The Delaware Captive Bureau is aiming to speed up its licencing process with the aim of licencing new captives within 30 days.
“The Captives Bureau now has a goal now of approving new applications for licencing within 30 days if complete, or at a later date if it’s a complicated application,” Mike Teichmann, director at Delaware law firm Parkowski, Guerke, & Swayze and president of the Delaware Captive Insurance Association, told Captive Intelligence.
“This applies both to conditional and non-conditional licences.”
For a conditional licence, if it’s filed before 1 November, the Bureau is aiming for a 30-day process.
“But because most of these come in towards the end of the year, if it’s filed after 1 November, we agree that an 80-day goal would be acceptable,” Teichmann added.
Teichmann told Captive Intelligence that the Association reached out to Stephen Taylor, captive director at the Delaware Department of Insurance, around this time last year because he had been talking about the idea of making improvements to the domicile.
“We sat down and we met with him and his staff over a period of about six months, to work out some improvements,” he said. “We finalised these improvements in October.”
The Bureau has also agreed to process routine requests such as approvals for dividends, or investment policy statement changes, in a ten-day period.
Taylor has also agreed to review and approve such requests before a board meeting is convened to adopt the proposed action.
Teichmann said there is a real desire on the part of the Department to licence new entities, including certain 831(b)s, but there is greater focus on larger captives.
“831(b)s remain a sizable portion of the Department’s stable of about 700 licenced entities, and the Department doesn’t want to scare new 831(b)s off by any means, but they want to bring in some larger captives too,” Teichmann said.
“As an example, I’m working with an insurance company that’s creating an internal reinsurance mechanism using a Delaware captive and the Department has worked with us very speedily and competently to get this licenced.”
The Department licensed 43 new risk bearing entities in 2023, including cells and series captives, compared to 60 in 2022, with Delaware’s year-end totalling 670 risk bearing entities.