There is an increasing interest in international pension plans (IPPs) for expatriates as a consequence of the trend towards globalisation of businesses and the increasing challenges of retaining globally mobile employees in domestic pension plans.  They are typically established in international finance centres such as the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man or Bermuda in order to benefit from a benign fiscal and regulatory regime and may either be serviced by locally based actuaries or by the international teams of domestic actuarial consultants.  IPPs pose unusual challenges to employee benefit actuaries and consultants in balancing the conflicting demands of parity with domestic employees on the one hand having regard to the differing fiscal and social insurance arrangements at home and overseas, with a need on the other hand for flexibility and proportionality where relatively small numbers of globally mobile employees are involved. 

This paper traces the development of IPPs over the past three decades, how they typically operate at present and how they might continue to develop in the future.  It comments upon the trend from defined benefit to defined contribution pension provision, the general interaction with other aspects of the employee benefit package, the relative merits of funded and unfunded arrangements and the relative attractions of "bundled" and "unbundled" investment and benefit administration approaches.

There have been very few papers on this subject presented to previous ICA conferences and this paper seeks to fill a gap in this specialist field.  The speakers present the paper from both a British and an American perspective, drawing upon their personal experiences both in advising upon IPP issues and in managing IPPs in practice.