Captive insurance

Captive insurance companies are limited purpose insurance coverage businesses established together with the precise objective of financing dangers emanating from their parent group or groups, even though they occasionally also insure several of the dangers on the parent company’s prospects. Inside the simplest terms, it can be an in-house self-insurance vehicle. Captives typically represent commercial, economic and tax positive aspects to their sponsors as a consequence of the reductions on expenditures they enable build, the ease for insurance threat management plus the flexibility for cash flows they produce. Also, they may possibly give coverage of risks which are neither available nor supplied in the traditional insurance market at affordable rates, and allow the relevant group direct access to reinsurance markets.

The administration of a captive is ordinarily, although not often, outsourced to a specialised captive manager, who’s often located in an offshore jurisdiction.

Types of Captive

There are numerous forms of insurance coverage captive, of which by far the most common are defined below:

• Single Parent Captive – is an insurance or reinsurance business formed mainly to insure the risks of its non-insurance parent or affiliates.
• Association Captive – is often a organization owned by a trade, industry or service group for the advantage of its members.
• Group Captive – can be a company, jointly owned by quite a few firms, made to provide a car to meet a popular insurance need.
• Agency Captive – is often a enterprise owned by an insurance coverage agency or brokerage firm so they may perhaps reinsure a portion of their customers dangers through that corporation.
• Rent-a-Captive – is really a corporation that offers ‘captive’ facilities to other individuals to get a fee, whilst protecting itself from losses beneath person applications, that are also isolated from losses below other programs inside the similar firm. This facility is usually employed for applications that are too compact to justify establishing their very own captive.

Two other varieties of insurance corporation which have developed recently are unique purpose cars (SPV) and segregated portfolio corporations (SPC):

• SPV – Even though utilized extensively in the past for numerous financing arrangements, recently they’ve been utilised for catastrophe bond concerns.
• SPC – SPCs could be formed as a rent-a-captive facility to allow these organizations who lack adequate insurance coverage premium volume, or who are averse to establishing their own insurance subsidiary, access to many with the positive aspects associated with an offshore captive.

Commercial Advantages

You’ll find several commercial advantages to working with a captives to supply a superior means of risk management than the traditional marketplace.

• Cost. Premiums charged by commercial insurers include things like amounts to cover the insurer’s profit margin and overheads. Such overheads may be important when thinking about insurers with significant corporate structures to preserve.
• Flexibility. Once the market place is soft, the captive can benefit from the low prices by reinsuring a fairly big proportion of its risks. The low cost of reinsurance enables the captive to construct its reserve base. Once the market hardens, the captive is able to retain a bigger proportion of its risks, and may preserve cover for its parent even when commercial insurance coverage is unavailable or prohibitively highly-priced.
• Claims management. The process of generating a claim from a third party insurer is often long and involve a great deal of price for the claimant. Where the insurer is actually a captive, the claims handling procedures might be dictated by management, cutting down on the delays and bureaucracy which might be frequently a necessary part of the claims handling procedures of commercial insurers.
• Claims knowledge positive aspects.

Captives generally retain a portion with the overall risk and reinsure the remainder. For this reason, when claims practical experience is greater than anticipated, the excess of net premiums over claims is retained by the group. The reinsurance taken out by the captive is tailored to minimise the group’s exposure where claims knowledge is worse than projected.

The types of risk that a captive can underwrite for the parent incorporate house damage, public and products liability, professional indemnity, employee advantages, employers liability, motor and healthcare help costs.

Captives are becoming an increasingly important component in the danger management and threat financing tactic of their parent. A variety of causes have already been place forward as the basis for the development within the use of captives:

• heavy and escalating premium expenditures in almost just about every line of insurance coverage coverage.
• issues in obtaining cover specific types of threat.
• variations in coverage in numerous parts of your globe.
• inflexible credit rating structures which reflect marketplace trends as an alternative to individual loss knowledge.
• insufficient credit for deductibles and/or loss handle efforts.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.