Catherine Hock:

Hello everyone. And welcome to today’s webinar “How mutual assistance is providing better service”. Today, we will hear a presentation from our French member IMA Group, who designs and implements solutions for its partners and mutual insurers shareholders, from an emergency assistance to everyday help.

I’m pleased to welcome Claude Sarcia, CEO and Managing Director of IMA Group, who joins us from Niort. He will be followed by colleagues all in Niort as well. So Claude you have the floor.

Claude Sarcia:

Thanks a lot. First of all, welcome everybody. I would like to underline how we are very happy to participate to this webinar today and to explain what is assistance. I do not know if you are aware of this French concept created in the 60s, but assistance is typically French at the beginning, based on the Nordic experience auto mobile club coming from Denmark or Norway and in the 60s, someone in France has decided to create assistance companies. It’s a very original business model because in the 80s, assistance company in France are very powerful and develop more and more services for insurance and for mutuals. The originality of IMA because we are here in order to speak about IMA, it’s quite original as a business model because we have over 40 years experience on this market. Group was created in 81.

We have been designing, assembling and implementing assistance solution and services. We are created in 81 by Major French Mutual. Some of them are members of ICMIF, for example, MAIF is working for ICMIF, but we have our PV Group. PV Group in Belgium insurer of our group. We have one of our shareholder coming from Morocco, Wafa assurance group. Since the beginning we have a specific business model because our business model is based on human values. It’s quite interesting because we are not a profit center. We don’t remunerate our shareholders, we reinvest all the results of the group into the company. The reinvestment of this result give us the opportunity to develop information system, innovations, new offers to support our shareholder’s and clients or employees recognition. Since the beginning, we have developing the open market too.

We work for insurance company for mutual, our shareholders, but we work with the open market for automotive industry for different, for mutual in Beaufort else, for example, and we have a lot of major international players as one PSA groups and mutual say French organizing around health assistance. We have a very important international development to serve our beneficiaries and this development is through subsidiaries, but we can speak about that later with Benoit and this subsidiaries, we are developing in order to support our beneficiaries traveling abroad, and also our beneficiaries in local markets. But we are give you more detail after. We have a comprehensive range of services and we grow from emergency assistance, to day to day support because we consider that assistance company is like a laboratory and we give others the possibility to develop services for all citizens all around the world.

So we have an extensive offer across the domain of mobility for vehicles, trips, travel, and leisure. We have different models and services around property work, remote connected homes. We have different services around health and wellbeing and legal. That give us the opportunity to keep pace with social and meet evolving consumer needs. We have a profession with a strong social utility because we work with a lot of providers all around the world. We bring turnover to these companies and who help these companies. For example, towing companies, ambulances, air ambulances and so on to develop their own market, their own business and the territories. That is very important because we have this social responsibility to help our shareholders, to help our beneficiary and that we are to help our providers too. We are a big part into innovation in digitalization of assistance files.

We begin this way on the 19th and we developed more and more. We are for example, TPS equal. Today we are leader of the 112, equal in Europe to guarantee secure mobility for all vehicles registered in Europe for example. While the located assistance on motorways and we have created in 2010, the first assistance second turn in order to develop more and more innovation in the company and to give employees the possibilities to participate to the development of new products. We consider that assistance and insurance are both social laboratories and it’s very important as citizen of the world to consider what do we need, what are of the need of services? We develop services based on different culturals, professions, territories in order to adapt our model to all the citizens and to give the offer a wide and large offer to everybody.

So that said, that considers that I work in this job since more than 40 years, I begin as coordinator. It is quite interesting to see the development of the job. At the beginning, we are started creating products, whereas we were startup developing products with voice and data’s, but we were not aware of the situation in the past at the beginning of the creation. It’s a big asset for us because since for more than 40 years, we work with data’s and voices, that voices of our employees, we developed new products around this concept. If I can compare, we were in the 80s, very strong startup, but we are not a startup anywhere, but we invest yet in new startup because we develop new products and we have developed some startups in order to give the possibility to our business, to create new products and to be online with the development of our society. Not the society of the enterprise, but the society of the world in which we worked and live.

