The South Carolina Captive Insurance Association (SCCIA) begins its annual conference this evening at the Charleston Place Hotel in the city “where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers come together to form the Atlantic Ocean”). The SCCIA is a group about which Columbia’s Insurance Technology community needs to know much more.
“Captives are estimated to write, one way or another, approximately 25-30% of the commercial insurance market,” according to Bob Sargent who manages the Specialty Insurance Blog. In his recent post, Captive Insurance Study, he gives highlights of a recent study by Marsh, Next Generation Captives: Optimizing Opportunities. Some quick highlights:
- Captives owned by public companies manage $55-60B of premiums
- 65% of captives surveyed have expenses of 5% or less
- Middle-market companies are making greater use of captives
The Marsh report states that interest in, and growth of, captives was strong in spite of the soft market. Now that the market has begun to harden interest in captives will only increase.
Captives are all the more relevant to South Carolina because it ranks third among all states (behind only long-standing leader Vermont, and Hawaii) as a domicile to captives. Ten years ago SC had no captives but then SC Insurance Commissioner Ernie Csiszar (now with the USC Moore School of Business) led efforts to make SC attractive to captive insurance company formation and management. This week’s conference is the ninth annual gathering of the group that keeps growing each year.
Most of South Carolina’s captive community dwells in Charleston just as most of South Carolina’s insurance technology community dwells in Columbia. While insurance technology has been primarily focused on carriers and secondarily on agents, there is ample reason to give increasing attention to captives as well. Trumbull Services is the only insurance technology provider with a Columbia office to be listed in the association’s web site provider directory. It seems that there’s much more that the Columbia insurance technology community can be doing for a captive audience that’s only two hours away.
Tags: captives, Columbia, Charleston
December 10, 2008 at 9:20 pm |
More emphasis needs to expand the coverages of the captive insurance company.