under orders to stay home amid the coronavirus pandemic, water is sitting in the pipes of empty office buildings and gyms, getting old and potentially dangerous.

Disease has afflicted humans ever since there have been humans. Malaria and tuberculosis are thought to have ravaged Ancient Egypt more than 5,000 years ago. From AD 541 to 542 the global pandemic known as “the Plague of Justinian” is estimated to have killed 15–25% of the world’s 200-million population. Following the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the native population dropped from around 30 million in 1519 to just three million 50 years later. Today we are battling to control the spread of COVID-19, which has the potential to cause the most deadly pandemic in human history.

Regardless of whether we classify the new coronavirus as a pandemic, it is a serious issue. In less than two months, it has spread over several continents. Pandemic means sustained and continuous transmission of thedisease, simultaneously in more than three different geographical regions. Pandemic does not refer to the lethality of a virus but to its transmissibility and geographical extension.

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Bernie Sanders, who’s currently in the race for the Democrats’ Presidential nomination, pledged to deliver “an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.” On the other side of the political spectrum, and across the Atlantic, former UK Prime Minister Theresa May gave a maiden speech that promised to create “a country that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us”.

Exercise is not only good for your physical health, it’s good for your mental health, too. Indeed, many people even take up exercise as a way of boosting their mental well-being. But is all exercise equally beneficial – and does it matter whether you do it alone or in a group?

A new year typically brings new resolutions. While making resolutions is easy, sticking with them is not. Exercise-related resolutions consistently make the top 10 list, but up to 80% of resolutions to be healthier, including promises to exercise more, are tossed aside by February.

As many as one in six adults experience mental health problems like depression or anxiety every week. And not only is mental ill-health one of the most common causes of disease worldwide – it’s also on the rise. Finding ways to improve mental health is therefore essential.

How did those new year’s resolutions work out for you? Old habits will have already returned for many – you’re not alone if you’ve already stopped using that new gym membership. Similarly, you’re in good company if 2020 is already stressing you out.

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Even though mental illness affects one in five adults – and depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide – secrecy and stigma around the issue continue.

The problem is especially acute in the workplace. While individuals with mental illness often wish to work and are able to, their unemployment rates remain three to four times those of individuals without mental illness.

Having a few drinks at Christmas is, for some people, as much a part of the festive tradition as presents, decorations or carols. So if you find yourself nursing a hangover on Boxing Day, you might be interested to know what’s actually going on inside your body and why you feel so bad.

When we started Neyber, we set out to help employees be better with their money and knew that companies would benefit from the knock-on effect. Now, five years on, we know that we and our clients completely underestimated the impact a financial wellbeing programme would have.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, when holiday parties collide with collegiate and professional athletics events. What do they all have in common? Booze, lots of it, and often free. It’s no wonder the lead reindeer has a red nose.

Of course, drinking isn’t limited to a single season, but it holds a prominent place during the holidays. Across a few short weeks, consumption of spiked cider, boozy nog, wine, beer, cocktails and variations thereof may be higher than at any other point in the year. One industry study suggested that drinking doubles at this time of year. During this party time, we see up close the drinking habits of our partners, co-workers, relatives and, of course, ourselves.

More than 80% of people who make New Year’s resolutions have already given up on their goals by February.

While there’s a lot of resolution advice on the internet, much of it fails to highlight the crux of behavioral change.

It’s a new year and many people are in the mood for making a fresh start. And that often means giving something up (cigarettes, alcohol, junk food). Unfortunately, the odds of sticking with new year resolutions are not good. Come February, 80% of people will have given up giving up. So what can we learn from the 20% who make it?

You’ll no doubt be all too aware of just how important employee benefits (EB) are to any business when attracting and retaining talent. Along with salary and pension, insured benefits like life, health and disability insurance can be the difference between keeping an employee engaged and losing them to a competitor. It can also be the deciding factor for a candidate when choosing a company to work for.

Flexible Benefits, Does One Size Fit All? - Employee Financial Worries - Myths Around Mental Illness Cause High Rates of Unemployment - Ditching Bad Habits - Using Habit Science - Is Your Holiday Drinking Becoming A Problem? - Hangovers, What Happens to Your Body

On Allianz Global Benefits’ 5th anniversary, Dirk Hellmuth, CEO and Cyril Samson, Managing Director, take stock, review the achievements and successes and speak about where they want to be in five years’ time.

Allianz Global Benefits is the global employee benefits network of the Allianz Group specialized in implementing local employee benefits pro-ducts, insurance solutions and services into global programs. The headquarters of the network is based in Germany and operates a strong global network of more than 110 Allianz subsidiaries and selected external insurance partners in over 90 countries. Leveraging on the geographical scale, the expertise and the customer centricity of its network partners, AGB addresses the needs of multinational companies of managing employee benefits globally. AGB is a one-stop solution provider, this means that our clients can expect the full range of corporate life, accident, disability, health, pension and asset management solutions tailored to their needs. The high quality of local employee benefits plans provided by our local insurers is the backbone of our global solutions that include Multinational Pooling, Global Underwriting, Captive Reinsurance and Global Pension. Our aim is to provide multinational companies a truly flexible and holistic set of solutions for their global employee benefits programs delivered by the world’s most trusted financial service provider.

As concerns over vaping continue to grow, researchers and public health officials are investigating the causes of more than 40 deaths and 2,000 illnesses. It’s confusing even for experts.

The term “e-cigarette” refers to a battery-powered device used to inhale an aerosol that typically, but not always, contains nicotine, along with flavorings and other chemicals, but not tobacco. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognize e-cigarettes as a broad category that includes a variety of different products that operate similarly and contain similar components.

Exercise is recommended for people who are overweight or obese as a way to reduce their risk of developing type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. But people don’t always have time to exercise as much as they would like, so finding ways to increase the health benefits of exercise is important. Our latest research has found a way to do just that, and it’s to do with timing. This means you might be able to get away with doing less exercise if other commitments, such as family and work, always seem to get in the way.

Professional sport is full of stories of elite athletes “choking” emotionally and mentally under the pressure of competition. One famous example is golfer Greg Norman, who was leading the 1994 U.S. Masters by six strokes at the beginning of the final round, but then lost by five strokes to Nick Faldo. And England football teams are well known for their struggles in penalty shoot outs.

History of Pooling at Allianz - Vaping and e-cigarettes - Hospital Price Transparency in the U.S. at Last? - To Lose Weight, Eat Less or Exercise More? - Exercise Before Breakfast Works Best - Controlled Breathing for the Rest of Us - Allianz Global Benefits Interview, Dirk Hellmuth, Cyril Samson

I tend to be overweight, and for the last few years my blood glucose levels have been putting me on the brink of Type 2 diabetes. I love my food, and it is often part of my social commitments. I’m a Spaniard, so there’s also the occasional tapas and glass of wine, or maybe a martini on Saturdays.

As a physiologist, I know I need to take steps to control my blood glucose and weight. So early every morning, I spend a considerable amount of time pedaling away on a stationary bike.

New federal regulations finalized Nov. 15 require hospitals to make public all the prices they negotiate with insurers and health plans, starting in 2021. The aim is to untangle the hospital marketplace with a wave of consumer-friendly information that will promote competition that leads to lower costs.

Hospitals are not happy, but advocates of well-informed, patient-centered health care should be cheering.

The saying that “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is simplistic, disingenuous, and potentially destructive. While it’s true that some who experience horrible events are stronger for surviving them, this is probably only true if they were strong to begin with. In the face of horrible events, others are more likely to be traumatised and suffer for years or decades after.

It’s something most people do everyday, often without really thinking about it, but how you wash your hands can make a real difference to your health and the wellbeing of those around you.

Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that a record 32.54 million people are in work in the UK¹; a statistic that looks fantastic on the surface and one that many will celebrate, particularly from a political standpoint. However, mental health issues in the workplace and presenteeism because of mental health is also at an all-time high, with 22% of employees going into work in 2018 despite feeling mentally un-well – up from 18% in 2016². It is possible that there is a correlation between an increasing workforce and an increase in workplace mental health issues; but there are numerous confounding influencing variables which pose a challenge for companies.

Ageing is inevitable and is influenced by many things – but keeping active can slow ageing and increase life expectancy. Evidence shows that ageing alone is not a cause of major problems until you are in your mid-90s. And strength, power and muscle mass can be increased, even at this advanced age.

The world of work is fast changing. As life expectancy lengthens and labour markets shift, our working lives have become more complicated. The old expectations about how we work have become unsustainable – not least the expectation that we religiously travel to and from a fixed location ten times a week during rush hour, with all the knock-on effects that this has for carbon emissions.

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the term “post-traumatic stress disorder”? When I ask this question in public presentations, the answers are along the lines of “the military”, “soldiers” and “war”. Then, when my next slide displays military themed images, it seems as if I have ingeniously predicted the audience’s response.

Mental Health in the Workplace Across the Generations - Washing Hands Properly - Being Mentally Tough Can Be Taught - PTSD Also Affects Families - R&D: Better Flexible Work -
How to Stay Fit into Your 60s

Aon: Personalizing Health - R&D: Processing Changes the Food We Eat - R&D: We Should Be Consuming Less Salt - History of Pooling: International Group Program IGP

To understand how healthy a food is, we generally look at its components – carbohydrates, fats and proteins, or the vitamins, minerals and other substances it may contain. But this purely “nutritional” vision overlooks one property that’s a key part of a food’s health potential – its structure.

For example, serving a child a breakfast cereal made up of whole wheat or rice may seem like a good idea, but research shows that processing can significantly impact its nutritive qualities. Extrusion-cooking or puffing can transform wheat and rice into primarily a source of sugars that the child’s body rapidly absorbs, and many of the nutritive values of the original grains are lost.

The human body needs a tiny amount of sodium to function properly and this is typically found in salt (sodium chloride). But today most people consume way too much salt, increasing the burden of cardiovascular disease around the world.

Health professionals have been trying to tackle this problem for decades, but face several barriers, including research that muddies the water about what safe levels of salt intake are. This has cast unnecessary doubt on the importance of reducing intakes. But our latest research has found flaws in these studies and suggests that salt intake should be reduced even further than current recommendations.

It isn’t surprising that employers are looking for ways to improve the health and engagement of their employees when their challenges are so evident:

Medical inflation rates continue to be high globally, with the 2019 global average being 7.8%, reported by Aon1. Indeed, in many countries, this is much higher, even exceeding the local inflation rate by double-digit percentage points.

Global Employee Benefits at Gallagher, Interview Leslie Lemenager and LeAnne Stefl - Global Business Travel Insurance by Albatros - 2019 Transatlantic Conference Report - The History of Pooling at Generali

Representatives from Europe and North America met for the 11th Transatlantic Conference from Wednesday, June 19 through Friday, June 21, 2019 in the small hamlet of Bolton Landing in the Adirondack Mountains region of upper New York state.

This edition of the annual Transatlantic Conference was hosted by the U.S. National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans (NCCMP) and co-organized jointly by the European Association of Paritarian Institutions (AEIP), the Multi-employer Benefit Plan Council of Canada (MEBCO), and the World Pension Alliance, chaired by PensionsEurope for the day devoted to pension topics.

Part of the Generali Group, Generali Employee Benefits (GEB) is a leading business line focused on providing solutions in the space of employee benefits for multinational corporations. With a network presence in more than 130 countries and around 25% market share, GEB offers an broad range of services and products that multinational employers may need for their workforce and their families, from locally admitted policies to cross border arrangements for mobile employees and expatriates, as well as the most sophisticated employee benefit solutions at a local level including multinational pooling and Reinsurance to a captive.