We develop a lot of services. We receive comfortable help of our shareholders, because for example, for the innovation part, they accept to give us more than 40 million euros in order to develop innovation and invest in new startups in order to develop new programs and new services. We try to combine digital and human resources to do our jobs differently.

We have a lot of, it’s no more evolution of our business. After Benoit give you some data, considering our companies and the number of employees and the and the turnover. It’s quite important because I have to say perhaps in order to conclude that we are the first assistance company in France and we are the most important for the time being. We are not a captive and that is very important and very important for us to have mutual as shareholders because this mutual wants to receive services, to receive quality and not to receive dividends.

That make a big difference because we have the wide capability to give the best service to our shareholders and to the clients of our shareholders. That’s very important for us and that give us the possibility to develop a lot of new models, a lot of analysis of data of organization, and to give our shareholders the possibility to have a better relationship with their own members. So I think that’s it for me because it’s more important perhaps for you to have some examples and to understand really with Yann and Benoit what is in fact assistance in the real life. Thanks a lot for listening. If you have any question don’t hesitate to ask them, thank you.

Benoit Rigallaud:

Hello everyone. Thank you very much, Mr. Sarcia for the introduction. I’m Benoit Rigallaud, Head of International Mobility at IMA. I’m going to make you a short presentation in addition to what Mr. Sarcia present you.

IMA Group is mainly on the mobility sector. On mobility, we speak of course about automotive assistance. To give you an overview, the automotive assistance, actually in IMA Group, we are not only serving Insurance Mutual Insurer or manufacturer in France, but also in different countries and we will see that after with the warmup and our implementation. This is the main business of activity of IMA. As we heard Sarcia say we also do home assistance. Typically like water leak or, consequences of natural disasters. We have a network of providers able to act fast in risk quality for our beneficiaries.

We have life care, life care is very interesting. I think France was one of the first to implement solution. Typically it’s connected to our national health insurance, not the… Sorry, the government, what the additional one done by Mutual Insurer. Typically, when you go to hospital, you can need a house maid gardening, after hospitalization you can need also nurses. We have a global network in France for that, and in some of our subsidiary, but we also have some very specific services that we like to put because we do medical, and I’m very glad today for ICMIF members to have the presence also of Yann Rouaud our Chief Medical Officer. We do therapeutic support for chronical illness. For example, people with cancer, they have treatment, they go out of the hospital and we have medical teams to coach them and give them support.

The last one is the legal. We provide private and corporate low legal by our own IMA Tech subsidiary in France. I will not go through that, you can see in this slide also all the IMA Group shareholders and our partners. As you see, and as Mr. Sarcia just said, our shareholders are in France, MAIF, MACIF, Matmut are the biggest one, but we have also shareholders in different subsidiaries in Europe and in Africa.

So talking about the implementation…you’re going to find solution, what thank you. This is the footprint of IMA worldwide. We have a international presence with subsidiaries. As you can see, mainly in Europe, Africa and one since 2018 United States. If you want to understand better what we do in those different region, please do not hesitate to ask question. This is where we are implemented, but also it’s important to note that we are able to act everywhere around the world, especially on the medical assistance. We don’t have limitation so we can act in Fiji or in Alaska or in South America. We can provide services with our network of medical facilities, logistical and medical correspondent, all around the world. When a case happen in a country where we have a subsidiary our team in those country are able to act, when it is outside those region, we work with correspondent.

The slide is coming and really sorry about that small technical issue, thank you. To give you another view of what is IMA on the numbers? IMA we serve 45 million beneficiaries worldwide. We have a lot of people to take care. We manage three million cases of assistance per year that represent more or less 11 million calls that we have to receive every year. You have to understand that it’s a big organization. It represent for 2021, 879 million euro of revenue. What make us very proud is the percentage of satisfaction globally. We are 95.6 in all the different services we are able to provide. Now I’m very pleased to give the microphone to Yann Rouaud our Chief Medical Officer.

