The increasing need for alternative solutions to fulfil demand for property cover continued to dominate discussions at this year’s Vermont Captive Insurance Association (VCIA) annual conference in August.
Property has been one of the fastest growing lines of business written by captives over the last two years, but captives are increasingly taking larger property limits because of burgeoning rates and lack of capacity in the commercial market.
“Everyone wants solutions for property, that has not gone away and will not go away,” said Claire Richardson, captive consultant at Hylant, speaking on the Global Captive Podcast at VCIA.
“We’re starting to see a little bit better participation from markets on the property side. That’s really encouraging, but it’s still in a hard marketplace.”
In July 2023, Captive Intelligence published a Long Read highlighting that the challenging environment for property risk has created the “perfect storm” for writing the line through captives although questions concerning collateral, retentions and long term strategy needed to be assessed by insureds.
“We’re seeing a lot of interest in the property space,” said Mat Robinson, senior managing director and captive operations leader at Brown & Brown.
“Can we include property in our captive? What limits can we take, and what would that ultimately look like?”
Robinson also said cyber has been heavily discussed at this year’s conference.
“There’s interest all over the place within the captive space at this point in time, and we’re not seeing a slowdown in growth of captives or captive opportunities,” he added.
John James, head of business development at Performa, said that aside from investment management, the one thing that he keeps hearing about is property.
“Property is certainly a hot button for captive insurers in general,” he said. “Certainly, property presents some challenges and some opportunities in the captive space.”
Richardson highlighted that a lot of Hylant clients are also looking towards medical stop loss solutions for their captives.
“They’re really bolstering the captives that already exist, so we’ve continued conversations down that route.”
Listen to the full podcast report from the VCIA annual conference here, or on any podcast app. Just search for Global Captive Podcast.