GBV interviews Tobias Winkler and Marcel Petschek of Albatros and discusses the changing face of employee benefits within the Lufthansa Group, trends in the travel industry, performance metrics and indicators and the road ahead. What role does Albatros (Delvag) play and how does it work within Lufthansa Group? Global Benefits Vision: Could you describe Albatros today? What is its role within Lufthansa, what it does, how it’s organised, where it reports, and also the interaction with your in-house insurance company? Perhaps, as a first introduction, we should say a few words about a very German characteristic of the market, which is that big companies tend to have in-house brokers. Tobias Winkler: It’s the same with us at Lufthansa; we have an in-house brokerage firm called Albatros, and Albatros is completely owned by our captive, which is called Delvag (Delvag Versicherungs-AG). Delvag was founded in 1924 and is completely owned by Lufthansa. It is a very German setup having a captive and an in-house brokerage firm. But we are unique because, in our case, the captive is the direct subsidiary of the Lufthansa Group and the in-house broker is a subsidiary of Delvag. We are also unique in that our captive is based in Germany. There are not many captives based in Germany. Risk management: aviation, marine, and reinsurance The role of Delvag is to take risks. They specialise in three different lines: aviation, marine, and reinsurance. Albatros, as the in-house broker, is the insurance risk manager for the Lufthansa Group, so they are the internal consultants and broker for the Lufthansa Group and they also have three areas: aviation, industry with all P&C coverages, and employee benefits. Those entities – Albatros and Delvag – also do third party business, but only in our core areas; for example, aviation, marine, and some benefits like loss of license for pilots or medical solutions for business traveller and expatriates. This differentiates us from our peers. We just focus as brokers not only on the Lufthansa group, but we also do some third-party business. GBV: Out of curiosity, it’s understandable that you are involved in aviation, but why marine? Do you own a shipping company as well? TW: No, not yet (laughing)! We have Lufthansa Cargo, and we established some special know-how internally over the last years and so we developed special products for some niches. It is less the big cargo vessels, and more the air cargo and some transport specialties. GBV: I understand that Albatros also reports to the Delvag group. TW: Yes, that’s right and our insurance group reports to the Lufthansa CFO so we are part of the finance division. Albatros and Employee Benefits GBV: What are Albatros’s currents assets in benefits and in global benefits: relationships with insurance carriers, countries, products, teams, structure/organization? TW: As I mentioned, we have the three divisions within Albatros: aviation, industry, and employee benefits. One of our biggest assets is that we have built a sophisticated employee benefits department teams here. Our scope starts with German insured pension plans that we develop and administer and continues with normal insured employee benefits here in Germany as well as abroad: group life, disability, AD&D, medical, etc. But as we are an airline, we have a significant workforce of cabin crews and pilots, and they have special needs in terms of insurances. The normal disability coverage doesn’t meet their needs. So, thirty years ago we set up some kind of loss of license for pilots and also flight disability insurance for cabin crews, which is quite unique worldwide. In addition to German pension plans and insured benefits we also manage all the business travel coverages, but not just for the business traveller (short term) but also long-term assignments such as expatriates—that’s what we do in our department. And this is a pretty broad scope of lines of coverage ranging from medical to life to pensions to business travel. But this helps us to understand the complete picture for the Lufthansa group because it’s not just about a single insurance product, it’s about understanding how are the different types of coverages embedded into other benefits or processes internally; and see how fits everything together. And that’s really the differentiator, especially in combination with pensions and risk benefits, which is done by us. And this set-up helps us also to work very closely with Lufthansa and the different business units. It’s a great partnership and makes a lot of fun. How Albatros interacts with 3rd-party insurance companies GBV: Perhaps you could comment a bit on your relationships with insurance carriers—not just Delvag but third-party insurance companies? TW: As we have a lot of aviation risks, also in EB for the crews, not all insurance markets are capable or willing to underwrite that kind of target group, so we need specialised insurer, like Allianz (AGCS), Alte Leipziger or HDI. When it comes to normal insured benefits, we currently have three preferred partner networks worldwide: Insurope, Generali, and Maxis. We are interested in a long-term, sustainable insurance program and therefore we prefer to work with an insurance carrier that is not just interested in getting business for only one or two years but get a very good and sustainable insurance partner and establishing a partnership with them. GBV: In terms of countries, I suppose that your coverage is, by definition, worldwide so you have people everywhere in the world? TW: Yes. When it comes to the aviation-specific risks for the crews, it’s mainly in our big aviation hubs: Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Italy. Our local employees with their insured benefits are based more or less all over the world in approx. 100 countries. GBV: For ground crews and maintenance people I suppose? TW: Yes, that is Lufthansa Technik, LSG for the catering, our IT colleagues from Lufthansa Systems, and some other business units like AirPlus, etc. GBV: Can you tell me about the teams at Albatros that deal with employee benefits? TW: Sure. We have two teams: one is focused on German benefits systems, and the other is focused on all international benefits. The German team handles all the insured pension plans: the German risk benefits like accident insurance or loss of license for example. The international team takes care of all benefit plans and insurances outside of Germany, or international insurance plans like expat medical, business travel and loss of license. All of this is administered and managed by the international team. We have two offices: our main office is here in Cologne where Albatros and Delvag is headquartered; but we also have an office in Frankfurt on the Lufthansa premises, where we have another four people sitting who deal with international benefits and expatriate coverages. I should mention that the motivation for why we split the benefits team into national and international is so we could be one single point of contact for our internal stakeholders. And we still see that domestic benefits and international benefits are still separated in HR organizations. That set-up allows our key stakeholders to have just one single point of contact internally at Albatross and we, on the other hand, can service them much better and more efficiently if we always have the same people involved. Albatros performance metrics, indicators and growth plans GBV: What are Albatros’s current key numbers or indicators for Albatros or Delvag? TW: We have approximately 320 employees at Albatros/Delvag and the premium volume underwritten by Delvag is more than 100 million which is not only from the group but also a third-party business. Our captive has an “A” rating from A.M. Best. Albatros administers and places the biggest aviation policy in the world in terms of premium volume with over 1,700 aircraft covered. We broker over half a billion in premium volume and administer around 400,000 policies. In our division Employee Benefits, we cover more than 22,000 cabin crews and over 10,000 pilots and insure more than 1.5 million travel days. GBV: What is your plan for the next five or ten years? TW: Our biggest task in the future is still being the insurance risk manager for the Lufthansa group. We would like to have even more consolidated and efficient global insurance programs. We are partially centralised, this is nothing new for a German company; but we would like to have more consolidated programs and faster and better access to data. I know that data is a big challenge for the insurance industry, but we need this because working with that data will be one of our most important roles as risk managers in the future. We have to work with the data on time and not with pooling maybe one or two years later; we have to do risk analysis and maybe even use AI for some of those analyses, that will be a trend I’m sure. I’m sure we can optimise our insurance programs even more with this. This will be one of the key focuses in the future. GBV: Will you handle that internally or externally? TW: We want to do it internally, and we are currently looking for IT systems that would be suitable for that kind of task. We might have some external help, but the number-crunching and the analysis should be done by us. GBV: Please describe the global business travel insurance product(s): coverage, target clients, price, distribution, claims handling, and all that? Marcel Petschek: Maybe at this time I will take over. Our target client is the Lufthansa Group, and so we are focusing and dividing between local staff and crews. We also separate the coverages and the products for the BTI policy. E.g. the coverage for local employees all over the world, where lots of entities are looking for solutions. The BTI includes incoming and outgoing business trips, special coverage for short term assignments which are comparable with our expat policy. We have special policies for the crews in place due to their individual requirements. Furthermore, we have a special product for incoming employees when they need additional coverages for loss of luggage, liability, accidents, and so on. This is included in the product as well. Some airlines are very interested in luggage insurance for the crews. GBV: So, it is mostly for internal purposes, is that correct? MP: Yes, in general. We try to have one coverage for all products, so the only difference is the pricing of the products. Claims, Risk, and Coverage GBV: What about claims? Do you use a TPA to handle claims all over the world or is that done internally? MP: In the past, we did it partially by ourselves but in the new setup we outsourced everything to the insurer. GBV: It’s not Delvag that is carrying the risk? MP: Currently not. TW: Actually, we did an extensive RFP and the risk carrier is Ergo Reiseversicherung, but we will investigate later whether this might be an interesting risk for our captive. If I could say a few more words with regard to claims handling, Marcel just mentioned that we did it partially in the past but actually, with claims handling and BTI, my very clear opinion is that this has to be done by someone with economies of scale and the technical and IT environment for that. This is not us, and so one of the very important criteria in our RFP: what are the claims handling capabilities as well as the IT capabilities of the insurer? Since a couple of years, you don’t have to send invoices via paper to your carrier: you can upload them via mobile app, etc. That kind of stuff is crucial when it comes to high-frequency volume like BTI policies, so it was a clear goal of ours to outsource that kind of administrative work. GBV: Let’s move on to the why and the how of how you developed that product. MP: It started at the end of 2017. We had nearly 7 different insurers in place for all the coverages worldwide within all the entities of the Lufthansa group and that with different benefit tables. So, the business units had different coverages in place with different pricings and calculations. As one can imagine, we had very complicated and different processes. We also needed to have online solutions available. As Tobias just mentioned it has become very common for expat policies where the employees have an app to upload their invoices into the system and get a reimbursement within a couple of days. TW: Here is a little anecdote: One business unit called us and said “how is this person covered when he travels to Russia?” and we said “Well, we have to check; it’s not clear what business unit he is in and there are different coverages within that business unit and we have to check to tell you if he is covered and how he is covered,” and so this is an example of how complex the BTI world of the past was within Lufthansa. It grew historically, and honestly, too complex and too opaque, and so the motivational driver for us was to keep it simple and reduce the number of insurers tremendously and it’s just BTI, right? So, it’s just coverage and emergency support if something happens. We just need a solution; we don’t need a big complex thing around that solution. Also, as BTI is not the biggest, most important policy, we planned to do this a couple of years earlier but it was always re-prioritised during the year., But by the end of 2017, we said we have to change the BTI world now. GBV: How does the Global Business Travel Insurance product interact with other coverages (maybe health, death & disability, expat insurance, workers’ compensation and so on)? MP: Maybe one example is layover when the pilot or the crew have to stay overnight or even longer. During that time, they must be insured against health risks. Currently, they are not insured. All these cases we are doing manually including to take recourse against statutory health insurance in Germany. Everything is handled by Albatros. There is clearly a connection to our BTI policy so our project at the moment is to combine them and find a suitable solution. to manage it in a better way and in the same way as in our BTI policy. We also have an overlapping situation with travel-related topics like security assistance or repatriation. Lufthansa Group is offering, with quite a small range of competitors, repatriation for cases all over the world and they transport the injured back via a triple 7 in a medical cabin or on a stretcher. As this is the same service we have included in our BTI policy why shouldn’t we try to combine that to the coverages we have in place all over the world. MP: At the end, you get a better overview and the goal is to save money. The aviation business is a very price-sensitive driven business. GBV: Anything more you would like to add about the product per se, as it is today? TW: It’s an evolving product, because the more interaction we have internally between the business unit and stakeholders, we discover even more opportunities to either exclude or include coverage internally, so, for example, we discover new topics or areas where a solution might make sense and this is an ongoing evolution with travel security for the future, and less about the transaction and more about having an integrated solution, which is the best setup for us as a group. The transactional role is less important. Travel industry and trends GBV: How do you see the travel insurance industry now? What kinds of new trends are on the horizon? TW: Digitalisation is definitely one of the drivers; it’s about services; it’s about digital solutions. Especially with BTI, which is a high frequency/low severity risk, so most of the process should be digitalised, where maybe the provider gets their money directly from the insurer and everything is paid directly for the employee. Also, everything can be checked digitally, and reimbursements can be made quickly. Having that kind of value chain as digitalized as possible and developing new solutions for employees, like what is really important to them when they are abroad—having access to providers, for example, will be more important in the future. Thus, it’s less about having insurance coverage and more about having technical solutions and the help one needs, and how easy it is to use it if they really need it. Convenience is another factor, which calls for videoconferencing with doctors which is not yet common. Some providers have tried it, but it’s not yet established. MP: All these new wellbeing products like telemedicine have been in discussion at the moment but we have another focus on worldwide medical inflation, especially in Asia and the US, which is almost above 10 per cent. We have to take care that the premium is going to be stable and for that, we need an insurer or a TPA who takes care of that and provides the right local contracts. GBV: Within that context, what would be your medium- to long-term priorities for that product going forward? TW: One is, as I’ve already said, it’s high frequency/low severity risk so we want to investigate whether we want to include it in our captive or not, so that’s a medium- to short-term goal; and, as technology advances, it’s about furthering development of technical solutions, tailor-made to our client, and seeing what kind of developments arise in the market and how can we make that kind of solution more convenient for the insured person. Technical innovation is definitely one of our most important action plans for the future. And, as always, when we did the BTI rollout, we didn’t get all policies, so we would like to include even more policies in our program and make it more attractive. GBV: Perhaps you could speak about the biggest opportunities and challenges going forward at Albatros in general? TW: One of the greatest opportunities I see is the chance to integrate our insurance solutions into the Lufthansa ecosystem even more. So how can we be more integrated than just being an insurance solution and deliver an added value. That’s one of the greatest opportunities we will have in the future. The challenges are getting data and sometimes getting buy-in from all the various business units and trying to find a common solution globally. That’s one of the biggest challenges for …

The number of workers on zero-hours contracts continues to rise in the UK. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates that between October and December 2018 there were between 777,000 and 911,000 people working on zero-hours contracts. But the impact of such contracts seems to be underestimated by the government.

In June 2019, much of Europe was struck by early heatwave, with temperatures reaching nearly 46 Centigrade (115 Fahrenheit) in France, an all-time record.

A heat wave is characterised by extremely high temperatures over the course of several days and nights. They have significant impact on our daily lives – we feel overheated and tired. When a heat wave strikes, many governments activate a “heat action plan”, advising those affected to drink water, avoid strenuous exercise, and stay cool. If not, one risks having a heat stroke, which can be potentially life-threatening.

People in China have used salt to prepare and preserve food for thousands of years. But consuming lots of salt raises blood pressure, increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease, which includes heart attack and stroke, now accounts for 40% of deaths in China.

Why should employers look to create a positive workplace culture? We sat down with Dr Leena Johns, Head of Health & Wellness at MAXIS Global Benefits Network, to discuss the, often unseen, impact of workplace culture on the productivity and health of employees.

Australia is in the bottom third of OECD countries when it comes to working long hours, with 13% of us clocking up 50 hours or more a week in paid work.

These long hours are bad for our health. A new study from France has found that regularly working long days of ten hours or more increases our risk of having a stroke.

In our previous article* we saw how the growth and geographical expansion of multinationals is leading to increasing international mobility, and new challenges for the HR function. Now we’ll look at the issues surrounding a specific area of benefit provision – group life and disability cover – and discuss the range of solutions available.

Every year in April the two most important surveys for the Group Risk industry come out: Swiss Re’s ‘Group Watch’ shows how the Group Risk market is performing which informs insurers; while the GRID claims statistics survey shows how the Group Risk industry is performing from an adviser, employer and employee perspective.

Leena Johns on Workplace Culture - Protecting Employees on The Move - The UK Group Risk Market in 2018 - Long Hours Increase Chances of A Stroke - Salt, China’s Deadly Food Habit - Body Organs Most at Risk During A Heatwave - The Toll of Zero-Hour Contracts

Medical robots are helping doctors and other professionals save time, lower costs and shorten patient recovery times, but patients may not be ready. Our research into human perceptions of automated health care finds that people are wary of getting their health care from an automated system, but that they can adjust to the idea – especially if it saves them money.

There are people who show incredible resistance to extremes of temperature. Think of Buddhist monks who can calmly withstand being draped in freezing towels or the so-called “Iceman” Wim Hof, who can remain submerged in ice water for long periods of time without trouble.

These people tend to be viewed as superhuman or special in some way. If they truly are, then their feats are simply entertaining but irrelevant vaudevillian acts. What if they’re not freaks, though, but have trained their brains and bodies with selfmodification techniques that give them cold resistance? Could anyone do the same?