Yann Rouaud:

Thank you very much Benoit. Thank you very much, Mr. Sarcia and Catherine.First of all, great thank you to the ICMIF family for welcoming IMA in this webinar. As Benoit said, my name is Yann Rouau, I’m the Group Chief Medical Officer.

The purpose of my introduction now is to give you a good oversight of the medical capabilities of the company. Because as you know, there is a key component in every assistance company, which is the medical part of it. The idea is to demonstrate that in here, we are one group, but we have fully integrated solutions allowing us to manage all client’s expectations from the first call of the patient, to the final destination or the final service. In order to do that, we have teams managing cases using telemedicine and other embedded technologies. We can use the international network medical, but not only technical sometimes with audited and selected medical facilities.

The footprints that we have, like Benoit said, is quite useful for medical assistance company. We can act anywhere around the globe. We are lucky enough to have very faithful and professional correspondents in every country nearly. These are the ambassadors of IMA and we are using them when the case is in their territory and so we can use them for many purposes. I will explain to you this real cases in further slides. We have dedicated departments related to medical expenses and cost containment. We have our own medical escort teams, doctors, nurses with our own medical logistic base. Roughly we can transport 12 to 14 ICU patients in one day, but also 20 standard patients on a commercial flight or on air ambulances. To do that, we have specific agreements with the airlines companies and air ambulance providers. They are part of the R network. So they are also audited and selected. We can offer to some clients, some corporate medical services, like corporate medical director guidance. We are doing this for some big clients and also unfortunately, sometimes body repatriation as well.

So the purpose of this presentation is also for you to have a better understanding of what can IMA do for the ICMIF family, the clients, and the prospect. We have inbound and outbound capabilities. We can help and assist any patient all around the globe and transport a patient from a country A to a country B not only considering the countries where we have subsidiaries, but definitely all around the globe. Maybe sharing a few figures with you to understand the dimension of the group. We have roughly, like I said, 60 dedicated Ascot doctors and Ascot nurses. Group wise we have around 70 doctors and nurses coordinating medical cases, also in Europe of course. But we also have medical teams managing cases in every subsidiary, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, Morocco, they have their own embedded medical teams because the local knowledge is also very key when you are driving a case.

From a French perspective, we are dealing with roughly 30,000 cases per year. If we take this in consideration to the group level, it’s around 50,000 cases. We cover 500,000 international assignees, people who are mainly business travelers or expatriates, we take care of 10,000 injured and sick people by transporting them back to their home country, wherever they are around the globe. This includes also the medical evacuation, roughly 2000 I would say in this 10,000. Client satisfaction is a very key thing for us because like Mr Sarcia said, we are serving the interest of clients, shareholders, but we are a very patient-centric company. We deal with the quality and we try to make a difference in people’s life. This is why I guess that 93% is very good result for us and very satisfactory, because a good way to understand that, yes, happy we meet the expectations of clients and customers and patients. Next slide, please.

We were willing to share with you also some cases coming from the real life like Mr. Sarcia said, nothing better than the real life to demonstrate and understand what we are doing and how we are doing it. Always aligned with group values. Those three case studies will be a good example and a good opportunity to demonstrate the values of IMA Group.

This first case is about a lady who was assigned in Baghdad, and very unfortunately she was injured being an accident. As you know, the level of medical care in Baghdad is quite far from international standards. The decision was made to firstly, evacuate the patient from Baghdad to the nearest center of medical excellence, stabilize the patient, and then repatriate the lady back to the home country. But when you say that in such countries, you need to think about more medical, but also security concerns. This is why we tried summarizing in three step, what we have decided to do.

The plan was number one, to activate an air ambulance with an ICU medical team on board from Dubai to Baghdad and in the same time, making sure that our local medical team will take care of the patient from the hospital to the tarmac, with a backup of a security team, making sure that local medical team, patient, ambulance will be safely guarded all the way from the house to the tarmac. Why a tarmac delivery in such country, most of the time, insurers of air ambulance company only allow the aircraft to land for two hours in a war zone country before flying back. When you have only two hours on the ground on the tarmac, the only option that we have is to arrange a tarmac delivery of the patient.

