Captive insurance

Captive insurance are an alternative to self-insurance in which a parent group or groups create a licensed insurance company to provide coverage for itself. The main purpose of doing so is to avoid using traditional commercial insurance companies, which have volatile pricing, and may not meet the specific needs of the company. By creating their own insurance company, the parent company can reduce their costs, insure difficult risks, have direct access to reinsurance markets, and increase cash flow. When a company creates a Captive they are indirectly able to evaluate the risks of subsidiaries, write policies, set premiums and ultimately either return unused funds in the form of profits, or invest them for future claim payouts. Captive insurance companies sometimes insure the risks of the group's customers. This is an alternative form of risk management that is becoming a more practical and popular means through which companies can protect themselves financially while having more control over how they are insured.

There are many variations of how captives can be set up, which can be broken into two categories. The first, category is known as non-sponsored in which the company is the creator and beneficiary. Within that category the most common are single-parent or “pure”, group and association. The second category is sponsored in which the captive is owned and controlled by another company that allows other companies to “rent” insurance. This category includes Protected Cell Captive Insurers and Rental Captives.

The term "captive" was coined by the "father of captive insurance", Frederic M. Reiss, while he was bringing his concept into practice for his first client, the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company, in Ohio in the 1950s. The company had a series of mining operations, and its management referred to the mines whose output was put solely to the corporation's use as captive mines. When Reiss helped the company incorporate its own insurance subsidiaries, they were called captive insurance companies because they wrote insurance exclusively for the captive mines. Reiss continued to use the term: the policyholder owns the insurance company i.e. the insurer is captive to the policyholder. If the captive insures its own parent and affiliates, it is called a pure captive. If it insures just one type of industry (e.g. energy industries), it is called a homogeneous captive. A captive insurance company can also insure a group of diverse companies; this is called a heterogeneous captive.

Captives are licensed by many jurisdictions. The captive's primary jurisdiction is known as its domicile. The captives are then regulated by local insurance authority agencies, which require that captives have enough money to pay claims as well maintaining a minimum surplus. Most captive insurers are based "offshore", in places such as Gibraltar, Mauritius, Belize, Bermuda, The Cayman Islands, Ireland, Guernsey, Luxembourg, Barbados, Malta, The Bahamas, Singapore, Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, Qatar Financial Centre, Dubai International Financial Centre and Jersey in the Channel Islands.

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