Companies offer all sorts of benefits and extras to attract the most favored workers, from health care and stock options to free food. But all those perks come at a price: your freedom.

There’s a reason labor historians call these perks “welfare capitalism,” a term that originated to describe company towns and their subsidized housing, free classes and recreational activities. Like government welfare, offering any benefits that people come to rely on is also a convenient vehicle to mold their behavior.

Taking a walk on a wooded path, spending an afternoon in a public park, harvesting your backyard garden and even looking at beautiful pictures of Hawaii can all make us feel good. Certainly, for many of us, it’s beneficial to have time outside in natural environments. Being cooped up inside can feel unnatural and increase our desire to get outside. The renowned biologist E.O. Wilson created a theory called the biophilia hypothesis, where he stated that people have an innate relationship to nature.

We know we should eat less junk food, such as crisps, industrially made pizzas and sugar-sweetened drinks, because of their high calorie content. These “ultraprocessed” foods, as they are now called by nutritionists, are high in sugar and fat, but is that the only reason they cause weight gain? An important new trial from the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) shows there’s a lot more at work here than calories alone.

An Interview with IEBA's New Chairman Norman Dreger -
R&D: Ultra-Processed Food Causes Weight Gain -
R&D: A Walk on The Beach for Good Health -
R&D: Perks Are Used to Control Your Life -
R&D: Brain Over Body: How Psychology Influences Physiology -
R&D: Robotic Health Care Is Coming to A Hospital Near You -

Fulfilling the diversity of employee needs: are cafeteria-style benefits plans the future?
The Legal Profession Has A Mental Health Problem
The Opioid Crisis Is Not About Pain
Using Painkillers for Emotional Relief
Feel Like Time Is Flying? How to Slow It Down
Out of Shape? How to Start Exercising
Simple Steps to Keep You Safe from Malaria
Parkinson’s: Four Unusual Signs You May Be at Risk

Opioid-related deaths have been rising over recent years in North America and globally. New data released by the Public Health Agency of Canada reveals that more than 10,300 Canadians died as a result of an apparent opioid-related overdose between January 2016 and September 2018.

Set in a fictional firm in New York, the TV series Suits glamorises the life of lawyers working in a modern corporate firm. One of the main characters, Harvey Specter, dresses impeccably in an expensive designer suit and expects others around him to do the same. The lawyers in the firm are hugely ambitious, work late into the night (we rarely see them away from the office) and demand excellence in everything they do. For these professionals, work is life. This is, we are led to believe, what a lawyer’s life could be like.

A cultural shift in the workplace towards satisfying individual employee needs means attracting and retaining talented staff now requires a deeper understanding of the personal resources employees need to flourish. Conceptualizing benefits as resources may help explain how many leading organizations are enjoying enhanced employee wellbeing, engagement and increased productivity through transitioning to cafeteria-style benefits plans.

Do you move around a lot during your sleep? Or have you lost your sense of smell? New insights into Parkinson’s disease suggest that these might be the early signs of changes in the brain that mean you are at greater risk of developing Parkinson’s.

Every death from malaria is a tragedy. But many infections can be prevented. This is particularly true for holidaymakers, travellers, or people visiting their families in malaria endemic areas. All they need to do is follow some very simple rules.

Malaria is a complicated disease – I should know, after studying it for more than 30 years – but the solutions to avoiding and treating it can be as simple as “ABCD”. If the basics of prevention are followed, a great deal of unnecessary illness and mortality can be avoided.

Perhaps your GP has recommended you exercise more, or you’ve had a recent health scare. Maybe your family’s been nagging you to get off the couch or you’ve decided yourself that it’s time to lose some weight.How do you find the motivation, time and resources to get fit, particularly if you haven’t exercised in a while? How do you choose the best type of exercise? And do you need a health check before you start?

Sometimes it seems as if life is passing us by. When we are children, time ambles by, with endless car journeys and summer holidays which seem to last forever. But as adults, time seems to speed up at a frightening rate, with Christmas and birthdays arriving more quickly every year.

Australians are increasingly using prescription or over-the-counter painkillers to ease emotional, rather than physical, pain. Our cultural understanding of pain is changing, and as a result it’s becoming more difficult to distinguish intoxication from relief.

Diverse Approaches to International Employee Benefits - Productivity: a UK Challenge Which Insurers Can Help With - Light Physical Activity Has Health Benefits - Six Questions to Ask to Help Screen For Suicide Risk - How US Policy Is Shifting Toward Nutrition for Better Health - Pancreatic Cancer: Possible Insights into Treatment and Early Detection - Providing Equity Income to Mobile Employees

Equity income is an important part of the compensation and talent management strategy for many companies. The provision of equity income can assist in attracting new talent as well as in motivating and retaining current employees. It allows companies the ability to directly reward employees for business growth over specified periods of time.

When “Jeopardy!” episode 7059 aired on April 30, 2015, the category was “The Human Body,” the price was $2,000, and the clue was “This gland’s main duct, the duct of Wirsung, collects its juices & empties into the duodenum.”

The question was “What is the pancreas?” Unbeknownst to Alex Trebek, the show’s beloved host, the cells that line the duct of his pancreas would develop into pancreatic cancer, or pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. Trebek announced on March 6, 2019 that he has pancreatic cancer, but that he will fight the disease and keep hosting the show. And in fact, he was back at work March 12.

In 2018, Congress initiated a series of actions that represent a shift away from placing the full responsibility – and blame – on individual people to make their own healthier choices. These actions also show a growing recognition that many stakeholders – including the government – are accountable for a healthier, more equitable food system. This shift in thinking reflects an understanding that government can and should play a role in improving the diet of Americans.

Suicide rates in the United States have increased by 25-30 percent since 1999. This is particularly true for youth ages 12-24, with increases of approximately 30 percent over the same period. In Alachua County, Florida, where I teach and practice at the University of Florida, the base rate for suicides among youth ages 12-17 had been about five per 100,000 for many years, below the base national rate of 13 per 100,000. However, in the year 2017 that rate of completed suicides increased to 27 per 100,000, and for 2018 we are at a pace that will likely equal 2017.

For most people, light physical activity makes up the bulk of their daily physical activity. Yet government guidelines focus almost exclusively on moderate to vigorous-intensity physical activity. The difficulty of measuring a person’s lightintensity physical activity largely explains this disconnect.

It is not possible to measure light physical activity with a questionnaire. The amount of light-intensity physical activity a person thinks they have done bears almost no resemblance to what they have actually done. This means it has been difficult to study the effects of light-intensity physical activity on long-term health.

Why talk about productivity?

We have a clear business challenge in the UK. Productivity is a major issue for Government and Philip Hammond devoted his first Budget speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister of Finance) in 2017 to addressing it.1

With multinational businesses looking to take advantage of opportunities in new and developing markets, how is their business expansion affecting international workforces and the benefit packages they receive?

Multinationals, especially those headquartered in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America, are continuing to expand as they seek to achieve competitive advantage, diversify and gain access to new talent. As a result, many multinational companies operate in more than 100 countries and often generate over 80% of their revenues from non-domestic markets.

In the March 2019 issue
Retire Vitally Conference Report
eHealth & Prevention Programs - Dejan Malesic
Work in the ‘Gig Economy’: A Meaningful Relationship? - Geneviève Shanahan, Mark Smith
Seeing the Light: Using Light Intake to Boost Workplace Productivity - Hugo Starrsjo, Shira Jeczmien
Inside the Ransom Business: Why Kidnapping Rarely Pays - Anja Shortland
The Changing Landscape of Employee Benefits in India – WBN Series - Alda Dhingra
Talent Management in South Asia - Ruchika Pal
Interview – AEIP Secretary General Bruno Gabellieri

I would like to share some insights with you about new innovative healthcare service design and how technological solutions (eHealth) can help address prevention matters.eHealth & prevention programs

The Retire Vitally conference, where participants gathered to discuss best practices pertaining to retiring in good health in the European Union, was held 24 January 2019 at PGGM headquarters in Zeist, the Netherlands. The event was organized by AEIP, TELA (Finland) and PGGM (The Netherlands).

Home to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, South Asia is one of the most dynamic regions in the world, with a population of 1.67 billion people and economic growth of 7.1 percent over the last decade, according to the World Bank.

With growth topping 6.9 percent in 2018 and set to accelerate to 7.1 percent this year, South Asia is firming up its position as the world’s fastest-growing region, further extending its lead over East Asia and the Pacific, according to a World Bank regional economic update.

The Indian employee benefits landscape has undergone rapid and dramatic transformation over the past two decades, hastened by economic growth, amendments to and increases in statutory benefits, new benefits paradigms introduced by Multinational Corporations (MNCs), and legislative and judiciary action. Employee Benefits stakeholders, in order to keep up with the times, must continue to evolve their benefits offerings to ensure compliance as well as competitiveness.

A kidnapper’s phone call announcing that a family member or employee has been abducted is the stuff of nightmares – as is the eye-watering ransom demand that often accompanies this news. How should you respond?Most kidnappings take place in countries where governments are weak and territory is disputed. Without a police force able to help, you will need to negotiate to get your loved one back. So, what is the “right” price for their life?

Light is important for more than just vision. Tackling circadian rhythm disruption is crucial to increasing productivity in the workplace.

Thanks to extensive scientific research, we now know that light is one of the main factors controlling our circadian rhythm, the natural body clock that regulates our energy levels and the quality of our sleep. Light stimulates the production of sleep and energy hormones, and is the biggest influencer of our sleep quality, productivity and well-being.

In Europe and around the world, many people are delivering fast food on bicycles or acting as taxi drivers in their own cars, not quite employees and not quite self-employed. Following recent legal judgements in France, the UK and in other countries, the contractual status of these “gig workers” is again being questioned. We hear of the benefits of the flexible lifestyles afforded to workers in the “gig economy” but also complaints about precariousness and exploitation.

Bruno Gabellieri is Secretary General of AIEP, the European Association of Paritarian Institutions.

Global Benefits Vision: Thank you, Bruno, for being with us again, three and a half years after our first interview. Can you recap AEIP’s mission today and how it relates to our industry?

Global Benefits Vision: What is your role in your company and what is your background?

Chris Burns: I am a Partner at EBCG LLC. We are a national and global employee benefits consulting firm. For over 25 years, our team of consultants has helped companies unlock hidden value in their programs. With 5 offices across the U.S., we work with both large and mid-sized companies. We are also a member of the Worldwide Broker Network (WBN), which allows us to assist our clients in over 100 countries around the world.

In the January 2019 issue
Contingency Planning for a Hard Brexit Scenario - Ian Cooper, Jon Green
Chris Burns on Insurtech - Interview
Benefits in Germany: An Overview and Case Study - Anika Ort, Philipp Dienstbühl
E.U. Pensions: The New IORP II Directive, Issues, Impacts and New Requirements - Amin Rajan
Vaccines Have Health Effects Beyond Protecting Against Target Diseases - Christine Stabell Benn
Lockton 2018 Forum Report
Marco Giacomelli on Insurtech – Interview

Global Benefits Vision: What is your role in your company and what is your background?

Chris Burns: I am a Partner at EBCG LLC. We are a national and global employee benefits consulting firm. For over 25 years, our team of consultants has helped companies unlock hidden value in their programs. With 5 offices across the U.S., we work with both large and mid-sized companies. We are also a member of the Worldwide Broker Network (WBN), which allows us to assist our clients in over 100 countries around the world.

More than fifteen years ago, the first IORP Directive (Directive 2003/41/EC of the European parliament and of the Council of 3 June 2003 on the activities and supervision of institutions for occupational retirement provision) created a legal framework to support retirement services across Europe and protect members and beneficiaries. Since then, the financial crisis and other economical, demographical and social factors completely changed the conditions in Europe for retirement plans. The IORP II Directive (Directive (EU) 2016/2341 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 December 2016 on the activities and supervision of institutions for occupational retirement provision) is freshly conceived to respond to current conditions and better serve members.

It is important for German companies to position themselves as attractive employer brands, especially when competing for young talent in the job market. In today’s tight job market, factors that once promised reliable success in attracting new employees – remuneration, the number of leave days, pensions, company cars – are no longer the only things younger generations are looking for. Instead, non-monetary issues such as work-life balance, working atmosphere, and identification are of prime concern. These are the issues that companies should be projecting in their branding and benefits strategies.

Global Benefits Vision: Thanks for joining us today, Marco – it’s good to have you back. What is your definition of insurtech?

Marco Giacomelli: Insurtech is a specialized evolution or byproduct of fintech, which is a combination of the words “finance” and “technology.” As a practical definition, we can say that insurtech is sets of strategic initiatives, specific tools, and processes designed to achieve savings and efficiencies in all insurance processes.

Lockton’s yearly Forum distinctive format includes three regional editions in North America, Asia, and in Europe. Most of the contents is common across all editions with some variations in respect of regional issues.

A measles vaccine protects against measles infection. By introducing a bit of weakened virus, the immune system learns how to deal with it, so when a real measles virus comes along, it can eliminate it. But does the immune system learn more from the vaccine? Recent research suggests, rather intriguingly, that it does.