This was done with the local medical team, the security team. There was a safe handover performed from the local medical team to the ICU medical team of the air ambulance and Miss Doe was successfully flown with appropriate medical care to Dubai. Once there in Dubai, she was admitted in one of our preferred medical facility. She had a surgery and she was fit to fly post surgery on the commercial flight with a medical escort back to France where she was able to continue further treatment. As you can see, we are using an air ambulance when we have no other choice, but in this situation also looking for a cost containment perspective, but never downgrading the quality of the means that we put in place. Definitely she was fit to fly a commercial flight. This is what we have used to fly her back home.

This is a typical example of two of the values of the group. One is the bold vision and the other one is a full cooperation because as you can see in such situation, you have many players here. You need to have a good cooperation with all the players and you need to have this bold vision to make sure that this lady will be safely flown to a center of medical excellence.

Case number two, please. As you know, all of us, but I think even in our private lives, we had to deal with the COVID 19 situation. And it has been a great challenge for any medical assistance company to manage COVID 19 situation and COVID 19 patients. We had a gentleman who is expatriate in Abidjan, and very unfortunately he had the COVID and it was a very severe COVID with a critical medical condition. When we have been activated on this case, the first thing that we have done was to transfer the patient from the small hospital where he was, to our best and preferred medical facility in Abidjan to upgrade the local medical care. We have closely monitor the situation. We have activated our local correspondent for a bedside visit, making sure that we can demonstrate the presence of IMA at the bedside of the patient, making sure also that the medical care was aligned or the best local standard, and in the same time, we have activated an air ambulance to fly the gentleman back to Paris.

It was a critical mission. We have briefed the air ambulance medical team before the flight and as expected when the patient arrived on the tarmac, once again, it was a tarmac delivery. There was no possibility to do a bed to bed transfer. Our local medical team took the patient in charge and brought him to the tarmac. Once the patient arrived on the tarmac, the patient deteriorated very rapidly, which is quite standard. COVID 19 patients, they do not like to be moved, they are very fragile. So upon arrival on the tarmac the patient was facing an acute respiratory failure. He was directly intubated under the wing of the aircraft, which saved his life. He was very fortunately flown back to France safely. He was admitted in a University Hospital of Paris, ICU for 10 days, fully recovered, and was able to start his job again in Abidjan three months after the illness.

This is demonstrating the dynamic approach, another value of the group. When you have such a critical patient, the only way to move things forward is number one, to make sure that the patient is in the best local medical facility, to activate the air ambulance very quickly, not to waste time, to make sure that everybody is briefed and ready to deal with their very severe patient.

Case study three please. There’s… Very sorry to end the presentation with a sad case, but life is life and sometimes we have to deal with patients passing away. It’s a patient and his family, they were living in Miami and they were traveling on a leisure trip to Brazil. Very unfortunately patient had severe road traffic accident, was badly injured, multiple critical injuries. He was admitted in the local hospital, like Abidjan case, we have moved immediately this patient to the first choice and best private medical facility to make sure he was benefiting from international standards, medical care. We were closely following his medical condition, speaking to the family as well, making sure that the family was reassured to have IMA in the picture closely monitoring the medical condition of the husband, providing informations to the family as well.

Very sadly, day five, the patient passed away. We had to put in place, as you can imagine in this very sad situation, which was a big emotional challenge for the family. We had to put in place all the necessary, psychological support for the family, but also we had to deal with legal and financial issues. Remember, it’s a road traffic accident, you have a police report. We have not only the medical and the emotional side of things to deal with the family, we have also to take care of the legal and financial issues. At the end, we have organized repatriation of late Mr. Smith remain back to Miami. Of course, we managed to repatriate the family as well. We have extended the psychological support for the family in the home country. Which brings us, sorry to the fourth value of the group, which is trust. In this situation, indeed the trust of the family, trust of the client is very precious for us and we feel it’s a great responsibility, so we try to do our best, especially in this very emotional situations.

That’s it. Thank you very much for your time listening to the medical side of things, and I hand over to Benoit again.

