Source: http://worldcityweb.com/home/MIA/publications/magazine/29/707/

The final frontier

by WC

Thefinal frontier

An innovative company fulfills emigrants’ last wishes.

There are many industries that encourage people to look ahead and prepare for the future. Retirement planning. Life insurance. College savings plans.

A decade ago, Pablo Cevallos identified another one that hadn’t yet become common: funeral planning.

Cevallos is the founder and CEO of Memorial International, a company that started in Ecuador and began spreading throughout Latin America and, eventually, into the United States. Its U.S. office, in Miami, opened four years ago.

Customers who enroll in its all-inclusive burial plans pay a monthly fee of $29 to cover the burials of seven family members. The company corrects any reference to the plan as funeral “insurance,” noting that insurance especially in the United States carries special regulatory requirements. Rather, Memorial International calls itself a funeral assistance company.

The idea of pre-arranging funeral services is not uncommon, but Memorial International’s plans have a special twist: They are designed for expatriates who want to be buried in their home countries.

A Mexican immigrant living in Homestead can be interred in Mexico, an Argentine in North Miami Beach can specify that they be buried in Argentina, a Spaniard in Atlanta can pre-select burial in Spain.

“It’s a family plan and it’s for people who die outside their country but wanted to go back to their homeland for burial,” said Cevallos. “With our assistance, the body is picked up, all the repatriation paperwork is handled, the body is transported to the home country and the funeral service is taken care of.

“We offer the service throughout Latin America and in Spain,” he said. Those family members enrolled in the program can have their bodies repatriated from the United States, Europe or elsewhere in Latin America.

Cevallos said the demand for repatriation of bodies is growing the most in Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador. He said they grew 28 percent last year, when compared with 2004.

In Ecuador, Memorial International is a well-known funeral chain with 80 outlets and a range of services, including funeral services as part of a corporate benefits package or pre-paid funeral arrangements. In Bolivia, where it has an office in Santa Cruz, it offers the expatriate service but also operates its own funeral homes. The company also has offices in Mexico, Spain and Colombia, though it can arrange services throughout the Americas. Cremation can be opted for under the monthly payment plan.

Much of the marketing for the assistance service is done online or through a call center in Ecuador. Currently, the company has 6,000 families just more than 40,000 people enrolled in the program around the world. In the United States, there are 2,000 families paying the monthly fee to guarantee they are buried in their homelands.

Before starting Memorial International, Cevallos had no experience in the funeral industry. He simply saw an opportunity.

“This kind of business used to be a family business. But now, all over the world, it is a corporate business,” Cevallos said. “It’s true what they say. The one sure thing in life is that we have to die.”