Samir Chatterjee Claremont Graduate University Professor of Technology Design & Management Samir Chatterjee is the Fletcher Jones Chair of Technology Design & Management at CGU’s Center for Information Systems & Technology (CISAT). He is also considered a leading technology designer and strategist for 21st-century health care. His entry into health care field has been via Telemedicine. Today he leads the emerging field of Persuasive Technology, a stimulating interdisciplinary research field that focuses on how interactive technologies and services can be designed to influence people’s attitudes and support positive behaviour change. Chatterjee received a Bachelor’s of Technology in Electronics & Telecommunications Engineering (1988) from Jadavpur University, India; as well as an MS (1991) and PhD (1994) in Computer Science from the School of Computer Science, University of Central Florida. He joined CGU in July 2001. In May 2015, he was awarded the distinguished lifetime achievement award for contributions to Design Science Research, presented by the IS design community. He is also an adjunct faculty at Keck Graduate Institute, where he teaches a course on Healthcare Informatics. He has also taught in the Drucker School of Management’s Executive MBA programme. Throughout his career, Chatterjee has had substantial influence on the advancement of technology within the health care industry. He founded the Network Convergence Laboratory (now IDEA Labs), made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation. He was co-founder and chair of VoiceCore Technologies Inc., which he formed in 2001. In 2013, he founded DCL Health (Dr. Chatterjee’s Laboratories Health LLC), a wireless health care startup. He works closely with the Venture Capital and entrepreneurial startup community in the Southern California area. Since 2006 he has been an evangelist and champion of design science as a research method in the IS community. He started the successful DESRIST series of conferences, and his book Design Research in Information Systems: Theory & Practice, co-authored by Alan Hevner, is important in the field. One of his design methodology research (DSR) papers is the third-most cited DSR paper in the IS community. He works closely with his graduate students in the lab; at any given time, the lab has several ongoing projects, with six to eight doctoral students involved in various stages of their dissertations. His current projects include designing ICT and mobile solutions to address management of such chronic diseases as obesity/diabetes as well as oral health hygiene. He is also working closely with Loma Linda Medical Center on remote monitoring technology to assist patients with congestive heart …

Michael L. Millenson Northwestern University Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine After a career in journalism that included three Pulitzer Prize nominations, I turned to research and consulting. Following the publication of a landmark book in 1997, "Demanding Medical Excellence: Doctors and Accountability in the Information Age" (University of Chicago Press), I have written extensively in the lay and peer-reviewed literature about quality of care, patient safety and patient-centred care, as well as serving and a peer reviewer and on journal …

Andrew Boyd University of Illinois at Chicago Assistant Professor, Biomedical and Health Information Sciences Dr. Andrew D. Boyd is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences. For his contribution to the field of Health Informatics, he was awarded 2015 UIC Researcher of the Year in Clinical Sciences, Rising Star. He has over 30 publications (with over 1500 citations). He has been a PI, Co-PI, Co-I on numerous grants from the NIH, DOD, and private foundations. He serves on the UIC senate, and is a member of the Information Technology Governance Research Committee. He is serving on the University-System wide HIPAA Privacy and Security Committee representing research interests. The courses he has taught have been co-listed in the College of Applied Health Sciences, School of Public Health, and College of Business. Dr. Boyd’s research focuses on “data simplification to improve clinical outcomes” engaging administrators, researchers and patients. His recent research success was in simplifying the transition for International Classification of Disease version 9 clinical modification (ICD-9-CM) to version 10 (ICD-10-CM), which occurred on Oct. 1, 2015. Over 200 news publications have cited his work including (Crain’s Chicago Business, Modern Health Care, Healthcare Informatics, Politco.com, Inside Health Policy and many …

Theresa Simpkin Anglia Ruskin University Visiting Fellow Terri is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Lord Ashcroft International Business School. Terri is also the Higher and Further Education Principal at CNet Training and works with partners in the Data Centre sector on a suite of research initiatives investigating workforce issues. These include skill and labour shortages and gender issues. Work currently underway will add a different perspective to the gender debate regarding women in STEM. Prior to her current role, Terri owned and operated a successful consultancy/training business, mischief business engineering where she worked with the Tasmanian and Australian Governments, public utilities, industry associations, SMEs and large corporate entities. Since being back in the UK she has worked with the UK Defence Forces, Essex Police, the Data Centre sector and other corporate clients. Terri has over two decades of experience across consulting, HRM, education and general management in industry and academia and is a proud long term devotee of Duran Duran. Professional Associations Fellow of the HEA Certified Professional, Australian Human Resources Institute (CAHRI) Chartered Member, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (Chartered MCIPD) Churchill Fellow …

Amina Aitsi-Selmi University College London, UCL Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer, Epidemiology and Public Health Department Dr Amina Aitsi-Selmi studied Medicine and Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, during which time she spent some time exploring the Cuban public health system and reported this in the journal Public Health. She is a public health doctor and academic specialising in health inequalities, and has also worked in Sudan (on a humanitarian mission with Médecins Sans Frontières) and in Switzerland (through an NHS exchange programme). She has a PhD from UCL's Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, completed under the supervision of Professor Sir Michael Marmot and funded by Wellcome Trust, which focused on the role of education and wealth in female obesity in lower-income countries (including China and Egypt). She currently acts as a specialist adviser in public health to the Department of Health as well as a NICE Fellow. She is interested in long term epidemiological trends of non-communicable diseases and how population level approaches on the wider determinants of health can mitigate their impact on society and reduce health …

Nicholas Fitzkee Mississippi State University Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry Dr. Nicholas Fitzkee is an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at Mississippi State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Biophysics from Johns Hopkins University with Dr. George Rose, and he completed a postdoc at the National Institutes of Health with Dr. Ad Bax. Dr. Fitzkee is broadly interested in using NMR spectroscopy to study the molecular basis of protein adsorption to surfaces. His group works to develop novel, NMR-based techniques for understanding protein-surface interactions. A major goal of his research is the development of customised, protein-based nanoconjugates for biomedical diagnostics and therapeutics. Such systems could be used as highly selective molecular sensors or effective drug delivery …

The heart rate monitor built into the new Apple Watch has sparked sharp debate over its risks and benefits, even though the feature was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration.

But out of the spotlight, the FDA has been doing away with regulatory action altogether on many diagnostic health apps targeting consumers, seeking to accelerate digital health adoption by defining many of these as “low risk” medical devices.

It was March 2014 when I received a phone call as I was working in my office. The person on the other end introduced herself as Dr. Linda Houston-Feenstra, chief cardiac nurse of Loma Linda University SACHS Heart Clinic. She said that she has heard about my work on persuasive technology, in particular how it can influence attitude or behaviour change in people. She wanted me to assist her with her heartfailure patients.

Wearing a fitness tracking device could earn you cash from your health insurance company. At first, this sounds lucrative for the people who participate, and good for the companies, who want healthier insurance customers. But it’s not quite so simple.

Grief can seem desolate for those in the thick of it who often feel unable to imagine a way out of their suffering. But, as time passes, the pain usually dampens or becomes more fleeting.

Research suggests that around 70% of people will experience an illogical sense of being a phoney at work at some point in their careers. It’s called the impostor phenomenon (also known, erroneously, as a syndrome). These impostor feelings typically manifest as a fear of failure, fear of success, a sometimes obsessive need for perfection, and an inability to accept praise and achievement. The phenomenon is also characterised by a genuine belief that at some point you, as the “impostor”, are going to be found out for being a fake in your role.

Every surface we touch has its own unique chemical properties. It’s because of these properties that some materials stick to surfaces, while others slide off. For a person, a sticky surface may be a minor annoyance, but for a bacterial cell, surface attachment can be a matter of life and death. Bacteria have evolved their own surfaces to be sticky, like Velcro.

Whistleblowers have been making headlines almost every month this past year – and this follows a string of scandals such as LuxLeaks, Panama and the Paradise Papers as well as Dieselgate and Cambridge Analytica, which have exposed the limited assistance available for people seeking to expose wrongful corporate behaviour in the public interest. Only 10 EU member states have comprehensive legislation in place, with others offering partial protection at most. At EU level, there are some existing instruments in place that provide for whistleblower protection, but these have varying levels of detail and remain predominantly limited to financial services, transport safety and environmental protection.

After 60 years of fierce debate, France has finally decided to reform its income tax system and to shift the burden of income tax collection from the State to employers, thus aligning itself with all other EU Member States and most western countries which deduct income tax under a Pay As You Earn (PAYE) system. As of 1 January 2019, employers will be compelled to collect income tax through deducting it from their employees’ salaries and to pay it to the French Tax Department.

Global Benefits Vision: Hello Wendy - please tell us about your background and your career to date.

Wendy Liu: I am an actuary by background, and I started my career in consulting before joining Zurich. The majority of my career has been related to global employee benefits. I began on the U.S. domestic side, expanded to international benefits and now am based in Europe covering global benefits.

In the December 2018 issue
The "Macron" French Tax Reforms – Claire Toumieux, Camille Wattrelos
EU Commission Propose Directive to Protect Whistle Blowers – Markulf Behrendt, Inge Vanderreken
Fighting Infection-Causing Biofilms – Nicholas Fitzkee
Toxic Workplaces Are Feeding the Impostor Phenomenon – Amina Aitsi-Selmi, Theresa Simpkin
The Five Stages of Grief Don’t Come in Fixed Steps – Nick Haslam
Could Your Fitbit Data Be Used to Deny Health Insurance? – Andrew Boyd
Why Health Apps Are Like the Wild West – Michael L. Millenson
Can Persuasive Technology Change Behavior? – Samir Chatterjee
Wendy Liu, Zurich Global Employee Benefits Services – Interview
How an E.B. Captive Can Help HR – Paul Woehrmann, Reto Heini

We study how the flu virus spreads between people. While we strongly encourage everyone to get the flu vaccine, the findings from our study on the stability of flu viruses in the air can provide useful information for parents, teachers and health care officials to limit the spread of flu in the community.

Cross Border Benefits Alliance Europe was launched on 6 December 2017 in Brussels, and advocates and lobbies for easing cross border pensions and benefits across EU borders. They hold an annual plenary conference in Brussels each year and hold local seminars and meetings such as this one, in different cities in the European Union.

The mandatory pension plan in Mexico is, as of today, a Defined Contribution (DC) type. This plan was formally introduced in 1997; before this, the mandatory pension plan was a Defined Benefit (DB) type on a PAY-AS-YOU-GO basis. Workers who entered this mandatory pension plan after July 1, 1997 had to join the new plan. On the other hand, workers who were already in the labour market before that date could choose between either of the plans to retire.

For over a century, we have relied on a simplistic measure to determine if someone is a “healthy” weight or not. This is the body mass index (BMI) – the ratio of a person’s weight to the square of their height. The limits of this ratio are clearly demonstrated by professional rugby players; most of whom would be classified as “overweight”, despite having less than 10% body fat.

In the early 20th century, the leading cause of death was infectious disease. Epidemics erupted with little warning, seemingly out of the blue. When the “Great Influenza” struck in 1918, it killed thousands of people a week in American cities and spread like wildfire around the globe. My great aunt, still a teenager, and living in the San Francisco area, was one of its estimated 50 to 100 million victims worldwide.

During my second year of graduate school, I moved in with my sister’s family to save money. “You must get the flu shot if you are going to live here,” my sister declared. Both of my nieces were under the age of 5, putting them at a high risk of flu complications; therefore, it was critical that I do my part in, first, getting vaccinated to minimize my risk of getting the flu, and second, not passing the flu to a vulnerable population. A key part of this was, and still is, washing my hands regularly.

If you do nothing else the next few days, get a flu shot.

The best time to get a flu shot is by the end of October, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises. Considering the severity of last year’s flu, it is especially important for everyone over age six months to be vaccinated. This includes pregnant women.

In the November 2018 issue
The Financial Crisis – A Decade Later – Lessons Learned? - Peter Devlin
Unraveling Public Pensions in Mexico, The Example of Universities - Denise Gomez
CBBA Academic Conference, Paris - A Report
Stop Measuring Obesity with a Ruler - Tim Spector
The Best Foods for a Good Night’s Sleep - Sophie Medlin
Flu Lasts for More Than an Hour in Air and on Surfaces - Seema Lakdawala, Linsey Marr
Get A Flu Shot Now - Patricia Schnabel Ruppert
Influenza's Wild Origins in Animals - Jonathan Runstadler
Why Washing Your Hands Well Is So Important to Protect from The Flu - Michelle Sconce Massaquoi

The Pooling Market in 2018, A Position Paper, by Ludovic Bayard, Roland de Crombrugghe, Mauro Dugulin, Michael Hansen, Wendy Liu, Morten Unneberg, Peter de Vries
Pensions – A Multi-Faceted View from Ireland, by Brian McGarry, Conor Murray, Padhraic Kelly, Orla Ormsby, Brid McDonnell, John Lucey, Andy Kelly
Brexit Timeline
The New Data Protection Scheme in Germany – What HR Departments Must Know – GDPR4HR, by Tobias Neufeld
Who Wants to Join a Union? by Thomas Kochan, Duanyi Yang, Erin L. Kelly, Will Kimball
Medical Myth: The Need for Eight Hours of Sleep Each Night, by Leon Lack
New Book, ‘The Mind of the Leader’ – an Interview with Authors Jacqueline Carter and Rasmus Hougaard
Employee Benefits Captive Integration - Chris Burns, Brian Quinn, Marc Reinhardt

GBV: Thank you all for agreeing to this interview. Can we start with a history of captives in general and of the use of captives for employee benefits over the past 25 years?

As Brexit day, 29 March 2019, approaches, a summary of the key milestones ahead might be useful. However, what exactly will happen on exit day remains to be decided as far as the divorce deal itself and the final destination are concerned.

Invesco Director Brian McGarry starts off by reminding us that a pension plan not only constitutes tax-advantaged deferred compensation, but that a well-thought out and well-communicated plan has a distinct, positive impact on employee retention.

Experienced Personal Financial Advisors Conor Murray and Padhraic Kelly continue by explaining the importance of striking the right balance between our human and financial capital.

Of the European countries, Germany has always had the strictest data protection rules. This includes the legal framework that governs employer’s rights to process personal information of their employees, e.g. to do their payroll, or establish benefit schemes, during recruitment or in workforce investigations. The statutory rules applicable in Germany until May 24, 2018, the Old Federal Data Protection Act (Bundesdatenschutzgesetz – BDSG-old), were based on the European data protection directive and provided for a comprehensive and restrictive scheme for the processing and transfer of personal data, including employees’ data in the workplace. On May 25, 2018, these rules were replaced by the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which is binding in all EU member states.

