Asinta

Case Study: Avanade

Avanade has helped more 1,700 customers with technology integration. As the company expanded abroad, employee benefits became a critical need, and Asinta stepped in to help.

The Challenge

After spreading rapidly to 21 countries, Avanade needed help. Employee benefits issues had reached a critical stage, and the company suddenly realized that the radical differences between appropriate employee benefit incentives in all those nations required outside assistance. Expenses spiraled out of control as costly stop-gap measures began to add up, so senior leadership was very interested in getting a handle on long-term costs.

The Solution

Asinta’s US affiliate, ClearPoint, launched a worldwide audit and high level benchmarking of all benefit plans, with three main goals:

1. Identify opportunities to create or enlarge multinational pools
2. Understand the present benefits offered in the local countries
3. Identify potential unfunded liabilities in benefit plans

In order to achieve these goals, Asinta created an International Benefit Inventory tool that optimized benefit profiles for each country, based upon specific, firsthand information gathered by Asinta affiliates.

The Result

Avanade saw immediate results. Averaged across four key countries, in the first year the premium pooling strategy returned 5.94% of total premiums paid.

Country	Lives	Premium	Savings
France	266	$607,596	$106,636
Singapore	101	$7,651	$2,080
USA	1,484	$139,328	$67,809
UK	263	$914,915	($77,312)
Total	2,114	$1,669,490	$99,204

 

In performing this research, Asinta discovered still other ways to reduce costs through natural pools, new dividend-eligible pools, streamlining purchasing protocols, and reducing overlap. We also found under-funded benefit coverage in some areas.

Avanade's leaders embraced the newly standardized approach to benefits and international travel plans, and they positively loved the reduction in overlap costs. The initial four-country initiative was so successful that the company adopted these practices across its entire international benefit platform.