CAPTIVE EDUCATION
time moved on, those captive owners started meeting more formally. With the formation of the Captive Insurance Companies Association (CICA) 40 years ago, the meetings gradually started to add educational sessions in addition to the usual networking opportunities.
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Over the years, the educational sessions became progressively more professional, but they were still more about sharing information than about improving skills.
With decades of history, the captive industry was a well established part of the risk management landscape. Yet, despite its important place in the world of risk, it still did not have a formal training programme. Key leaders in the captive industry realised that there was a growing need for more formalised skill training and for the creation of a unifying professional designation for people who work in the captive insurance industry. The need for a baseline level of understanding of the industry, and the ability to demonstrate to others that such training had been completed, was clear.
Approximately 10 years ago, the key players started planning. In 2004 the International Center for Captive Insurance Education (ICCIE) was launched as an IRS 501c3 non-profit organisation with the exclusive directive of providing educational courses and teleconferences in captive insurance and providing the industry with its only professional designation, an Associate in Captive Insurance (ACI).
Captive industry trade associations such as CICA and the Vermont Captive Insurance Association hold conferences and seminars on timely topics, but these offerings cannot fill the need for broad-based education about the components of the captive insurance industry, or build the support staff skills to compete in the increasingly competitive arena of support industries such as captive management, accounting, claims management and investments. CICA and the domicile captive associations also recognised that they had neither the time, nor the resources, to provide a training programme that would be accessible to individuals not only in the US, but scattered throughout the world.
ICCIE (pronounced ‘I see’) offers industry participants the opportunity to acquire knowledge that spans many aspects of the industry, mainly via online courses. From the core course basics of risk, alternative risk financing mechanisms, actuarial forecasting, captive governance, ethics and the different types of captive formations, to the finer details of elective specialties such as risk retention groups, cell captives, healthcare captives, employee benefits captives, captive investments, and captive accounting practices, ICCIE offers a wide array of courses for working professionals in both the captive industry and the broader risk management arena.
n the beginning, the captive insurance movement was primarily about captive owners sharing information among themselves— information about challenges such as obtaining fronting, choosing service providers and working with regulators. As
As an online programme, ICCIE offers extreme flexibility. Students can be located anywhere in the world, as long as they have access to the Internet, or even a telephone line. This is particularly convenient for people who travel, as do many in the industry. To date, ICCIE has enrolled individuals from more than 40 US states and two dozen countries and territories, from Hawaii in the west, popular offshore domiciles Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, to several European locations, Dubai, Singapore and further east.
ICCIE also offers a high degree of flexibility in how long it takes students to complete the ACI designation programme. It is possible to obtain the designation in as few as six or seven months, by taking more than one course at a time without breaks between courses. At the other end of the spectrum, students are permitted up to three years to complete all the requirements of the certification programme. The average is about 20 months, with most students taking breaks between courses.
The students enrolling in the ACI programme are not just geographically diverse, but come from many different segments of the risk management and captive industries: from captive owners and managers to attorneys, actuaries, investment advisors and other risk management professionals.
With more than 800 enrolments in its first seven-and-a-half years, and more than 200 graduates of the programme, the ACI designation is widely accepted in the captive industry. ICCIE is endorsed by CICA along with all of the major domicile and industry associations, and is recognised by the Risk Management Society (RIMS), the American Society for Healthcare and Risk Management (ASHRM), and other important risk management organisations. ICCIE has successfully filled a void in captive insurance education.
While there is no substitute for face-to-face networking and education such as occurs at the CICA International Conference, the captive industry now offers numerous forms of educational opportunities, including those formalised by the ICCIE.
The educational framework of ICCIE was created by the same people who teach the courses: a large network of the most talented and experienced people in the captive community. The complete list of the ICCIE course designers and current instructors can be found at
www.iccie.org l
Dennis Harwick is the president of the CICA. He can be contacted at:
dharwick@tampabay.rr.com
Mitch Cantor is the executive director of the ICCIE. He can be contacted at:
mitch@iccie.org
CICA | Forty years of captive leadership 39
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