German industrial insurer HDI Global is targeting $100m in gross written premium by its new US fronting business within five to six years, expanding into auto, workers’ compensation and potentially cyber.
HDI launched its US Captive Solutions in January with Jason Tyng brought in from Amazon to lead the new unit. He is now vice president of the US Captive Solutions Group.
Tyng and Marco Hensel, senior vice president and chief underwriting officer for HDI Global in the US, discussed the insurer’s recent entrance into America’s booming captive fronting market, in an interview recorded at RISKWORLD last week for the Global Captive Podcast.
“We’re looking to be in the $100m frame as far as a gross written premium over the next five to six years,” Tyng said. “We want to be considered a major player.”
HDI Global is a well-known and established fronting option in the European market and it already works with European captives that are insuring US-based risks.
Hensel said it was after attending American captive conferences in 2022 that he realised they needed to target the US market for fronting.
“I found out very quickly that there is a big need in the US market for carriers that can front for captives,” he said on GCP #85.
“Coming back to Chicago with that information, we built a business plan, we got support from our US CEO, but also from our board in Germany to execute this business plan and to offer captive fronting solutions to US based clients.”
Tyng said the response since launching in January has been “overwhelming”.
“I don’t think that I’ve had a day off since the World Captive Forum,” he added.
“We’ve received submissions from just about everywhere that you can think of. The brand is well known globally, not so much in the US but we’re doing what we can to make that happen.
“And once they find out, it’s like we’ve opened the floodgates and it hasn’t let up.”
HDI is already offering US fronting for property and casualty, but plan to bring auto and workers’ compensation online in the coming months, while they are also seeing a lot of requests for cyber.
On cyber, Tyng believes that is because a captive can facilitate much broader coverage than is currently available.
“If you look at some of the coverage forms, there’s not a whole lot of coverage that’s being provided,” he said.
“You’re basically listing a bunch of exclusions. But when you put that kind of coverage into a captive, it now allows the insured to tailor a form and actually get the coverage they need.
“That’s definitely something that we’re going to continue to explore and take on and potentially we’d like to become a major player in the market for that as well.”