QBE North America has established a sponsored protected cell company (PCC) in Vermont with the initial purpose to support medical stop loss programmes.
Champlain Insurance PCC was licensed by the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation on 15 June and is managed by Advantage Insurance Management.
QBE has a long history in America’s medical stop loss market, today supporting 27 captive programmes, including single parent and group captives.
Dale Sagen joined QBE as vice president in accident & health as business development leader, cell captive, in May 2023 and speaking on the Global Captive Podcast at the VCIA conference in August, said adding the option of utilising Champlain was an “opportunity to drive greater results for our clients”.
“It’s very difficult to set up a captive programme,” Sagen said. “So we set this up to essentially make it easier and more efficient for our customers to utilise captives.
“Not necessarily just the rank and file captive programme you see here at VCIA, where sometimes it’s just one large employer, but making it easier for those smaller employers, those smaller advisors that technically don’t have a lot of options out there in the marketplace.
“We see the Champlain Insurance PCC programme as an opportunity for us to provide a better service for our clients and really utilising it from a variety of ways is what we’re most excited about.”
Sagen said that the PCC would make QBE’s service model more efficient and support clients wanting to utilise their own captive or build a group captive within a cell.
“It’s a very effective model for employers and advisors that essentially want somebody to be their risk management partner,” he added.
“As you advance down the supply curve of captive solutions supported by QBE, you’re going to find an area in which you can create your own agency branded programme, a white labelled approach to a group captive.
“You can move to a model where it’s a single parent captive programme using our vehicle. It’s a cell facility, which means that it’s pretty open to just about any risk that our clients are interested in.”
While the focus now is on using Champlain for medical stop loss, Sagen believes it will become useful for property & casualty captives programmes in the future.
“From our perspective, we’re starting with medical stop-loss, but we are a global insurance company,” he said.
“So it’s an area where we will look towards more property and casualty opportunities as they materialise. But our facility now is really focused solely on medical stop-loss.”
The full interview with Dale Sagen will be included in episode 91 of the Global Captive Podcast.