Benoit Rigallaud:

Thank you very much Yann. I think those cases speak for IMA Group. It’s our day to day operation on the international level, and it’s always very interesting to understand that. The part I going speak about is about the mutual insurance companies and their assistance partners. It was very interesting for us important more interesting to understand what was the model of assistance in other part of the world, knowing that one of our principle at IMA Group is international cooperation. In 2016, we had first, we’re going to say global collaboration with another mutual assistance corporation named Desjardins. I will explain more in detail what we do with them.

We decide to based on this first case, we decide to create a survey to understand better how the assistance part is handled by mutual insurer, all around the world. Knowing that this is what we do serving our shareholders, but not only as you see in the introduction, we serve also private organization, But it was very important to, for us to understand how does it work and see if there is other way to do a international cooperation. The slide after please, Cathryn.

I going to give you the example of what we do IMA Group and Desjardins. Desjardins is a member, Canadian mutual insurer, and like our shareholder in Europe, they have their own assistance provider named Assistel. Assistel and IMA start to collaborate based on requests from Assistel to improve the quality of assistance in four main points. Cost containment for medical, inpatient or outpatient cost worldwide, bedside visits, medical evacuation and travel management. Globally for Assistel, IMA Group manage 100 case per year. It been five years since we collaborate and it’s going very well because it’s very important for us to know the quality of the service we provide.

We just launch a survey in this year in April and we receive a very good grade of 8 from 10, 10 being the maximum. We can say that Assistel trust the IMA Group, and it’s very important for us. What they enjoy is our international network, our emergency response expertise, our reputation in Europe also, because we have a lot of offices and our operational relationship. It’s going very well. It’s an example, and we wish to have more international collaboration with mutual insurer and their assistance.

But to understand how does it work? We launched a survey in 327 mutual insurer. It is a survey we done on internet. There is how can I say, depending on the region, depending on the countries, depending on the mutual insurer, we didn’t have the same quality of information. We would be very happy to improve those results with ICMIF numbers, if it’s possible. What I’m going to show you is the result globally. We check 324 mutual. We check on those mutual, which one offer an international assistance service. On those international assistance service, who is the assistance provider, the providers of assistance are they mutual or are they the recreative one? It was very important for us to understand.

When I say international assistance service, I’m talking about travel and insurance, for example, or expat insurance, business traveler insurance. As you see in Europe, 55% of the mutual insurance provide this kind of service. In Asia only 29% offer this kind of service. We discover globally 28 assistance providers. On those 28, less than 10 are connected to the mutual insurer directly. Which means the mutual insurer is the shareholders as the assistance model or IMA model. It was very interesting also to understand this because, we believe that the value proposition of a mutual insurer must take in consideration the assistance starts. So we see some disruption.

The slide after. Talking about after this survey and answering the question, how is mutual assistance offering better services? We believe that we are able to offer better service because we are the first for the quality of service, generally our rate are very high. We are a one stop shop, for example, not only medical, but now we offer also security, international security solution. As Yann explained in the Baghdad case, of course, medical assistance provider alone will not have been able to provide the service. We do inbound and outbound. We act as a respondent for also assistance company around the world and for insurers and copywriters around the globe. One of the point is our global reach. IMA is opening new offices, IMA in Africa example, actually in the CIMA region, we are opening three office in the first step. But we are opening more office and we are very interested in potential collaboration to open other offices in other region of the world.

Very important point as Mr. Sarcia say in the introduction is that we have digital innovation. We are always looking for innovation at the service our beneficiary, we develop services such as telehealth. We have a portal that we call My Global Support for typically business travelers and expatriate. We have the IMA lab where our shareholders provide us around 40 million funds to develop innovation at their service. And of course, one of service we are very proud is the worldwide cost containment capability of IMA Group. We are able to reduce the cost between 15 and 25%, but as Yann say, quality first, service first, take care of the customer, but be reasonable on the cost because as you know, depending on the region, the regulation is different, so the medical cost can fly.

