Selecting the Right Fiduciary to Design Your Captives Insurance Company

Once a captive insurance company is formed and licensed, the captive owner must now turn its attention to actually running the captive. Although stated several times before, it bears repeating here: a captive is an insurance company and it must be operated as such. As daunting as that may sound initially, you either have heard or will hear from captive industry consultants that managing a captive is not terribly challenging provided you have the right support team in place. While I believe that is essentially true, I also believe you should clearly understand all the requirements before you turn over the management responsibility to anyone. I believe it is a big mistake to outsource something simply because you do not understand it. You should first understand each component’s role in the captive operation well enough to ask the right questions; then secure a resource expert in managing that function.

So the first step in the process is to learn the responsibilities of each captive-management function. In order to delegate the responsibilities you must know what they are. Second, no matter what partners are retained to provide management support, you are still ultimately responsible for the regulatory compliance of the captive. So, to repeat, it is very important for you to spend the time it takes to clearly understand the regulatory and fiduciary requirements of managing the captive.

While this chapter is no way exhaustive, it will at least give you a start—a framework to facilitate the process of understanding the key elements of effectively managing a captive insurance company.

Key components of captive management

At its highest level, captive management focuses on four key areas:

Underwriting

Claim management

Financial management

Compliance/reporting

There are certainly more functions of a captive (e.g., strategic planning, risk management, marketing and communication, etc.), but these four are important to understand up front. Each one of these areas requires specific expertise and industry knowledge. Understanding the basics will help you find the right partner for your organization.

The content of this press release is from the book Taken Captive by R. Wesley Sierk III and available on Amazon.com.