A captive insurance company is a type of risk-management arrangement that essentially works like self-insurance. While “single-parent” captives are financially possible only for large, well-capitalized companies, associations or groups of companies may band together to form a captive to provide insurance coverage. Professionals such as doctors, lawyers and accountants have formed many captives.

A new paper, written by Dr. Patricia Born, Midyette Eminent Scholar of Insurance at Florida State University and Triple-I Non-Resident Scholar, discusses the considerations for these companies from a financial cost and benefit perspective.

The paper, A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Member-Owned Group Captive Option, explains how mid-sized companies seeking to lower their insurance costs and control other aspects of their insurance program might consider the costs and benefits of group captive insurance arrangements.

The paper outlines the numerous benefits of group captive membership, including greater control over risk management concerns and lower costs of insurance. It includes information on the types of companies that use member-owned group captives; the various types of captive arrangements; how they are currently used; where they are located; and legal and regulatory compliance concerns. It also offers several case studies.

“While captives can allow companies a means for managing risks that cannot be placed with commercial insurers, the risks that are reasonably retained by companies in captives have some distinctive characteristics,” the paper notes. For example, the frequency and severity of losses for risks transferred to the captive should be well understood by the company. Also, a company should have adequate experience with the risk to fully appreciate the actuarially estimated expected losses associated with the exposure. The expected losses should also not be catastrophic in nature. Since these losses are infrequent, they can be more effectively pooled by an insurer who has more capacity and more opportunities to diversify its risks.

“Group captives have become an attractive risk management option for a growing number and type of companies,” the paper concludes. “The current hardening in the traditional insurance market makes captives even more enticing and suggests the captive industry will see more growth in the form of new captive formations and increasing group captive membership.”  A hard market, known in the insurance industry as a seller’s market, describes situations when insurance is expensive and in short supply.