The last slide. In conclusion on my part, the objective of this webinar is to give you an overview of IMA capabilities and DNA. We will be very glad to develop our international corporation with mutual insurance and their assistance provider if they are member of their ecosystem. Because we want to mutualize and benefit from your local expertise. We are actually discussing with mutual Insurers in South America, in Asia, but please do not hesitate to contact us. We think that we can be a benchmark player for the assistance part of mutual insurer. We will be very happy to assist you in maximizing your mutual list and cooperative value proposition. I will give the last world to our CEO Claude Sarcia to close now, before the question and answer.

Claude Sarcia:

Okay, thanks a lot. I think it’s time to answer to your question. We have tried to make a short presentation of our company it’s not so easy because we have a lot of things to say and to show. But I think we have tried to give you most important activities in medical, what we can do for example, for our beneficiaries or for yours too. But it’s time for question. Thank you very much for listening and we are ready to answer every question you have to ask and to, would like to have answer on your… So Catherine, thank you.

Catherine Hock:

Thank you so much. The three of you for such an excellent presentation. So clear, well structured and dynamic. I really, really enjoyed it and I hope our listeners and future watchers will as well. We know now why mutual assistance offers better service and of course, quality is first and yet you manage to also do the cost containment bit. Your numbers are staggering, 45 million beneficiaries, 11 million calls, 93% of satisfaction rate. How many languages are you able to speak in from your base in Niort when you attend the calls from around the world?

Claude Sarcia:

We have to say, the employees of the company speak several languages, of course, classical one, for example, English or German or Italian Spanish and so on. But we have people speaking Turkish, we have people speaking Japanese, Chinese, sometimes Indonesian, Gaelic and so on. A large possibility to cover all activities we want to cover. English of course is very important. We don’t use every language every day, but we have a lot of people speaking strange languages too some dialects and so on. It’s a very rich atmosphere and very rich activity for us too. It’s a good opportunity to find people studying languages because they joined the company because the company gives them the opportunity to speak and to develop languages.

Catherine Hock:

Okay, well, absolutely. I mean, communication is key, right? You’re right to focus on that. What also I found so interesting in the assistance model is that you are really, especially for mutual insurance or owned by mutuals, it’s quite unique, you are truly global. This is really something that normally doesn’t go with mutual being such global, and yet you have to be so patient-centric and so mindful of cultural differences, et cetera. So how can you ensure the quality of this continuing in services with your providers around the world? Do you have to-

Claude Sarcia:

I come to answer and give them the opportunity or possibility to Yann or to Benoit to add some topics, but it’s very important. We have providers all around the world where specific network in order to select and to discuss with these providers and these providers are for example, clinic hospitals, they can be all private persons, they can be members of government if necessary in some countries. And we select these providers, we discuss with them regularly. We have people here working in order to bring dynamic to this network. We visit them, we discuss about quality, about of course cost because it’s very important to have the control of the cost and of what we spend.

And it’s very important for us because we have no physical representation with our insurer, with our members. We have only, the provider is a representation of our activity and the representation of our shareholders. So they have to be perfect, they have to give good image of the company, they have to represent our values, our quality, our controls, and that the reason it’s a very important department here where we have peoples have big knowledge about this providers, this network about of countries all over the world. Is okay, for example, for Yann and Benoit. They work previously in South Asia, they work in Indonesia, but they can add some topics perhaps or re straight what I am saying.

Yann Rouaud:

For the medical side of things. Like Mr. Sarcia said, it’s very much medically driven, the medical correspondence we are in close contact with them. We can also follow up on the medical facilities, especially the private one in some countries. Mr. Sarcia said that indeed the usual way of dealing with the medical network is to visit the hospitals, to audit the hospitals. But keep in mind that we had to deal with the COVID 19 and the fact that there was no trip possible. We had to think out the box and we discussed, well, what, what’s the best way to deal with our correspondent, especially the medical, private facilities. Because it’s a big responsibility. Cathryn you said patient-centric, it’s something that I’m very keen to demonstrate and to ensure people that yes, we care about people and we are fully responsible of sending them to the better local medical facility.

