London, UK | 3rd September 2026:Â Origin, the Enterprise Benefits Intelligence platform, today announced that Martine Ferland, former President and CEO of Mercer, has joined the company as an angel investor and strategic adviser.
Ferland brings four decades of experience in global benefits and human resources consulting, including five years leading Mercer, the world’s largest HR consulting firm. She currently serves on the boards of WSP Global and the Adecco Group. Ferland has known Origin’s co-founders, Chris Bruce and Pete Craghill, since Mercer acquired Darwin (formerly Thomsons Online Benefits), the global benefits technology company they founded and led, and worked closely with them in the years that followed.
For most large organizations, benefits are the second largest people cost after compensation and the only one still managed without a platform of its own. Origin gives global benefits teams the visibility, intelligence, and governance to lead: every benefit, cost, vendor, and country structured into a single source of truth, AI-powered insights that show where they are overpaying, non-compliant, or missing savings, and governed workflows for renewals, compliance, and vendor management.
“Early in my career, one of my largest financial services clients asked me to document and rationalize their benefits across 120 countries. We did it by hand. It took the better part of two years, and by the time we finished, it needed doing again,” said Ferland. “That problem never got solved in the four decades since. When I started discussing with Chris what he and Pete are building at Origin, I could not find a more natural application of AI anywhere.”
“Origin is infrastructure rather than another tool,” Ferland continued. “My job now is to be useful: stress test the growth plan, share my perspectives, and support the team as they build a community excited about using AI to transform the value delivered by their benefit programs.”
“Martine is one of the most credible figures in our industry, and she has lived this problem from every side of it,” said Chris Bruce, Co-Founder and CEO of Origin. “Her counsel will be invaluable as we scale the platform, deepen our HCM integrations, and grow our ecosystem of brokers, consultants, insurers, and point solutions.”
Since coming out of stealth in April 2025, Origin has announced more than $50M in funding from investors including Notion Capital, Felix Capital, and Acadian Ventures, and is approaching 40 of the world’s largest multinationals as clients.
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