CICA Looks To Unite Captive Industry

An invitation to domicile-specific captive associations to hold their official meetings during CICAs annual conference.

Hyperlinks connecting those associations Web sites to CICAs Web site.

A letter to CICA members added that CICA has also spoken with "a number of publishers and service providers to the industry and will be announcing member discounts to some publications shortly."

The letter, signed by CICA President Michael Mead, also says that CICA "will be including more domicile information, in addition to expanding hyperlinks to the domicile associations. Additionally, we are reviewing a plan to begin a similar service for all management firms."

Mr. Mead, principal of Michael R. Mead and Company in Chicago, said the initiative was started because "there are theoretically about 4,000 captives in the world and weve only got about 110 members. So the question is where are the rest of them?"

Although many of those captives are "special-purpose vehicles" that are not candidates for CICA membership, "there are a lot of people that we think would benefit by being members of CICA," Mr. Mead said.

The key benefit is "information exchange," he said, noting that CICA's conference is structured "in such a way that people can have a lot of informal idea exchange. That was the original purpose of CICA when it was started 30 years ago with a group of captive owners getting together to talk about common issues and challenges and potential solutions."

The captive industry, he added, "is an esoteric field and there arent a lot of places people can go to get answers."

Mr. Mead noted that the Vermont Captive Insurance Association has traditionally held its board meeting at the CICA meeting, while the National Risk Retention Association, some of whose members belong to CICA, overlaps its conference with CICAs.

Mr. Mead said that some domiciles that may wish to take advantage of CICAs offer are those attached to states such as Colorado, Illinois, Hawaii, Nevada, South Carolina and Vermont in the United States. Internationally they would include domiciles such as Bermuda and the Caymans, and other organizations such as the Insurance Managers Association.

Since many domiciles "just dont have the resources" and newer domiciles are in the process of building infrastructures, "our thought is that if we are truly going to position ourselves as the umbrella association for the industry, then wed like to try to get all these people under the umbrella," he concluded.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, August 13, 2001. Copyright 2001 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.

Contact Webmaster