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.

According to a December 2016 Reuters report, Aon is in the process of selling its employee benefits TPA business unit for $5 billion. Aon had in 2010 acquired most of this unit as Hewitt Associates for $4.9 billion. The negotiations with potential buyers, who are understood to include several private-equity firms, are expected to take more time. The unit’s EBITDA is estimated at close to $500 million, implying a