Disability Education
Winged Keel Made it Easy for The Thomson Corporation to Enhance its Disability Benefit
Barclays Capital Challenge: Barclays' LTD plan covered only base salary while executives earned significant bonuses.
Solution: Winged Keel designed a plan to would specifically cover bonus compensation for 1,000 eligible executives.
Result: Barclays improved its benefits offerings to executives, improving its competitive positioning among NY investment banks.
Citigroup Challenge: Citigroup needed to harmonize long term disability (LTD) benefits among 13 separate operating companies, and wanted to offer executives portable individual policy coverage.
Solution: Through meticulous pricing analysis and benefit comparisons, WKG produced one plan that would meet the needs of the entire organization, including expatriates. Winged Keel undertook all administration, development and distribution of personalized enrollment forms, handling phone calls, billing and claims coordination in the design and implementation of one comprehensive plan for the entire organization.
Result: Winged Keel implemented a single disability plan for the entire Citigroup organization, and is currently servicing over 2,500 policies for former and current employees.
Cleary Gottlieb Steen and Hamilton Challenge: Cleary was seeking cost stability in its LTD plan and wanted employees to obtain portable individual coverage.
Solution: Winged Keel used their design and administration expertise to implement a LTD plan shifting a significant amount of risk to fixed price individual disability policy coverage.
Result: Cleary Gottlieb gained cost stability for their LTD plan and was able to provide individual policy coverage for over 250 people.
General Reinsurance Challenge: General Reinsurance was facing rising LTD benefit costs due to an increase in claims.
Solution: Winged Keel designed a customized plan that mitigated cost increases by covering bonus compensation with fixed price individual policy coverage.
Result: LTD costs were stabilized and 170 employees received portable individual policy coverage.
UBS Investment Bank and UBS Wealth Management Challenge: UBS Investment Bank and UBS Wealth Management wanted to unify two very different Long Term Disability benefit platforms and needed to create a new plan that was competitive with peer financial services.
Solution: Winged Keel designed and implemented a new plan that integrated individual disability policy coverage into their LTD benefits.
Result: UBS's plan is in line with other New York financial service companies and 4,500 executives received individual policy coverage.
The Thomson Corporation The Thomson Corporation, a leading global provider of integrated information-based solutions to business and professional customers, has approximately 1,500 highly compensated executives in locations throughout the United States.
The Objective Significantly enhance the Long Term Disability (LTD) benefit for highly compensated executives by:
- Adding protection for bonus compensation
- Increasing the benefit maximum
- Adding an element of portability through individual policy coverage
The Challenge Implement the LTD benefit enhancement in a high quality fashion without increasing the Benefit Department's workload or budget.
The Solution The Thomson Corporation leveraged Winged Keel Group's domain expertise and infrastructure to achieve its enhancement goals while outsourcing all enrollment and ongoing administration work.
Results
- The new Executive LTD benefit:
- Covers bonus compensation
- Increases the benefit maximum by 33%
- Provides full portability through individual disability policies at a 30% discount
- 40% of all eligible executives elected to enroll in the new benefit
- The rate guarantee on the employer-paid Basic Group LTD benefit was extended by two years
- A high quality enrollment was completed at no cost to Thomson
Finding a Way to Enhance a Benefit Without Increasing Workload With continued success, employee compensation levels at The Thomson Corporation had risen over the years. And with a large cadre of talented executives to retain and incent, The Thomson Corporation had been steadily increasing the percentage of overall compensation paid out in performance bonuses.
"We had been thinking about changing our disability benefit for executives to adjust to their changing protection needs," explains Diane Gasser, Vice President, Benefits/M&A, Human Resources at Thomson. "With so many competing priorities, we needed a way to implement the Disability benefit enhancement while not tying up a lot of resources from our Benefits Department. Of course, the benefit change needed to be communicated and enrolled with the utmost quality since it was being offered to our top executive group."
"I had previously worked with Winged Keel Group to enhance a disability benefit," says John Raffaeli, Senior Vice President, Human Resources at Thomson. "They had done such a terrific job for me that it was easy for me to suggest to Diane that she consider them for Thomson's Executive LTD benefit."
Outsource to a Full Service Executive Disability Administration Firm The Thomson Benefits Department determined that they needed a disability administration outsource partner with focus, experience, deep infrastructure, and an organizational structure built out to handle a large voluntary enrollment to executives. To select the right firm, Thomson conducted site visits to various enrollment vendors they were considering.
"The site visit to Winged Keel Group was extremely impressive," remarks Chris Bracher, Director, Health and Welfare Benefits, Human Resources, at Thomson. "They had the people, technology, and processes in place to do the job. Once we met the people and understood the scope and depth of the resources, as well as Winged Keel's focus on disability benefit enrollment and administration, we knew they were the right fit for us."
In addition to providing a full outsource solution for Executive LTD administration, Winged Keel's track record of success with voluntary enrollments allowed Thomson to secure an extremely competitive guaranteed standard issue (GSI) offer from a top disability carrier. The selection of Winged Keel also enabled Thomson executives to receive a proprietary discount on their premium costs.
Winged Keel Helps The Thomson Benefits Department Achieve Its Objective The enrollment went smoothly and yielded a 40% participation rate. Winged Keel worked closely with The Thomson Corporation's data manager, Hewitt, to fully integrate the Executive LTD benefit into the firm's existing benefit offering. Communications were provided to executives via the web, mail, phone, and employee meetings. Executives throughout the United States could access information about the new benefit through whatever communication medium they were most comfortable with.
"The enrollment went very well and our benefits group put minimal time into the program considering the magnitude of it," says Chris Bracher.
Feedback from executives was very positive. Executives commented that they appreciated having their bonus compensation protected, and gaining access to portable individual policies with no medical underwriting. Executives who had insurance agents compare the cost to comparable retail policies were pleased to discover that the Thomson Corporation's Executive LTD benefit was 25% - 40% less expensive.
Winged Keel now takes care of all aspects of Executive LTD Benefit administration for The Thomson Corporation including reconciling the billings to over 500 executives every month.
The Thomson Corporation has a great new disability benefit and an outsource partner with a long track record of success. Because Winged Keel Group is compensated solely through state filed commissions on the portable individual disability policies offered, the services provided to support the Executive LTD benefit are completely free of charge to Thomson.
To learn more about Winged Keel Group and its Executive Disability capabilities please call Mike Griffin at 212-527-8011.