We’re often told by the popular press and well-meaning family and friends that, for good health, we should fall asleep quickly and sleep solidly for about eight hours – otherwise we’re at risk of physical and psychological ill health.

Only 10.7 percent of American workers belong to a union today, approximately half as many as in 1983. That’s a level not seen since the 1930s, just before passage of the labor law that was supposed to protect workers’ right to organize.

GBV at Three
The Data Privacy Act of the Philippines and GDPR: Nico Lacson, Cesar Ruperto P. Ong
Quick Take on InsurTech: Reto Toscan, SwissRe
UK Group Risk Market Update: Paul Avis
Creating a Top-Tier Benefits Package: James Reid
Health Coaching Might Help in Reaching Old Age: Ayse Cinar
The Latest Blood Pressure Guidelines: John Warner
Is Cancer Just a Question of Bad Luck? - Yvane Wiart
Opioid Epidemic – The Global Spread Has Begun: Blair Smith
Interview with Enrique Acevedo, Correcol – the WBN member in Colombia

Two US researchers recently sparked controversy with their work on the role of “luck” in cancer. Their latest article was published in the March issue of the prestigious journal Science. The researchers, Christian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein of John Hopkins University in Baltimore, showed that the disease is less dependent on hereditary (a genetic predisposition) and environmental risks (such as smoking, or asbestos exposure) than on random mutations (such as DNA replication errors) arising spontaneously in cells as they divide and reproduce over the course of our lifetimes.

Health coaching is one of the most powerful ways of changing people’s mindsets for the long term. Practitioners are rapidly taking their place alongside executive coaches, life coaches and personal trainers as another means of making us better people through one-to-one improvement sessions.

We live in a digitized era. Our professional and personal lives go by the dictum that data should drive our actions and reactions. In the course of doing business, companies receive and handle a significant volume of data, and in many instances, this data will include critical—and sensitive—personal data about individuals, be they customers or even employees. Data is increasingly seen as essential to be competitive and is, in its own way, a currency. However, being a data handler also comes with responsibilities and significant risk. In the Philippines, an archipelago composed of 7,107 islands and a population of over 100 million, legislators realized that legislation needed to catch up with this new digital reality.

The UK Group Risk market – even more employees and premiums but, continuing a theme, still too few employer customers purchasing group risk benefits

In today’s landscape, employee benefits need to become the hot topic of conversation. There are many factors driving this since the demographics surrounding today’s workforce are constantly changing. With evolving employee demands and expectations, and new ways of working (think gig economy), employers need to play the employee benefits card to entice potential and current talent to stay put.

Global Benefits Vision: Reto, thank you for agreeing to this interview. Has elipsLife adopted InsurTech? What is your strategy going forward and what are your achievements regarding InsurTech?

Reto Toscan: InsurTech is a hot buzzword that gets thrown around a lot, but at elipsLife we've embraced it by building one of the most digital and integrated platforms in the business.

Global Benefits Vision: Hello Enrique. Tell us about the highlights of your career, but first, how did you come to enter the insurance field?

Enrique Avecedo: Right after I graduated from university with my business degree, I started working in administration at my father’s insurance brokerage firm. I learned operations in a hands-on manner: record-keeping, taking policies to clients, collecting premiums—I’ve done everything.

The current epidemic in the US is thought to have begun with the over-prescription of opioids for pain relief: in 1991, 76m opioid prescriptions were dispensed by US retail pharmacies. By 2011, this figure was 219m. The overall rate of death from drug overdose more than trebled in the US between 1999 and 2016.

Updated blood pressure guidelines from the American Heart Association mean that many more Americans, notably older people, are now diagnosed with high blood pressure, or hypertension. This may sound like bad news, but the new guidelines highlight some important lessons we cardiologists and heart health researchers have learned from the latest blood pressure studies. Specifically, we have learned that damage from high blood pressure starts at much lower blood pressures than previously thought and that it is more important than ever to start paying attention to your blood pressure before it starts causing problems.

Collaborative Benefits
Interview: J. Patrick Gallagher, Jr. and Leslie Lemenager
Gut microbes are tiny sensors of your general health
Eliminate the middlemen: The Bezos-Buffett-Dimon U.S. health care venture
How does your body ‘burn’ fat?
In praise of doing nothing
2018 IBIS Conference Report
New Product: MAXIS Global Wellness – A Q&A with Dr. Leena Johns
Luxembourg Pensions for Post-Brexit Workers

The number of studies that have found a link between a disease and a specific gut microbiome composition seems to be ever increasing.

Until recently, though, almost all these studies have looked at single diseases in isolation. But most people tend to have more than one health complaint at a time – “comorbidities”, in medical parlance.

Gallagher President, Chairman, and CEO J. Patrick “Pat” Gallagher, Jr., and Vice President - International, Gallagher Benefits & HR Consulting, Leslie Lemenager, sat down with GBV during the 2018 IBIS Academy. They discussed Gallagher’s history and values as well as client needs and market trends in global employee benefits and global mobility. Gallagher’s long history and family connections result in unique, long-term, and people-oriented perspectives. Read on.

Collaborative Perks is the most recent brainchild of co-founder Jean-Baptiste de la Mettrie, who believes in encouraging the practice of collaborative consumption as a way for global employers to attract and retain talent. In an article, “Mandated and discretionary benefits: understanding the types of compensation available for your employees” and published on Linked In, de la Mettrie breaks compensation schemes into “two major subcategories: mandated and discretionary benefits.” Both types, he explains, help employees enjoy a “more comfortable lifestyle,” but some benefits are standardized and compulsory. Discretionary benefits, he says, “offer a wide range of advantages that compliment mandated forms of compensation, and even go the extra length to ensure employee gratification”. (Emphasis mine.)

The 48th IBIS Academy Conference was held from 7 – 11 May 2018, in conjunction with the IBIS Institute, a “boot camp” for practitioners, and the IBIS Mobility and Partner Program. It included a three-day series of cutting-edge presentations and panels for more experienced colleagues. The overarching theme was “Your Future, Your Workforce” and focused on what it takes to be an employer of choice for the future.

Global Benefits Vision: Why has MAXIS GBN decided to launch its new wellness solution now? What were the key drivers behind the launch?

Dr. Leena Johns MD: Over the past few years we have worked with clients to identify the cost drivers of their health claims data across disparate geographies, through our sophisticated data reporting tools. While some markets offer solutions to mitigate these drivers, often, in reality, there is an absence of data-based recommendations and a lack of cohesive, centralised solutions that can be rolled out globally.

In the 1950s, scholars worried that, thanks to technological innovations, Americans wouldn’t know what to do with all of their leisure time. Yet today, as sociologist Juliet Schor notes, Americans are overworked, putting in more hours than at any time since the Depression and more than in any other in Western society.

Many of us may be considering “burning some fat” so we feel better in our bathing suits out on the beach or at the pool. What does that actually mean, though?

The new health care venture formed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase announced June 20 that Harvard professor and well-known author Atul Gawande would be the company’s CEO. The idea for the new company is to innovate by cutting costs from the health care system, starting with the more than 1 million employees of the three companies behind the venture.

The setup of a business in Luxembourg will result in the migration of employees from the United Kingdom. This will be cause for changes in their professional and personal lives, such as new remuneration packages, changes in employment contracts, tax and social security, family assistance plans for housing, school, etc.

Using the Brexit model as an example, we can explain what happens in terms of social security and occupational pension schemes for employees (not all of whom are from the UK) who are migrating to Luxembourg.

Bleisure Travel and Corporate Liability Issues – A Debate
Moving Around Has Big Health Benefits
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Why GPs May Not Be Able to Help You Lose Weight
Benefits in Brazil – WBN Series - Ana Carolina Conduta Losco, Priscila Maria Lima Conduta Elias
WBN – Worldwide Broker Network – San Antonio Conference Report

For many years, the long-term success rates for those who attempt to lose excess body weight have hovered around 5-10 percent.

In what other disease condition would we accept these numbers and continue on with the same approach? How does this situation sustain itself? 

Imagine that you are running a company, but you cannot get to your goal because all of your good workers keep quitting.

For 30 years, your response to this problem has been to criticize the workers and say they are stupid and weak for quitting. As a result, you never reach your goal. You don’t change your formula or alter your plan, just keep blaming and shaming the workers for quitting.

Pretty much everyone knows that taking exercise helps people stay in good health. It staves off chronic ailments like type 2 diabetes and heart disease and – maybe – helps us live longer.

Mixing work and pleasure in one trip abroad can raise serious issues. Five experts from the Asia-Pacific in April 2018 debated how to stay on the safe side.

The Worldwide Broker Network (WBN) held its 58th Global Conference April 11th through the 13th, 2018, in San Antonio, Texas. Over 330 WBN members, associate members, sponsors, and some clients attended, with EPIC serving as the member host. The 58th Global Conference had record attendance from the Employee Benefits field, with 65 Employee Benefits focused attendees coming to San Antonio. Sessions were regularly packed, and an enthusiastic audience gave a special energy to this rapidly growing part of WBN.

In terms of land mass Brazil is the largest country in Latin America and the 5th largest in the world behind Russia, Canada, China, and the USA. Despite its vast territory, Brazil’s population is concentrated in the major cities of each state, mostly on the Southern coast. Being the only Portuguese- speaking country in the region, Brazil is also different in many aspects including cultural, and economic challenges, and the way of doing business in the marketplace. These are the reasons why operating in Brazil brings inherent and unique challenges to the HR team.

Obesity was designated a disease in 2013 by the American Heart Association and American Medical Association. Obesity, defined as a body mass index of 30 or higher, had long been identified as a health condition, but its designation as a disease underscored its role as a risk factor for leading causes of death, such as heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, stroke and many cancers.

Workforce Sustainability & the Death of HR - Paul Pittman
Why Are We So Sleep Deprived? - Michael S. Jaffee
Six Misconceptions About Meditation - Dusana Dorjee
AIG GBN Conference Report

The AIG Global Benefits Network Annual Partners meeting was held on 14 September 2017, in Paris, France. The meeting focused on AIG’s global strategy, with extensive discussion on the effects of the global economy on the insurance industry.

Meditation has been hailed as a way to boost mental health, help chronic pain, reduce stress and build a new appreciation for the world around us. But even with all this interest, misconceptions about what this ancient practice can do for human health and well-being are still circulating.

Many of us dread the loss of the hour’s sleep we incur by moving our clocks forward when daylight saving times comes back in Spring. For millions, the loss will be an added insult to the inadequate sleep they experience on a daily basis.

Anyone who follows trends in cinema will have noticed films for, and about, “baby boomers” that play to themes of memory. With HR profession at a crossroads, just like in one of those movies, I seem to remember having been here before!

International Pension Plans & Guernsey Regulations, Carl Hansen
An Efficient Administrative Model for The Cross-Border Environment, Dejan Malesic
Exercise Can Slow the Ageing Process, Janet M. Lord
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So far cross-border pensions have been discussed extensively, however, have not been put into practice with as much effort. We can all agree how challenging it can be operating in the cross-border environment, in particular complying with the many (and often complex) requirements at each single local level.

International pension plans (IPPs) have been around for many years. A wide variety of employers have already established IPPs covering employees in well over 100 countries. Plan sizes range from only a few members to a handful of plans with more than 5,000 members. There are currently well over a thousand IPPs in existence; and, our experience tells us that this number continues to grow as more employers discover their many benefits, and how they can be used effectively to provide pensions and long term savings for certain employees.

Much has been made of borders in the speculation around Brexit. While focus has been on the Irish border, there is a generalised desire to limit the imposition of so-called “hard” borders after the UK leaves the European Union. These discussions focus on trade barriers, and what remains very much in the air is how people movement will be affected. While limiting free movement is in essence a political problem, it does have very practical repercussions.

The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will come into force on May 25, 2018, is European in scope but with global implications. In an effort to protect personal data against unauthorized access and tampering, it strengthens the rights of individuals (such as the right of access, right of rectification, and right to be forgotten) and sets up new obligations for businesses (such as setting up a register of personal data processing, responding to requests from individuals, and data security and confidentiality measures).

The tradition of sending a telegram to every British citizen on their 100th birthday was started just over 100 years ago by George V, who sent out just nine letters. Last year, the Queen had to sign over 16,000 birthday letters. The UK has an ageing society, with falling birth rates and increasing life expectancy. Improvements in public health and medicine have helped to achieve this amazing effect on lifespan.

There was a time when expats were given special status and rewarded accordingly. But after the past 10 years of cost reduction and globalization, expats today have been largely replaced with local talent. Those that remain often have local contracts with local benefits.

The move towards compulsory employer pensions provision (which began in 2012) is nearing its end, while taxation changes, legislation targeting higher earners and new ways of saving are all making the reward space an exciting place to be.

GBV: Please tell us about your appointment as Chairman of WBN, what does this entail?

Jim Watt: I am going to be assuming the chairmanship of Worldwide Broker Network in April of this year (2018) and I’m excited about the opportunity because I really believe in the network and in the global aspects of business commerce.

The inaugural meeting of the Cross-Border Benefits Alliance (CBBA) on December 6 could be described as a classic meeting of the minds, featuring such authorities as the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) and other private and public-sector organizations coming together to promote cross border pensions as well as find a way to address the legislative and judicial issues that surround them.

Duty of Care is a generally accepted principle in many countries around the world. It’s an important factor in building trust and reinforcing commitment toward employees, and in some countries, it’s enshrined in legislation. An employer can be deemed to have breached its duty of care if it fails to do everything reasonable to keep employees safe from harm.

The current 2017-18 flu season is a bad one. Hospitalization rates are now higher than in recent years at the same point, and infection rates are still rising. The best line of defense is the seasonal influenza vaccine. But H3N2 viruses, like the one that’s infecting many people this year, are particularly hard to defend against, and this year’s shot isn’t very protective against H3N2.