So definitely we have to think of another way of managing the medical network and we have put in place some desktop audits. We have worked on the dedicated standard operations procedure to deal with the desktop audit. We have been audited remotely, all our key medical providers, making sure that yes, we were sticking to the standards of the group, never downgrading the quality. It was also a good way to get informations from the ground, from the countries regarding COVID 19. The fact that some medical facilities were overwhelmed, were having an issue with the equipment, shortage of medication, shortage of oxygen. Keeping the link with those people on the ground was very key. Thanks to the desktop audit during this crisis. Yes. It was the only way to do it, but we are looking at traveling again, fingers crossed.

Catherine Hock:

Absolutely, so actually Yann what you’re saying is that in a way COVID, by putting you in such a stressful and new situation also enabled you to progress even faster doing these audits, right.

Yann Rouaud:

COVID 19 was a big game changer for the medical assistance industry. Believe me, another interesting thing is usually when you have a patient abroad in a country close to a nearest center of medical of excellence, you can do number one, a local evacuation, and then you do repats. For the COVID 19 patients, no country was allowing a COVID 19 patient, except if the patient was having the nationality of the country, which means that every French patient with an acute and severe COVID 19 had to be flown back to France full stop. Big game changer for us.

Catherine Hock:

Of course, I get it. Staying on the health side. Also, what I found so interesting is that you said, I think it was Benoit that very specifically in France, you started also offering life care services that were kind of closely linked to the complementary health insurance in France. I know you have a presence in the US, does it work in the US as well, because every country has its own health cover. I know the US is very different obviously, but health is key obviously, I was wondering what kind of services you could offer from your US? I know it’s a newly opened office.

Benoit Rigallaud:

Exactly, our subsidiary name health care services is mainly a PPO. I’m sure PPO is something that told to the mutual insurer provider international solution. The main issue in United States is the cost and the health system is very different than anywhere around the world. Where you have to go through PPO, specialized companies, such as, maybe everybody know Global Excel or Frontier. That we have our own Global Excel and Frontier. Why we did that because the level of costs in North America for our shareholders and private clients was very high and require a complete control. We decide to, in 2018 to acquire this company.

Mainly of course cost containment, but also not only in North America, but also in South America, for inpatient and outpatient. As far as we had the COVID, so COVID was a very special period, but we are very happy with this solution. Cost containment, but also in some assistance cases, it’s always better when you are on the ground and you know the local specificities, and this is why we have this office in Miami for all the case we under. Of course in North America, but also in South America.

Catherine Hock:

Of course, and let’s hope that this webinar and maybe further talks with the ICMIF members across on the other side of the panel-

Claude Sarcia:

Perhaps to give you an idea how to cost reduction in US, it a real case. We receive from a hospital, an invoice of $600,000. We have discussed with the hospital and at the end of the day, we reduce the invoice to $150,000. Jus with the hospital. That gives the opportunity for the customer to go back to Europe. There is no lawyers or something like this, and the case is definitively closed and we have the capability to reduce the amount of the invoice, it’s quite huge. That’s the reason we have developed this subsidiary in America in order to reinforce this kind of services. And after we can develop all those services as Benoit say in South America for example, on the same basis. That’s very important for that, if you see the differences between the two amounts and it’s quite every week, every days at our work it’s quite normal.

Catherine Hock:

It’s remarkable to get the medical facility to rethink their price and their quote. That’s really remarkable as an outcome. Maybe before we end this. I was surprised and thank you for sharing the results of the survey that you conducted on how many mutuals actually offer assistance, international, global assistance, et cetera. I thought it was very low. Do you think, is there something we could do to try and convince them that they should offer this? Because it’s clearly a plus when you offer this as a service to your clients. It even probably gets you new clients through assistance. I don’t know after the survey what your thoughts were about these numbers? Which I found very low.

