Aon  ·  Activate  ·  Global Total Rewards & Flexible Benefits

One platform.
Fifty answers.

A modular Global Total Rewards and Flexible Benefits proposition for Koch, Inc. — scaled country by country, on the evidence.

Prepared by Aon  ·  Draft for discussion
I
You already
solved this.
Koch built a data-led benefits operation that measurably changes health outcomes. We should start by saying so.
What Koch built, 2019 → today

A benefits operation most multinationals cannot match.

Foundation
Koch Wellbeing
Launched with comprehensive biometric screening to connect employees to their own health data.
Specialist care
Carrum Health
Centres-of-excellence access for surgery and cancer care.
Chronic condition
Omada
Weight and diabetes management at scale.
Mental health
Spring Health
Mental health and wellbeing services across the population.

Then, in 2023, Sharecare navigation across 121,000 covered lives — employees and their families — to tie it all together.

Year one results

And it worked.

>50%
of the workforce engaged with the platform in 12 months
60%
of engaged users made more informed healthcare decisions
+14.2%
increase in care-gap closure vs non-engaged employees
80% vs 52%
cholesterol screening completion — engaged vs not
Breast cancer screening: 73% vs 45%

This is what a benefits function looks like when it is run on data.

Source: Sharecare, "How Koch is closing care gaps for its U.S. workforce"
The one limitation

It stops at the U.S. border.

55.7% — United States
44.3% — everyone else

Koch's most sophisticated Total Rewards thinking reaches a little over half of its people.

The other ~45% — India at 13.2%, China at 7.1%, and the rest of a 50-plus country footprint — are still described by three words on the careers page: "options vary by location."

Workforce distribution: Revelio Labs · Headcount to be validated with Koch
II
The cost of
the gap.
What Koch's own philosophy promises, what employees actually want, and what the market is charging for standing still.
Principle Based Management

"We treat people as individuals. We pay people, not positions."

— Koch's stated approach to compensation

"Options vary by location."

— Koch benefits, as described today

Both of these cannot be the strategy.

Aon Employee Sentiment Study 2025

Employees are asking for exactly this.

70%
say the ability to customise their benefits is important to them
46%
are actually able to customise them today
A 24-point gap between demand and provision
67%
would give up existing benefits for a better choice of benefits

That last number is the commercial argument: choice raises perceived value without raising spend.

Aon Employee Sentiment Study 2025 — participant base to be confirmed before external use
Aon 2026 Global Medical Trend Rates

Koch's footprint sits above the global average.

Middle East & Africa
15.3%
Asia-Pacific
11.3%
Latin America
10.3%
North America
9.3%
Europe
8.2%

Global average 9.8% — the first return to single digits since 2023. Asia-Pacific is highlighted because Koch's two largest non-U.S. populations, India (13.2%) and China (7.1%), sit inside it. Meanwhile 70% of multinationals now rank cost containment as their number one benefits priority.

The compounding problem

Every acquisition adds another stack.

  • iconectiv — telecommunications software and data services, via Koch Equity Development.
  • Anchor Packaging — acquired into Georgia-Pacific.
  • OCI's Iowa nitrogen facility — one of the largest in the world.
  • The logistics roll-up — warehouse capacity doubled from 3M to roughly 6M sq ft, turning a Midwest 3PL into a multi-regional network.

Acquisition speed is the Koch strategy. Today, benefits harmonisation is the tax on it — a bespoke project every time, in every country.

Aon Future of Total Rewards Survey 2026

60% of leaders say they lack a good way to measure rewards' impact on productivity.

Without one data model across every country, that number cannot improve — no matter how good any individual country's programme is.

III
You have run
this play before.
Koch has already proved it can put one platform in front of its entire global workforce.
2019 — HR core
130k
users on one cloud HR platform
70+
countries
8
languages
13
Koch companies on common technology

Siloed systems eliminated. Consistent processes. Consolidated reporting. A single culture carried across the ecosystem.

Then Koch bought the company outright.

Where that left things

You unified the system of record.

You did not unify the employee deal.

Benefits remains the last fragmented layer of Total Rewards — and the only one employees actually touch.

IV
Modular by
country.
One global platform. Four deployment tiers. The right tier chosen country by country, on evidence — which is precisely what makes it scale.
The design principle

A single global template is why most global rollouts fail.

It over-serves the small markets, under-serves the large ones, and asks every country to pay for capability it cannot use.

So we don't do that.

Activate deploys in four tiers. Each country receives the tier justified by its own headcount, complexity, flex-market maturity and expected value — on one platform, one data model, one contract.

Koch treats people as individuals. We treat countries as individuals — and the employees inside them get real choice either way.

The Activate tiers

Four rungs. One ladder.

Hub
Unified engagement portal. Access, content and communications in one place for every employee.
Hub+
Personalised portal. HR data tailors content to the individual employee.
Core
Customisable benefits experience. Employees choose benefits, retirement, wellbeing and rewards.
Core+
Comprehensive experience. Intelligent modelling, deeper automation, enhanced flex, wallets and modellers.

Because every tier runs on the same platform and the same data model, a country can move up a rung as its market matures — without a re-implementation.

How each country is assigned a tier

Four factors. Scored per country.

01
Headcount
Population size determines whether per-employee platform economics work at all.
02
Complexity
Number of plans, carriers, entities, unions, renewal cycles and statutory constraints.
03
Flex market maturity
Whether the local market, carriers and employees can actually support meaningful choice.
04
Expected value
Modelled cost, engagement and administrative return — the test every country must pass.

No country gets a tier because of its flag. It gets the tier its numbers justify.

Applying the model to Koch's footprint

Fifty-plus countries. Four answers.

