Captive Solutions with Christensen Group

Captive Solutions

with Christensen Group

The commercial insurance and employee benefits marketplaces have become significantly disrupted by a variety of factors in recent years: social inflation, upward medical trend, low interest rates, damaging natural disasters and nuclear verdicts to name a few. As advisors, our ability to mitigate these external forces is limited. In an effort to combat the shrinking market capacity and increased premium trends, we’ve been working diligently over the past year to formalize a new captive option for our clients. CG Captive Solutions is a wholly owned protective cell captive giving clients more market access as an alternative or supplement to the traditional insurance marketplace.

Benefits of a Captive Program

INCREASED ACCESSIBILITY

Whether a pure captive or a group captive, CG’s protective cell facility allows for increased accessibility to reinsurance and other unconventional markets. Captives provide an alternative source of risk transfer than the traditional retail insurance market. Access to additional sources of insurance surplus is particularly valuable during a hard market.

REDUCTION IN COST

If you have a large deductible (self-insured retention), a captive will provide you with the ability to reserve for projected losses within that deductible layer. If properly structured, a captive gives you an ability to effectively reserve for those losses on a pre-tax basis.

NEW REVENUE SOURCE

A captive can become a profit center for a customer that identifies an opportunity to sell third party risk. Some common examples include: (1) multifamily housing operator selling tenant legal liability to renters, (2) product warranty to consumers, and (3) excess liability layers to franchisees. wanting to sell their own risk.

INCREASED PROTECTION

For some businesses, the traditional insurance marketplace does not have a competitive product that offers affordable coverage for the right level of protection. A captive can be used to aggregate common risks that create economies of scale to manuscript coverage at the right price.

Is a Captive program right for you?

Commercial lines

For groups with difficulty finding reasonably priced coverage in the traditional or excess marketplace, a captive can be a way to gain more access and control over your insurance program. Renting a cell in CG’s Protective Cell Captive can make financing risk more effective along with enabling clients to access reinsurance carriers directly. A captive cell also allows for the introduction of risk transfer as a service (RTAAS) for clients – putting insureds in the position of underwriting and selling risk to their customers.

employee benefits

For large groups (1,000+ employees), Captive Programs can help save money on your benefit plans. Financing a portion of your plan through a captive allows you to deduct losses that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to do through a standard carrier-insured plan.

Case Study

Generating a new source of income.

Captives have the unique ability to enable clients to sell third party risk to their customers. A great example of this is in the property management world. Owners of apartment buildings, senior living facilities, or multiple investment property owners have the ability to sell renters insurance and tenant legal liability policies to their customers directly using a captive to distribute the policies; then benefiting from the underwriting income.

Case Study

Taking on more risk to reduce costs.

Medical trends and the cost of employee benefits continue to rise. Captives are becoming more and more popular in the employee benefits space as a buffer between the insureds partially self-funded layer and the stop gap. This can be beneficial to insureds for two reasons. First, taking on more risk in this “buffer” layer can create additional cost savings on the cost of stop-gap coverage. Second, using a micro-insurance company, such as a captive, to finance your risk allows you to reap the same benefits that an insurance company does by reserving for losses in that buffer layer on a pre-tax basis.

Strategic Risk Solutions

Christensen Group has partnered with Strategic Risk Solutions, the largest independent captive manager in the United States. A dedicated captive manager at SRS will function as the compliance arm of the captive.

Expensive problems.