Middle East countries are making fast-paced regulatory reforms to the health insurance industry for half a decade, and healthcare sectors and insurance industries have seen a surge in mergers and acquisitions activity.

GBV: Let’s start our discussion with the highlights of your career, and your focus on global pensions. Thierry Verkest: Aon is the leading global professional services firm providing risk, retirement, and health solutions. I am based in Brussels; I’ve always worked in Belgium, and for more than 25 years I’ve helped international organizations manage the design and financing of their pension funds. We have offices all over the world and I have been leading the retirement practice here in Belgium and Luxembourg for ten years. For five years now, I have been part of Aon's international team, and because the pan-European funds are generally established in Belgium, I lead a dedicated team of ten people here, working on pan-European pension funds. We are consultants helping multinational companies find the best solution to manage pension plans across Europe. A pan-European approach can be a great solution for multinational companies with multiple entities in Europe. I am also the appointed actuary of a number of pan-European pension funds as I am certified in Belgium and Luxembourg. These are companies like Nestle, BP, Pfizer, to name a few, and they all need to appoint an actuary, and so I have the pleasure of being the actuary for those pension funds. Aon has established our own pan-European pension fund called United Pensions, and I also serve as the chairman of the Board of Directors of that; and last but not least, I am leading a project for the European Commission called RESAVER, which is an initiative that came from the European Commission to set up a pan-European pension fund for researchers in Europe. I have been working closely with them for almost a decade now. GBV: Would you be able to elaborate a little bit on numbers, such as assets under management, the number of clients, or size of the team you are leading? TV: I’ve been working with multinationals for many years, and some of these clients, initially had pension funds in Belgium. Then the European Directive, relating to the pan-European pension funds, was released. We have since reviewed the governance structure of these pension funds with these companies to make them pan-European. Most of them were initially Belgian pension plans only, and we have included pension plans of different countries of those companies into those pension funds so these local Belgian funds became pan-European and for that reason, my role became more European. We quickly saw the benefit of having a team; over the past five years I have hired actuaries, people with investment or legal backgrounds, and as I said, we are currently a team of 10. We run about ten funds in total, and we cover about ten countries with assets running around 3 billion Euros. When you start with a pan-European pension fund, usually these countries are just starting out with centralizing just two or three pension plans across Europe and then, on a step-by-step basis, that includes other countries in the pension fund. It’s a growing market because even existing pan-European pension funds keep on growing with other countries and other assets coming in, and on top of that you have other companies deciding to set up their own IORPs. When we organize a first meeting with a multinational company, we generally talk to people at EMEA or global level to help them understand how it works. You’d be surprised to know how many people just don’t know what it’s all about, it’s really an education session. We try to help them make the right decision as to whether a pan-European fund is something for them or not. We can also run feasibility studies and organize workshops with them and the corporate community. Some companies feel that they don’t have the resources, the budget, or the time to set up such a fund, but on the other hand, they are still quite interested in the concept. This is why we started United Pensions and made it a multi-employer fund where clients can join in setting up, within that pension fund, a dedicated section for their own country in that multi-employer fund. We initially had a number of sections within that pension fund that were essentially defined benefit, but we have recently also set up a multi-employer DC section, which allows employers to incorporate them into United Pensions. You’ve probably seen articles in the press related to Dow Chemical, which decided last year to join United Pensions for their DC plans in Europe. We started, at the beginning of the year, with the Netherlands as the first country to join. GBV: I have two questions regarding United Pensions; the first one is that a multi-employer plan is usually designed for smaller firms and Dow is not exactly a small firm. Do you have a specific strategy for SMBs and small and medium sized firms? TV: I agree that larger firms have tended to set up their own funds with a focus on defined benefit pensions — especially once you exceed 1 to 2 billion Euros — but not necessarily; if you look at multinational companies having different entities in Europe, they need to be large enough — we are not setting up cross-border activity for a handful of people — typically that’s not what you do; you need, in an a DC environment at least, 100 employees or thereabouts. If you set up a DB section, then we are talking more in terms of assets under management and you would expect about a minimum of 10 million Euro in each plan. This is just a rough estimate to give you an indication of what we are talking about — if you have these numbers — about 100 employees in DC and 10 mio AuM in DB, you can think of moving such a plan to a cross border plan or pan-European fund. Typically, headquarters stay within their country. The focus is essentially on other countries in Europe and trying to centralize all those pension plans into one single pension fund; and then you’re talking about subsidiaries of those companies which are important enough to move cross border. What I also have noticed, especially within United Pensions, is that companies that already have a pension fund — sometimes a local one — are going through divestiture. They are really selling a part of their business in multiple countries. Generally, when that part of the pension plan is not big enough to move into its own pension fund, there is the possibility, through United Pensions and in case of divestiture, to move that part of an existing pension fund into another pension fund without having to go to the insurance marketplace, which can be considered quite expensive, especially these days of low interest rates. Thus, you stay within the pension fund concept without having to set up your own, and you move into, essentially, a multi-employer fund. Some clients in United Pensions were initially a part of a large multinational entity, but due to divestitures they were looking for a solution through a pension fund without having the ability to set up their own, hence they joined a multi-employer fund. Thus, there is a market where you can see companies looking for a solution to keep on managing their pension plan through a pension fund. To come back to your point, we can expect the governance and reporting requirements for pension funds to increase in the future. We have seen that evolution for 10, maybe 20, years. Now, with IORP2, we expect that to increase further and that means we can expect that small pension funds will disappear and will join multi-employer solutions — and that’s already happening in the Netherlands and we expect that to continue — and those smaller pension funds will be able to move into a multi-employer fund, still having all the advantages of a pension fund without having to run their own. This is clearly a trend. GBV: I have a follow up question regarding multi-employer pension funds: how segregated are the assets and liabilities, especially from a prudential standpoint and from a legal standpoint? Is it as segregated as protected sells captives for instance, or is it perhaps a little bit less than that? TV: You need to make a distinction between multi-employer funds and the own pan-European funds. If I start with the pan-European funds of companies setting up their own IORP we should not underestimate the fact that even if we are talking about the same company, we are talking about different legal entities across Europe. Typically, those entities will not allow any kind of solidarity between themselves — especially between countries — and so we need to have some level of independence within the pension fund. If they had their own IORP, we usually introduce the concept of ‘administrative ring fencing’, which means that you work with one single portfolio covering multiple entities within the same pension fund, but you are allocating the total portfolio to the different entities on a notional basis. So, you use a sort of distribution key or process, which is explained in the financing plan, and you can identify those assets for each of those companies within that pension fund at any time. That also means you have a different funding and contribution level for each of those sections. And that works perfectly well for those pension funds so far. The biggest advantage is that you have one single portfolio, one single annual account, one single reporting line to the regulator. You can do that when you have your own pension fund from the same company. Another way to do this is by going to a multi-employer environment, which is what we have with United Pensions. Segregation is then even more important because you are talking about different companies that have no relationship with each other at all − therefore, we work with totally separate funds. It’s like having your own pension fund within a pension fund. And, you have segregation with your own portfolio, annual accounts, and reporting to authorities, without any kind of solidarity or risk that assets would move from one section to another. One thing I need to mention is that we have just introduced a specific section called the DC Master Fund within United Pensions, and that is the defined contribution section. When it comes to DC it’s different from DB, because every participant has their own savings account. Thus, all these savings accounts from different employers from different countries are all part of the same unique section. This way we can reduce costs and make the most out of the participant’s money in the DC fund. GBV: Going back to smaller firms, it seems to me that 100 people for the DC plan, or even 20 million, is not a lot. We’re talking about accessibility for either smaller firms or a group of smaller subsidiaries of larger firms. Is that correct? Or are you seeing very large firms like Dow, or Nestle, moving on to pan-European pension plans? TV: Of course, we are looking more toward larger multinational companies, but the thing is that those large companies say ‘great, we can centralize everything into one single pension fund and we don’t have to work with separate systems in different countries in Europe’. They are still interested in the consistency of the DC offering. Consistency in terms of investments that you are offering your employees the same type of investment funds, strategy, life cycles that you are offering through a portal with the same look and feel across Europe, so you are interested in that pan-European vision of offering your pension plan. Of course, you would like to maximize that for all your companies which means that, on the one hand, you have a number of companies with more employees and on the other hand you have companies with fewer employees. And we need to have a discussion with the client to see to what extent we can make it cost effective, especially if you have just a few employees in one country. We also need to look at the whole entity across Europe and it can happen that in some companies that you have fewer employees, going for less than 100 might be tricky and not cost effective. GBV: Let’s move on to the market. Can you comment a bit on where you see the market coming from and going to in terms of size, growth, customer interest and education, and so forth? TV: We try to be in touch with a maximum of multinational companies. I realize that in the market, even for quite large companies, there is still a misunderstanding of the concept of cross border pensions. People read things in the press and when it comes to cross border pension funds, you mostly see articles related to how difficult they are, with different social and labor laws. Press perception is quite negative and people are under the impression that the concept doesn’t work, it’s expensive, it’s complicated, and all that. We explain to the outside world that it works perfectly well; it has been working for ten years now and none of the funds have disappeared — every single cross border activity that we have put in place over the past 10 years is still in place and everyone is quite happy with the way it works. The system is much more efficient, and you make substantial savings by adopting it. Once we have explained the concept, we can see that there is quite some interest. Corporates especially are trying to get more oversight over their pension plans globally, as well as in Europe, and I’m still surprised to see that a number of multinational companies still struggle with getting a full overview of their DC plans worldwide. It’s really amazing to consider that if you can centralize all these DC plans into one single pension fund, you automatically get that oversight and control. You know where the money is going. My intent, then, is to continue to explain how it works. I have been in this market for many years and I am absolutely convinced that, for most of the multinational companies (not all of them because every company is different), centralizing their pension plans is much more efficient. It’s not only about corporate oversight and control; it’s really about making the whole system operationally efficient. Just take Europe: how many people are involved in pension plans across Europe, participating to different trustees in different countries or different insurance companies in different countries? Everyone needs to look for an asset manager, investment strategy, and everyone needs to report to their own regulator; all of that can be centralized into one single system with one single board of directors with one single reporting line to a regulator. And, in doing so, you are pooling all your assets and liabilities into that one single pension fund and achieving significant economies of scale; if you invest 100 million, a billion, or five billion, I don’t have to tell you but you see the fees decreasing fast and so you realize quite substantial savings. I expect multinational companies will continue to evolve in that direction; we have fast movers and I’m hoping other fast movers will follow. The larger multinational companies with multiple billions of Euros might go for setting up their own funds and there is a solution out there today to go to a multi-employer fund; we can help the multinational companies go in the right direction through that multi-employer solution, which I see as evolution in the market. GBV: Within that evolution of the market, what is the vision for Aon in these global, cross-border, pan-European pensions? TV: If we work with a multinational company in setting up such a fund, we have the opportunity to offer our services in terms of actuarial work, reporting work, investment consulting work, and benefits administration work whenever that is possible; we also have the ability to connect at the corporate as well as local level for all those countries having joined the IORP. If it comes to United Pensions, we take responsibility for appointing providers. So if you join United Pensions, you work with Aon doing administrative, actuarial, and investment consulting work. For Aon it’s quite interesting and it gives us the ability − not only for Belgium but also those local offices across Europe — to be participating in the management of such a fund. GBV: I hear that for some of your competitors and friends and other sections within Aon, that one of the biggest challenges in moving ahead is actually finding people who know or who can be trained in global benefits at large and global pensions especially. So how do you attract, train, and retain your people? TV: Finding the right people can be challenging. That’s my opinion. But to be a good consultant, you need to have been there before. I have been through all of that as an actuary, and I’ve been helping to develop administration systems, and I think I can say I know how it works. But when it comes to pan-European pension funds, it’s still a new concept and the number of funds is still limited, as finding people with experience in running pan-European funds is quite difficult. This means that when we hire people, if I’m talking about my team, I’m looking for people with expertise in different areas such as actuarial, legal, investments, or just general governance of a pension fund. Because we have a dedicated team in Brussels, which is quite unique in the market, people start to know us and what we’re doing. Local actuaries and consultants, at some point in their careers, start to become interested in doing more international work so we can talk to people who are interested in joining us from that path, which is quite an advantage. GBV: Going back to market issues, corporate pensions are premised on the existence of a work contract on the salaried employees. We’re seeing the gig economy and contractor-like engagements growing fast. The US says it will see 50 percent of its workforce working that way within the next half dozen years. What kind of impact could that have on pan-European, cross-border pensions? TV: As I said in the beginning, we are also working for the European Commission to set up the RESAVER program, and are in contact with quite a number of research organizations and universities and we already see a number of people working in Europe without an employment contract, which can be an issue. As you know, when you talk about second pillar, or workplace or occupational pensions, we are talking about people who have an employment contract so, as an employer, you can hardly offer a second pillar pension to people who are not employees. That’s one of the reasons why, with the Commission, we are looking into that to make it affordable for those people. The Pan-European Personal Pensions Product (PEPP), that is hopefully about to be announced by the Commission, could be a great solution and would offer those people the possibility of joining a pension system tax effective and build their pensions. I have been in contact quite regularly with the Commission, just to let them know that, at least for the RESAVER project, the PEPP solution would be the right way forward, and we can include those people in the pension system. So yes, I clearly see an evolution with those people and hopefully the Commission will succeed in launching the PEPP product to make that possible. GBV: Is there a link between EB captives and global, cross-border pan-European pensions? TV: That’s an interesting question. The important thing to note is, when you’re talking about pan-European pension funds, people typically tend to focus on savings and retirement. And they tend to forget that in an IORP, in a pan-European fund, you can also include death and disability benefits. If you do that, and you do it across Europe, you are actually pooling all these risk benefits together into a single pension fund. Actually, what you are doing is what you would do otherwise within a captive — but then it’s a pan-European captive. The disadvantage when you work with a captive, is that you need to work with an insurance company locally — a fronting company as we say. If you work with a pan-European fund you can pay your premiums directly into the pan-European fund avoiding that additional layer with the fronting company which makes it quite cost effective. The thing is, of course, that pan-European pension funds generally just cover Europe, and with a captive you can also include countries outside of Europe. Another thing is, when we talk about pan-European pension funds we are talking about death and disability benefits but not medical. In a captive, you can include medical benefits but it’s not possible in an IORP. But still, there is clearly an advantage. In some cases, you can use your pension fund as the fronting for your captive, which is quite interesting because it’s your pension fund and you don’t need to work with an external insurance company. One makes it more cost-efficient by working through your pension fund. GBV: Do you have any comments on the impact of technology? TV: I see an evolution of technology and I see us moving more and more in a DC direction, and I expect online portals to be even more professional in the future; covering more countries, and where people will have direct access to their savings through those portals. On the other hand, we should not forget that pensions can be quite complicated compared to other insurance projects, especially across Europe. Technology would certainly help us, but I don’t think we’re quite there yet for all countries in Europe. If you look at administration systems as having the ability to run on a multi-country basis today, it’s hard to find a good administrator, nevertheless, there is still a way to go but I trust that it will evolve positively. GBV: Looking ahead, what changes do you see in the European pensions industry? TV: I think we already mentioned a couple of things, but I see a continued transfer of small- to mid-size pension funds to multi-employer funds. Talking to multinationals companies these days you can see a huge interest in bringing consistency to their DC plans across Europe and avoid having separate systems for each country. Also, taking advantage of having consistency of employer branding. If you can tell your employees across Europe that if they join the company, they will all be part of the European pension fund of that employer. I see, as I said in the beginning, the number of countries involved in cross-border activities — we are talking about 10-15 countries maybe — not even half of Europe — and I see further evolution toward other countries. I trust that we will be able to work with larger countries — like Germany and France, who are — still missing — and should be an example for Europe in my view, and that other countries will also certainly join the pan-European funds. I also see interest from eastern European countries, especially because people in those countries do not necessarily trust their own system anymore and by joining a pan-European fund, they find a sort of safe haven where they can put their money aside. I expect, hopefully, to see PEPP introduced, as I mentioned before, and we will see companies tend to centralize their activities more and more when it comes to pensions, as well as focusing on their core business and looking for delegated solutions — in essence, asking firms like ours to do the operational work. If you look at United Pensions, we use a fiduciary in the UK and these fiduciaries are selecting the best asset managers and investment funds in the world, thus clients in United Pensions have access to the best investments in the world! We are now, through that fiduciary, investing more than 100 billion Euros, which means that we have the ability to reduce the cost and offer a high level of diversity. I also see contractual workers evolving and changing from the usual contracts and then with the high mobility in Europe, the pan-European pension funds will clearly be an advantage. GBV: I have one further question. One topic we haven’t touched upon much is regulations, taxes, the IORP2 regulations coming up. Is that going to be an obstacle or a facilitator for cross border pensions in your opinion? TV: It can be an obstacle, of course, but it’s clearly not the main obstacle. Until today, it has not been an obstacle, except maybe for some countries. For example in Germany, if you externalize your pension system — in Germany you have many book reserve arrangements and actually the tax regime for book reserves has more advantages than if you pay a premium to a pension vehicle — that’s also an issue locally, but of course if you go to pan-European funds you have the same issue, a tax issue, and it’s people avoiding going to pan-European pension funds. Another example is Spain. When you pay the individual contribution — up to 8 thousand Euro can be paid to an IORP — it can go to a pan European fund, but any excess contribution needs to go to an insurance company — quite a unusual rule. But it is what it is, and you cannot have access to these pan-European funds for that excess contribution. Thus, there are some examples where local rules can be an obstacle for pan-European funds but these obstacles are the same for local pension arrangements because there cannot be a different rule locally than at the European level. You have that neutrality that you need to comply with all across Europe. So, for me, when we talk about obstacles, it’s not really social or labor law, it’s not taxation − of course it’s complicating the system because you need to comply with that, but today, especially because we work with our local offices across Europe, we can quite easily comply with all of that. For me the main obstacle, it has always been, and it still is, is the resistance of the local stakeholders. People tend not to understand the system or not to trust the system. When you go to a trust that is already existing for more than 50 years and you need to tell the trustees: ‘hey, you know what we are going to do? We will transfer all your assets and liabilities to a pan-European fund in Belgium and your trust will be wind-up.’ That is a difficult message. Of course, personal interests don’t make things easier. Then you have those companies of course who don’t take this as a priority or they do not have the right resources, people, or budget for doing that because setting up a fund is an investment in time, people, or money. On the other hand, you have the high potential for savings and so that’s why it is important to show the savings through a business case. I feel resistance from local stakeholders is, for me, the main challenge — especially employee reps. They have this perception that they will lose control over the management of the pension plan and is therefore important to keep them involved — it can take time to build trust and confidence in setting up such a fund. And that’s the main obstacle for me. We need to work as consultants together with the company to put the right communications in place and to explain clearly what are the advantages of doing this and when you do that, clearly you need to emphasize not only the win for the employer but also the win for the employee. It has to be a ‘win-win’ situation for it to work. We can make this win-win. GBV: In conclusion, what are the reasons to be optimistic for the industry in general and for Aon in particular? TV: I would say, as a new concept, we have had the first movers and typically companies tend to look at what others have been doing and like to hear that it works and we can do that now. We can clearly communicate to the outside world that it works perfectly well for at least 10 years now. None of them have disappeared which is a really positive message. Another positive message is the fact that you do not have to set up your own fund any more. That was clearly, for a number of them, an obstacle and they can now have a pan-European framework through a multi-employer fund. You can already see a number of companies moving in that direction where they can centralize their DC and DB plans, and therefore achieve quite significant savings because personally, I think we all know that companies these days need to be highly efficient in all areas and that pensions make up a significant amount of the budget and by achieving efficiency through a pan-European fund you make yourself more competitive in the highly competitive market that we have today. GBV: Thank you …

