BERMUDA FINANCE | Captive Insurance Roundtable
Risk Management summit in Cartagena, Colombia. Presenting to an all- Spanish audience poses additional challenges, but to the extent that we are in the region much more frequently, not only to attend conferences but also to have focused meetings with key decision-makers, bodes very well for Bermuda from a relationship-building standpoint. From my previous visits, my impression was that Bermuda remains one of the only captive domiciles in play in this region.
Husbands: We are, and the reason for that is because they want to be in a domicile with a pristine reputation. They’re not interested in being anywhere that’s got a slight question mark over it.
Weldon: Bermuda has been very effective in addressing misinformed perceptions about being a tax haven. The Bermuda government’s signing of more than 40 Tax Information Exchange Agreements as per the OECD, demonstrates Bermuda’s level of cooperation and transparency.
Allitt: We need to leverage our history as well. We’ve got a number of Latin American captives that we’ve serviced for years. So you can leverage from that, use those relationships to expand out—we don’t have to look at this as a new jurisdiction, it’s always been there, there’s just a lot of growth potential and it’s because of their own economic development that captives become more significant.
Weldon: We don’t often speak about the European Union, but I think that region also has a lot of business development potential.
Allitt: It really stands Bermuda apart from other jurisdictions in that respect. It’s seen at the moment as a bit of a theoretical benefit because we haven’t seen it, but I think over time and as Solvency II comes in, we’ll see a really tangible benefit.
Do you see potential opportunity for Bermuda in the changing landscape of the US healthcare space?
Husbands: There are actually quite a large number of healthcare captives here but because we’re such a large domicile we almost forget.
Having some of the healthcare market here helps a lot, because they come and they buy reinsurance here. So we just have to continue to be innovative and come up with different products.
Weldon: It is not widely reported but a substantial amount of healthcare business is already being written in Bermuda. The same factors that make us attractive for other lines of business—a quality regulatory environment, experienced service providers on the ground, and a world-class reinsurance market—also make us attractive in the healthcare space.
Mullen: From a healthcare perspective, there’s the myth of Bermuda perhaps not being open to healthcare captives, which is far from the truth. Bermuda, over time, may start to attract the ones that are drawn to Solvency II-equivalent regimes, and ones with high standards of governance. When I think about our book of business in Cayman, probably half of it is healthcare, so that’s their biggest space, whereas Bermuda has a lot more to offer in terms of the markets that you can place your business with.
Weldon: The Cayman market does an effective job shouting from the mountain top about their developments in healthcare.
Mullen: Across our entire book, financial institutions are the largest industry segment, but healthcare is a close second. The quality of the regulation in Bermuda is what attracts and keeps a lot of people here and the combination of that and the risk transfer market that’s available here makes it very difficult for other domiciles to catch up.
What innovations are you seeing in Bermuda—where do you see opportunities to take on emerging risks?
Husbands: Because of the strength and the expertise of the people around this table, there’s a great deal of talent here, and that talent creates ideas and comes up with innovative ways for our clients to use captives. There is a lot of talk about cyber, for example. We have brainstorming
43 Bermuda Finance | 2014
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76