As organizations become more global, HR leaders face the challenge of how best to reward and protect certain groups of their international staff. Pensions and savings benefits are often tightly bound by local rules and restrictions that can exclude some workers or render the benefits unattractive or insecure. One option is to look at the increasingly popular “borderless” or international pension plans that exist outside of domestic frameworks.
When the first Willis Towers Watson International Pension Plan Survey was conducted in 2009, the vast majority of plans were offered to expatriate workers who were sent overseas for assignments. The rationale was to deliver a replacement benefit for the one that was lost because they could not be retained in their “home country” plan or there was no suitable “host country” arrangement or “host” benefit.
