Captives Insure is heading to Burlington, Vermont for the Vermont Captive Insurance Association (VCIA) Annual Conference — the largest and longest-running educational event in the captive insurance industry.
The feature appears in Captive Insurance Times' July 2026 edition, which brings together reporting, interviews, and analysis from across the captive and reinsurance community. The full issue is available on the publication's website
A large residential window installer operating in the state of Florida partnered with Captives Insure (C.I.) to restructure its general liability program around a wholly owned captive insurance company. The client carries a substantial general liability exposure inherent to residential construction and had historically ceded the full economics of that risk to the commercial market. Through a fronted captive structure, the client now retains over 80% of gross written premium within its own captive — capturing the underwriting result of a well-managed book of business while maintaining A-rated paper for its contractual and statutory obligations
Every organization finances its risk somewhere along a continuum. At one end, risk is transferred almost entirely to a commercial carrier for a fixed price. At the other, the organization retains and funds nearly all of its own losses. Most of the meaningful structuring decisions in captive insurance are, at their core, decisions about where on that continuum an organization should sit — and how deliberately it moves along it.
Governor Kathy Hochul has announced a package of tort and rate-setting reforms included in New York's FY27 budget, designed to lower auto-insurance premiums for drivers and curb fraudulent claims. Early guidance from the Department of Financial Services (DFS) is already pushing insurers to implement these changes, with the governor publicly calling on companies to demonstrate measurable savings within months
A New York-based operator that provides varies types of autos into the hands of third-party drivers partnered with Captives Insure (C.I.) to write its commercial auto liability through a captive. The coverage is structured as contingent auto liability: the operator's policy sits behind the primary auto coverage that the drivers are required to carry, written at New York's statutory minimum limits, subject to a modest per-claim deductible, and including the state's mandatory personal injury protection and uninsured/underinsured motorist coverages. Because a captive cannot meet the filing, rating, and financial-strength requirements that New York and the operator's counterparties impose, an A-rated carrier issues the policy as a fronted, surplus-lines placement and cedes the risk back to the operator's captive. The captive assumes 100% (minus aggregate stop loss) of the risk and underwriting profit.
An insurance buyer faces a problem that most commercial transactions do not: the product being purchased is a promise to pay a claim that may not arise for years, by which point the insurer's financial condition could look very different. Counterparties cannot easily verify that promise on their own, and that is the gap rating agencies exist to fill. A financial strength rating is an independent opinion of an insurer's ability to meet its ongoing obligations to policyholders. AM Best, which has focused on the insurance industry for more than a century, is the benchmark against which insurer financial strength is most often measured, and its secure ratings — generally A- and above in common usage — have become the shorthand for an acceptable counterparty
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