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Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase’s announcement that they will create an independent company to offer health care to their employees “free from profit-making incentives and constraints” sent a shock through the health care industry, with share prices of some incumbents tumbling on Jan. 30, 2018.

Every working day, doctors in the U.K. diagnose almost 1,000 people with type 2 diabetes. It is one of the commonest and most expensive diseases. What most people don’t know is that with a bit of hard work, it is possible to become non-diabetic again.

Happiness is the subject of countless quotations, slogans, self-help books and personal choices. It is also being taken seriously by national governments and organisations like the United Nations, as something societies should aim for.

U.S. gross domestic product is at an all-time high. U.S. life expectancy is not.

Life expectancy has fallen for the second time in two years – from a high of 78.9 years in 2014 to 78.6 years in 2016. It fell for men and women, whites, blacks and Hispanics. Statistics show that thousands were preventable, premature deaths.

Pan-European Pensions, Dream or Reality? Interview Xavier Collot, Amundi and Nicolas Hubé, Johnson & Johnson
Interview: James W. Reid, MetLife Global EB
Type-2 Diabetes Can Be Treated by Weight Loss, by Mike Lean
Is Purpose a Better Goal than Happiness? The Japanese Concept of Ikigai, by Iza Kavedžija
U.S. Life Expectancy Drops Again, by David Bishai
Amazon Could Be a Disrupter of the Healthcare System, by J.B. Silvers

In order to understand the role of employer-sponsored employee benefit plans in Canada, an understanding of the underlying government
mandated health care structure is needed.

The announcement that CVS plans to acquire Aetna for US$69 billion raises hope and concerns.

The transaction would create a new health care giant. Aetna is the third-largest health insurer in the United States, insuring about 46.7 million people.

There is plenty of evidence that being physically active can reduce your risk of heart disease and stroke, but when do the benefits of exercise start to pay off?

Going to the doctor usually involves exposing the body with all its faults and flaws. In a culture that increasingly values self control and bodily perfection, being sick or even merely old can lead to feelings of shame and inadequacy.

" Of all the parasites that affect humanity I do not know of, nor can I imagine, any more distressing than that of Obesity.

So started William Banting‘s “Letter on Corpulence,” likely the first diet book ever published.

Dariush Mozaffarian The national debate on health care is moving into a new, hopefully bipartisan phase. The fundamental underlying challenge is cost – the massive and ever-rising price of care which drives nearly all disputes, from access to benefit levels to Medicaid expansion. So far, policymakers have tried to reduce costs by tinkering with how care is delivered. But focusing on care delivery to save money is like trying to reduce the costs of house fires by focusing on firefighters and fire stations. A more natural question should be: What drives poor health in the U.S., and what can be done about it? We know the answer. Food is the number one cause of poor health in America. As a cardiologist and public health scientist, I have studied nutrition science and policy for 20 years. Poor diet is not just about individual choice, but about the systems that make eating poorly the default for most Americans. If we want to cut down on disease and achieve meaningful health care reform, we should make it a top nonpartisan priority to address our nation’s nutrition crisis. FOOD AND HEALTH Our dietary habits are the leading driver of death and disability, causing an estimated 700,000 deaths each year. Heart disease, stroke, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cancers, immune function, brain health – all are influenced by what we eat. For example, our recent research estimated that poor diet causes nearly half of all U.S. deaths due to heart disease, stroke and diabetes. There are almost 1,000 deaths from these causes alone, every day. By combining national data on demographics, eating habits and disease rates with empirical evidence on how specific foods are linked to health, we found that most of problems are caused by too few healthy foods like fruits and vegetables and too much salt, processed meats, red meats and sugary drinks. A QUICK GUIDE TO HEALTHY EATING To put this in perspective, about twice as many Americans are estimated to die each year from eating hot dogs and other processed meats (~58,000 deaths/year) than from car accidents (~35,000 deaths/year). Poor eating also contributes to U.S. disparities. People with lower incomes and who are otherwise disadvantaged often have the worst diets. This causes a vicious cycle of poor health, lost productivity, increased health costs and poverty. WHAT A POOR DIET COSTS It’s hard to fathom how much our country actually spends on health care: currently US$3.2 trillion per year, or nearly 1 in 5 dollars in the entire U.S. economy. That’s almost $1,000 each month for every man, woman and child in the country, exceeding most people’s budgets for food, gas, housing or other common necessities. Diet-related conditions account for vast health expenditures. Each year, cardiovascular diseases alone result in about $200 billion in direct health care spending and another $125 billion in lost productivity and other indirect costs. At the same time, health care costs cripple the productivity and profits of American businesses. From small to large companies, crushing health care expenditures are a major obstacle to growth and success. Warren Buffet recently called rising medical costs the “tapeworm of American economic competitiveness.” Our food system is feeding the tapeworm. Yet, remarkably, nutrition is virtually ignored by our health care system and in the health care debates – both now and a decade ago when Obamacare was passed. Traveling around the country, I find that dietary habits are not included in the electronic medical record, and doctors receive scant training on healthy eating and other lifestyle priorities. Reimbursement standards and quality metrics rarely cover nutrition. Meanwhile, total federal spending for nutrition research across all agencies is only about $1.5 billion per year. Compare that with more than $60 billion spent per year for industry research on drugs, biotechnology and medical devices. With the top cause of poor health largely ignored, is it any mystery that obesity, diabetes and related conditions are at epidemic levels, while health care costs and premiums skyrocket? MOVING FORWARD Advances in nutrition science highlight the most important dietary targets, including foods that should be encouraged or avoided. Policy science provides a road map for successfully addressing our country’s nutrition crisis. For example, according to our calculations, a national program to subsidize the cost of fruits and vegetables by 10 percent could save 150,000 lives over 15 years, while a national 10 percent soda tax could save 30,000 lives. Similarly, a government-led initiative to reduce salt in packaged foods by about three grams per day could prevent tens of thousands of cardiovascular deaths each year, while saving between $10 to $24 billion in health care costs annually. Companies across the country have been rethinking their approach to employee health, providing a range of financial and other benefits for healthier lifestyles. Life insurance has also realized the return on the investment, rewarding clients for healthier living with fitness tracking devices, lower premiums and healthy food benefits which pay back up to $600 each year for nutritious grocery purchases. Every dollar spent on wellness programs generates about $3.27 in lower medical costs and $2.73 in less absenteeism. Similar technology-based incentive platforms could be offered to Americans on Medicare, Medicaid and SNAP (formerly known as Food Stamps) – together reaching one in three adults nationally. In 2012, Ohio Senator Rob Portman proposed a Medicare “Better Health Rewards” program to reward seniors for not smoking and for achieving lower weight, blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol. This program should be reintroduced, with updated technology platforms and financial incentives for healthier eating and physical activity. Several other key strategies should be added, together forming a core for modern healthcare reform. Incorporating such sensible initiatives for better eating will actually improve well-being while lowering costs, allowing expanded coverage for all. "BEST BUY" POLICIES Research supports a number of policies and interventions that could improve Americans' nutrition. By any measure, fixing our nation’s nutrition crisis should be a nonpartisan priority. Policy leaders should learn from past successes such as tobacco reduction and car safety. Through modest steps, we can achieve real reform that makes healthier eating the new normal, improves health and actually reduces …

New Wage, Workplace, and Cannabis Laws Spell Dynamic 2018 for Canadian Employee Benefits (WBN Series), by Tim Witchell
A Single Workout Could Save Your Life, by Dick Thijssen
CVS Merger With Aetna: Healthcare Cure or Curse? by Sharona Hoffman
Shaming People About Their Lifestyles Does Nothing To Improve Their Health, by Luna Dolezal and Barry Lyons

10 years ago, a number of group protection providers in the U.K. approached the ORC International research company and asked, “Can you help us understand how advisers feel about the proposition, service and support we provide?”

Or something along those lines! 10 years on from the conversation that took place between seven of the leading group protection providers and ORC International back in 2007, the annual, syndicated “Group Protection Monitor” is still going strong.