Hub
Hub+
Core
Core+
United States
India
United Kingdom
Netherlands
China
Mexico
Germany
Brazil
Canada
Poland
Japan
Malaysia
Italy
Australia
UAE
South Africa
Taiwan
Argentina
Employee population  →
Flex market maturity  →
Tier depthHub → Core+
Country  — marker size = employee population
Tier is derived from position, not assigned
Illustrative placement for discussion — to be rebuilt on Koch's own country census, plan inventory and value model
Core+ · Wallet functionality

One mechanic. Every market.

A wallet gives each employee a defined allowance to spend across the benefits that matter to them — and lets Koch fund very different propositions in very different markets without building a new scheme each time.

It is the operational form of "pay people, not positions": the same rule, applied to individuals, producing different answers.

Health
42%
Retirement
23%
Family
14%
Wellbeing
11%
Protection
7%
Lifestyle
3%

Illustrative allocation pattern — the actual mix becomes live data the moment the platform is running, and feeds directly back into plan design and broking.

Powered by Aon Intelligence

AI Concierge, across every layer.

Contextualise
Answer in the employee's own situation
Plan, country, language, family status and prior choices — so guidance is specific rather than generic content.
Coach
Guide the decision, not just the search
Model the trade-offs of a wallet allocation or a retirement contribution before the employee commits.
Action
Complete the task in the flow
Enrol, change, claim and escalate — without a hand-off to a service centre queue.

For a workforce spanning 50-plus countries and many languages, this is the only realistic way to give every employee the quality of guidance a head-office population takes for granted.

Connectivity, data & analytics

An aggregation layer, not a replacement.

C-Suite Layer Better informed, better advised, better decisions
HealthWealthTalentAnalyzersDiagnosticsBenchmarksStrategic · People · Business Impact
Human Capital Insights Layer Insight toolkit to shape decisions for the better
Human Capital Data LakeData HubAnalyticsOnline BenchmarkingClaims AnalyticsCaptive & PoolingBenefits Inventory
Activate Employee Experience Layer Adapted locally · WCAG 2.2 AA
WalletsModellerBenefitsRetirementRewardDashboardAppLanguageInboxLibraryCampaignsSelf-Service Toolkit
AI Concierge  — contextualise · coach · action —  runs across all three layers
Execution & Data Sources Where the numbers actually come from
APIs · SSO into existing HR coreLocal carriers & global networksEnrolment & utilisation censusesLocal claims dataPlan financialsEmployee surveysLocal e-brokingSilent automation

Koch already runs a global cloud HR core. Activate connects to it by API rather than competing with it — and turns benefits into the one Total Rewards layer that currently produces no comparable data.

V
What it returns,
and how we start.
The mechanisms behind the value, a rollout sequenced by evidence, and a first step that costs Koch very little to take.
Four mechanisms, not four promises

Where the return actually comes from.

Cost
A lever on medical trend
Choice architecture plus utilisation and claims data gives something to act on against a 9.8% global trend — and 11.3% in Asia-Pacific.
Perceived value
More value at the same spend
67% of employees would trade existing benefits for better choice. Reallocation, not additional budget.
Efficiency
One operating rhythm
Dozens of local renewal cycles, brokers and data formats consolidate into one calendar and one model.
Integration
A repeatable M&A playbook
The next acquisition onboards onto an existing chassis instead of triggering a bespoke country-by-country project.

Each of these is modelled per country in discovery, against Koch's own census and plan financials, before anyone commits to a number.

Sequenced by evidence

Prove it at both ends first.

Wave 1 · Prove
One mature flex market, one large emerging one
Tests the model at both extremes — a market where flex is well understood, and a market where scale matters more than sophistication.
Wave 2 · Scale the core
The Core and Core+ countries
The populations where per-employee economics and flex maturity both justify full choice.
Wave 3 · Extend reach
Hub and Hub+ countries
Every remaining country reaches the same platform — engagement and communications first, choice as the market matures.
Continuous
Re-score annually
Countries move up a rung as headcount, complexity or market maturity change. The model is a living allocation, not a one-off decision.
Three models exist in this market

Only one of them can be held to the outcome.

Model one
The platform vendor
Sells the technology, then leaves Koch to broke the benefits, negotiate every carrier and interpret its own data in fifty markets.
Model two
The broker with a licensed portal
Can place the risk, but does not own the roadmap — so the technology never quite bends to the client's actual requirement.
Model three · Aon
Broking, platform, data and advisory under one accountability
The people who design the plan, place the risk, run the platform and read the data answer to the same client outcome — and the same contract.

With the Analytics Hub — benchmarking, claims analytics, captive and pooling, benefits inventory — behind every recommendation.

In Koch's own words

A virtuous cycle of
mutual benefit.

Employees get genuine choice, in their own country, in their own language, guided rather than left to guess.

Koch gets one data model, a lever on cost, and a benefits chassis that its next acquisition can simply join.

That is not a benefits platform. It is Principle Based Management, finally applied to the half of Total Rewards that employees actually touch.

Next steps

One short discovery. Then real numbers.

Step one
Country & entity inventory
Headcount, legal entities and plan count per country — the input to the scoring model.
Step two
Plan financials & renewal calendar
Spend, carriers and renewal dates, so waves can be sequenced around cycles Koch already has.
Step three
Score and tier every country
The four-factor model run on Koch's real data, returning a defensible tier map.
Step four
Expected value per country
A modelled return for each market — and a Wave 1 recommendation Koch can test cheaply.

The first three steps need nothing from Koch but data it already holds.

1 / 28
← → navigate  ·  O overview  ·  N notes
OVERVIEW — click any slide, or press O / Esc to close