Employers are increasingly turning to captive insurance as more than just a means to cut their bills for employee benefits.

That’s according to a study from Willis Towers Watson, which found that while the primary driver for nearly half (44 percent) of companies with employee benefits in their captive is to control and improve their claim data to help with ongoing cost management — up from a quarter (24 percent) in last year’s study — the percentage of companies that cited cost savings as the main driver actually fell, from two thirds (67 percent) in 2015 to 44 percent in 2016. (Typically a captive is a licensed insurance carrier created from a parent company, which insures to reduce the risk exposure of vendors or others that have a busines relationship with the parent company.)

As captive insurance moves away from a single money-saving purpose, more companies are using it as a strategic tool to manage risk and benefit costs proactively and to analyze claim data to identify and address key cost drivers.

The study also found that many companies are seeing employee benefits as a source of diversification to more traditional lines of risk typically included, such as property, casualty or business-related risks.

The study, which polled employee benefit captives operating globally, found that 50 percent of those questioned use their captive vehicle to provide death and disability benefits as well as health care or medical benefits.

In addition, proactive risk management could be seen in the influence employee benefit captives have over pricing, with half (50 percent) indicating that their captive has full determination or significant influence over pricing rather than relying purely on local insurers’ underwriting.

Looking ahead, nearly half of the employee benefit captive users (47 percent) indicated that they are also considering a captive pension transaction, either in the next three to five years (41 percent) or within the next 12 months (6 percent).

“We continue to see a broadening use of employee benefit captives. Companies continue to explore further areas in which they can take on more of the risk and manage it internally in order to save money and mitigate risk,” Mark Cook, director at Willis Towers Watson, says in a statement.

Cook adds, “Also, many companies now recognize captives’ importance as a tool in benefit cost management, by identifying and addressing the key cost drivers. Successful employee benefit captives can stabilize and slow down benefit cost increases in an environment where medical costs continue to increase.”