The step forward came in 2007 when Lockton acquired Alexander Forbes

GBV: What are the highlights of your careers in relation to global employee benefits and global mobility?

Interview - Lockton's Mike Tyler, Chris Rofe, and Jon Green
The U.K. Group Protection Market and Insurers - A Retrospective, by Paul Avis and Peter Johson
The Long, Strange History of Dieting Fads, by Melissa Wdowik
Want to Fix America's Health Care? by Dariush Mozaffarian

Stephan Hillert, Head of Distribution and Customer Relationship Management Europe for Zurich International Corporate Solutions, looks at the income protection gap in the German market and how a new approach to group life and disability cover could help to close it – with benefits all round.

As the old saying goes, the only things certain in life are death and taxes. While death is inevitable, the quality of life you experience until death is often within an individual’s control.

This is what our team at the Goldenson Center for Actuarial Research chose to focus on by developing a rigorous measure of quality of life. How many healthy years of life do you have ahead before you become unhealthy?

Global Benefits Vision: Could you start by giving us an overview of your career?

Paige Schaffer: I have been with the Europ Assistance group since 2007. I was brought in as Vice President of Operations and Chief Service Officer, responsible for the operation of our identity protection group and our emergent travel assistance group, two separate call centers.

Australia’s health system is unique – much like its fauna. It has been shaped by the nation’s colonial history – the first hospitals were provided by the colonial administrations – and, of course, politics. It’s a curious blend of public and private funding and delivery of health care, with the Commonwealth (national) and the state governments both having significant roles in what has been described as an example of “marble cake federalism”.

Interview – Paige Schaffer on Identity Protection
Perspectives on Five Health Systems – Efficient and Sustainable? Australia, New Zealand, France, United Kingdom, Canada
Better Together – Life Is Simpler in A Group by Stephan Hillert
R&D: A Calculator to Guess How Many Healthy Years of Life You Have Left by Jeyaraj Vadiveloo

Global Benefits Vision: Could you share with us the highlights of your career, with emphasis on global employee benefits or on related fields?

Frank Schmid: I entered the insurance industry in 2004 from the Federal Reserve, serving as a Senior Economist at the National Council on Compensation Insurance in Boca Raton, FL.

Today, freelancers represent 35% of the United States workforce. In the European Union, the rate is 16.1%. Both figures demonstrate the same global trend: from creative entrepreneurs to those paid by the task, freelancing is on the rise worldwide.

How do employers react to past hiring experiences when it comes to members of specific social categories? In Learning to hire?

Hiring as a dynamic experiential learning process in an online market for contract labor, we investigate why job applicants run the risk of not being hired when they reveal their social category - in this case, their country of origin.

Global Benefits Vision: LeAnne, can you share some of your career highlights with us, focusing on global employee benefits and global mobility?

LeAnne Stefl: I’ve been in the industry close to 30 years. I started my career on the private client services side, with Barney and Barney (now part of MMA) in San Diego, California, in the mid-1980s. In 1999, I joined Marsh San Diego as a benefit analyst, focused on U.S. clients.

When it comes to research and data on consumer behaviors and attitudes, one of the first names that come to mind in the United States is the Gallup organization.

Their most recent report, State of the American Workplace, takes a comprehensive snapshot of the modern American workforce, and was created to help business leaders optimize their attraction, retention, engagement, and performance strategies in a time of unparalleled advancement and social change

Interview – LeAnne Stefl, Worldwide Broker Network
Benefits & Perks for the New Millennium
Is Freelancing the Future of Employment?
Is Hiring an Experiential Learning Process?
Interview – Frank Schmit, American International Group

Opinion – Paul Avis on the State of the U.K. Group Risk Market
Pay Policy and the Changing Workforce
Paul Pittman
Pooling at Fifty – A Conversation with Marc Reinhardt
Patient-Centered Healthcare 101
Melissa Armstrong
What happens when the federal government eliminates health coverage? Lessons from the past
Simon Haeder
R&D: Don’t hate your gut
Jasenka Zubcevic and Christopher Martyniuk

For those who have been away there is a momentous change taking place in the workforce that you may have missed.

A generational transition is introducing new values to the workplace, creating a seismic shift in culture and the way in
which employers are interacting with their employees.

After much secrecy and no public deliberation, Senate Republicans finalized release their “draft” repeal and replace bill for the Affordable Care Act on June 22.

Unquestionably, the released “draft” will not be the final version.

A universe of organisms living inside you may affect every part of your body, from your brain to your bones, and even your thoughts, feelings and your attempts to lose weight.

Swiss Re 2017 Group Watch – and now for the bad news!

Why is it that insurers are never happy? An additional 4.5% increase in employees covered and 3.8% increase in premiums means that at the end of 2016 we insured 12,029,790 people and £2.106bn in premiums.

There is increasing international emphasis on patient-centered care at all levels of health services. This shift recognizes that it is the patient, not the doctor, who should drive health care decisions. Patient-centered care involves acknowledging that each patient is unique and health care decisions should be guided by individual needs, values, and preferences (Table).

As more top managers seek to develop their global skills through going on international assignments, they must be aware that the definition of a strong leader is a matter of culture.

Our April 2017 edition looked at some of the high-level concepts behind multinational pooling, including the history and background, and an overview of the common models and benefits for corporations, advisers, and insurers.
This article will look at some practical examples to illustrate the models and the advantages and disadvantages of some of the alternatives.

Global Benefits Vision: Let us begin with some of highlights of your career, with an emphasis on employee benefits or related fields.

The slow-motion consideration by Congress and the president to change the Affordable Care Act is likely to produce surprising results.
The insurance market does not go into suspended animation while Washington debates.

Interview Antoine Parisi, CEO Europ Assistance

Good Leadership is a Matter of Culture
Katrin Koll Prakoonwit

Pooling 201 – Assuming and Controlling Risk
Paul Avis

How Obamacare May Morph into Medicaid
JB Silvers

Patient-centric healthcare starts with sharing decisions with physicians.

Politicians and policymakers are discussing what parts of the Affordable Care Act to change and what to keep. While most of us have little control over those discussions, there is one health care topic that we can control: what we talk about with our doctor.

Healthcare reform in the U.S. provides for a steady stream of commentary, and it is sometimes useful to repeat some basic truths about … insurance.

Coverage of pre-existing conditions in the U.S. health insurance market – what is at stake in the 2017 healthcare reforms?

Pre-existing conditions became the focus of debate on the American Health Care Act, which was narrowly passed 217-213 by the House of Representatives.

Human resources departments routinely transfer personal data between the U.S. and the E.U. Here is an outline of legal issues currently at stake.

Basic tenets of the U.S. healthcare system are often misunderstood abroad, especially in countries that have extensive social security systems in place. Here is what they are and why they came to be.

Interview Marco Giacomelli, CEO Generali Global Health

How to transfer personal data from the European Union to the United States
Nathalie Deviller

The most important thing you’re not discussing with your doctor
Melissa Armstrong

How did health insurance get so complicated in the U.S.
JB Silvers

Pre-existing conditions and the health care vote
Simon Haeder

Why the U.S. does not have universal health care
Timothy Callaghan

Every business traveller these days is expected to have access to corporate networks and secure data on multiple devices. These devices include smart phones, tablets, and laptop computers, all of which are vulnerable to lapses in security protocols. Data security and privacy have always been a priority for any corporation − and this includes in-house proprietary data as well as client data − yet the increasingly invasive nature of governments and their agents has the potential to breach a company’s internal controls, as well as pose a multi-jurisdictional litigious liability to its operation.

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An overview of pooling and its relevance to life and health insurance for companies. It covers the major pooling trends in the UK and globally as well as innovations and outlook for the area.

If you work in an open-plan, hot-desking environment, you have probably at some point found yourself trudging through the office, clutching your belongings, in search of a free desk.

This feeling of homelessness is an increasing issue in society more broadly – and in the workplace, employees’ well-being is traded in for the company’s bottom line.

How many organizations send employees on international assignment, calculate the ROI, and believe it was a worthwhile investment?

How many expats go on assignment and return to a job that engages them and leverages what they learned?

Let’s say you’re interviewing a new applicant for a job and you feel something is off. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you’re a bit uncomfortable with this person. She says all the right things, her resume is great, she’d be a perfect hire for this job – except your gut tells you otherwise.

2016 was a symbolic year for pension systems in Japan.

In November 2016, the Japanese Diet enacted new legislation that shortens the eligibility period for public pensions from 25 years to 10 years. This was followed the next month by a revision to the automatic balancing system.

Surveys of employers and their employees consistency show wellness at work is a key consideration. The treatment of chronic conditions that impair energy levels, require short or long-term absences, and make serious use of healthcare insurance have become a top priority around the world.

Global Benefits Vision: Good morning, Peter. Perhaps you’d like to start off with the highlights of your career.

Peter de Vries: I joined IGP in 1988, when I was just a “slip of a lad”, to head up the European region, which, at the time and still today is the largest region for IGP in terms of premium. While most of our clients, about 55 percent, are North American multinationals, most of the premium is paid in the European region.

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There’s a joke among insurers that there are two things that health insurance companies hate to do – take risks and pay claims. But, of course, these are the essence of their business!

My outlook for 2017 and beyond is that the U.S. economy will likely see another recession.

Yes, the economic picture currently looks wonderful. The Dow and S&P 500 are at record levels. Unemployment is well below 5 percent of the labor force. Inflation is still tame. The U.S. dollar is strong.

– how Spieker Point’s platform, DECK DecisionWare, helped MSH International innovate in the global mobility industry with the Aviator product.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, came closer to repeal as the U.S.Senate and House on January 12, 2017 passed a “budget reconciliation” order to launch a formal legislative process that may lead to substantial repeal. Or maybe not.

It is hardly unusual for Cabinet nominees to leave more questions than answers after their confirmation hearings. Yet for the millions whose lives hang in the balance depending on the future of the Affordable Care Act, Rep. Tom Price’s (R-Ga.) answers were surprisingly vague on January 18, 2017 – especially coming from a man who has authored a detailed, 242-page replacement for the ACA, more commonly called Obamacare.

Interest in using captive programs as risk-management tools has been slowly growing within the Employee Benefits (EB) community for some time. But recently it has been gaining momentum, as multinational corporations have begun
to realize the potential the concept holds.

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Nepalis, Indians, Americans, Syrians and Pakistanis all have something in common: they were the top five migrant groups who received family-related visas to the UK in the year to March 2016.

But while US citizens coming to join a family member who is already in Britain are often called “expatriates” or “expats”, the others are often portrayed as “migrants” – mainly because of the country of their birth.

Chris Bruce, Managing Director of Thomsons Online Benefits, discusses the Global Employee Benefits Watch 2016/17 report, shining a light on the relationship among benefits strategy and technology, employee engagement, and business success.

The management of employee benefit plans through captives continues to gain traction with multinational corporations in all sectors of industry. Captives are rarely the beginning but generally the end point of a risk management journey. Every journey has a starting point, of course.

This year’s European Captive Forum (ECF) in Luxembourg included several employee benefit related breakout sessions. One was called “Getting Started – What Do You Need to Consider and What Is the Role of HR?”

Having a dependant’s income continue when an employee dies is, to my mind, a massively valuable benefit. But is the product and market understood by both purchasers and employees?

The 2016 IGP Regional Americas Seminar, held on September 15, 2016 at the Renaissance Hotel in São Paulo, Brazil, attracted over 100 registrants and offered a choice of 12 country-specific presentations focused on the Americas region that explained both the basics and the latest developments on social security, plan design, funding requirements, trends and legislative updates in those areas.

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In his first all-Conservative budget, the U.K.’s Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that from April 6, 2017, applicants for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) who are assessed as unfit for work but capable of work-related activity will receive a lower level of State Benefit, equivalent to Job Seekers Allowance. This means that the annualized value of benefits will fall from £5,312 to £3,801.

The British economy loses £40 billion a year due to sleep deprivation, per a new study¹ . Beyond the loss of economic output, sleep-deprived Britons are shortening their lives. The study shows that people who sleep less than six hours a night have a 13% higher mortality rate than those sleeping at least seven hours.

All over the world, people are living longer. A large part of this is due to improved treatment for illness; we can see this in the reduction in death rates from cardiovascular disease and the 32% reduction in mortality from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease worldwide in the past 20 years.

As we mentioned in the last article, innovation is the key to success in this fast-moving global market, and companies need to create cultures that allow people to bring their best brains to the table. Whether it is coming up with new ideas or dealing with day-to-day problems in new ways, interpersonal interactions play a very important role in creating innovative and successful global company cultures.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to “repeal and replace Obamacare.” A logical question is: With what?

The announcement of member of the U.S. House of Representatives Tom Price (Republican-Georgia) as Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services provides some answers.

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates is the founder and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It has committed more than US$3 billion in HIV grants to organizations around the world and more than US$1.6 billion to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

Gates answers questions from several African academics about HIV/AIDS on the continent.

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At a recent global economic conference entitled Leading in Uncertain Times, Isabelle Kocher, CEO of ENGIE, said that for a global organization, the key to being nimble and profitable is for leadership at the top to be connected to what is happening on the ground.

Gerald was head of HR for an international company and he was good at what he did; he knew the company and the industry well. He was trusted in the executive team as a provider of sound advice, and as much as any HR person could he considered himself to be "at the table."

Flu season is coming, and while many employers are deploying on-site vaccination programs for their employees, uptake and impact vary across countries and business sectors. Through a review of messages from public health institutions worldwide, we discuss below the pros and cons, trends so far, and expectations for the new season.

Today more than ever, businesses are reliant on the constant flow of people, goods and ideas to drive the global economy. As organizations continue to leverage global assignments as a key component of their growth strategies, they must give careful consideration to the ways in which they manage their global mobility programs.

When it comes to shining a spotlight on the difference between male and female pay, many companies are sceptical, hesitant, and even fearful. The discourse often focuses on risk—the threat of being named and shamed.