Benoit Rigallaud:

I think the numbers surprised us, after, as I said, it is not a comprehensive survey because it was based on the information we had on the website also available. What we see, what we know very well at IMA is the European market where we see that a lot of mutual interests provide proposal travel and expatriate solution. I think it’s a real opportunity. What we have seen is this is less the case in some region of the world. For reason that we don’t know, maybe linked to the foundation of the mutual also and the corporation. I am not sure for example, this is my opinion. Okay. But the mutual based on a found on agricultural purpose had the idea to offer travel solution, but maybe it’s time now. Of course we are a global expert on this side, so we can, of course help them to understand first the needs and build the solution. Of course, we’ll be very happy.

Claude Sarcia:

What I can add, perhaps, assistance is not very well known. It’s quite difficult to explain what we are doing for people. It’s quite surprising when we explain that we are organizing repatriation, travel insurance, travel assistance. That we are doing on the other way, some own benefits, that we are providing services for cars and so on. It’s a huge rank of services and the reason why, perhaps you have a confusion between assistance and insurance. We have perhaps to be more powerful in marketing to push more and more what we are doing today in order to let know that we are able to organize these kind of services and we can provide these kind of services all over the world.

But it’s question probably of marketing of reflex. And as I say at the beginning, it’s a French concept. If you are on the other part of the planet, and it’s so easy to say, okay, it’s not perhaps assistance. You have perhaps an idea of travel insurance, of medical costs and so on. But concretely, it’s quite difficult to say, okay, I go spontaneously to my assistance company. But what is an assistance company? You have to go to your insurance company, to your mutual and to ask this mutual, do you have the capability to provide services for me when I travel abroad or when I am at home? For example. Because we have the both facilities to date.

Catherine Hock:

I agree, this is really something well. It was created 40 years ago. You celebrate your anniversary this year right? And-

Claude Sarcia:

That’s correct.

Catherine Hock:

Yes, that’s right. You still have this startup mentality I think, very agile and innovative. Also, enabled by the fact that your shareholders are mutuals. As you said, Claude Sarcia, they don’t expect for you to bring dividends, but quality of service. I hope that our members and more mutuals around the world will be listening and considering adding this service to their existing ones or switching to an all mutual assistance. I think unless Yann, would you like to make a final comment?

Yann Rouaud:

The final comment will be this one. This job is a privilege. Assistance is a privilege. This is always what I’m explaining to my team. You have very seldomly jobs where you can make a difference in people’s life when they are experiencing a problem, it can be a technical problem, a car problem, a health issue, no matter what, it’s a privilege to be there when someone is in need, and then you can offer your service. It’s a job of service. Should we stick to one thing for me, let’s stick to the people, the patient, the service, and it’s a job made of communication as well. 80% of everything we do is communication. We are really the patient-focus on this company. I’m sure that the values defined by Mr. Sarcia and all the team, the values of the group are not something just to be put in a PowerPoint. It’s something that we experience in every case. We stick to the values because we believe in what we do.

Catherine Hock:

Thank you, thank you very much. That was perfect as a conclusion, but Mr. Sarcia, would you like to add something to Yann-

Claude Sarcia:

Just one word. That very important for us, we are most stand up products. We are only product orientated so that means we adapt our services to each country, to each partners. That’s a big value at the group level too. Because it’s very important to say, okay, we bring services, for example, for American people. They’re not the same kind of services that we bring to Chinese people, Japanese people, we adapt to the mentality of the country, to the country itself. That’s very important in our way to do business and to create partnership and add added value partnerships. That’s it.

Catherine Hock:

Wonderful. You’re truly global with a local anchorage. You have the best of both worlds.

Yann Rouaud:

We’ll assist anyone anywhere with our network. This is something very global. It’s French indeed at the beginning, but now we have this global vision of the job.

Catherine Hock:

Thank you very much. The three of you for this excellent Presentation and conversation. It’s time for me to end this webinar now. Again, thank you to everybody who joined and thank you to Mr. Sarcia and his team for this excellent time together. Stay safe. Hopefully see you again soon and goodbye.

Claude Sarcia:

It’s a pleasure, bye-bye thank you.

Benoit Rigallaud:

Goodbye.

Yann Rouaud:

Thank you to ICMIF, take good care Catherine, bye-bye.

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