Association of Cayman
MAC’s Kieran O’Mahony looks ahead to this year’s Cayman Captive Forum
How many attendees are you expecting to this year’s Cayman Captive Forum?
I am not into the numbers game, as numbers may not be reflective of a successful conference per se, but for what it is worth, the number of registered attendees is ahead of last year, as of 31 October.
What can delegates expect?
They can expect another excellent conference with a great and relevant agenda. The speakers are from all aspects of our industry and have first-hand, as well as hands-on, experience of what they are talking about.
What sessions are you particularly looking forward to?
I would say that all sessions have great appeal. I am personally interested in the pre-forum tutorials on the Cayman Islands as a domicile and portfolio insurance companies (PICs). As for the main show, ‘Generational Kinetics’, the keynote speaker, Jason Dorsey, will no doubt be very interesting for all of us who left university 20-plus years ago.
‘Hospital/Physician Captive 50/50’ and ‘Consolidation of Healthcare Systems’, which will be running in the afternoon of 2 December, are both very topical indeed. As a reinsurance underwriter by training and profession, ‘Captive Reinsurance: Choosing the Correct Reinsurance Partner and Understanding Reinsurance Issues’ is close to my heart and the session regarding equipment maintenance insurance, the last session on 2 December, is something that a lot of captives are exploring right now.
Were this year’s sessions based on attendee’s feedback from 2014?
We conduct a post-event survey each year, which solicits a significant quantum of responses from attendees. This is systematic of the forum being ‘the clients’ forum’. We use that data and qualitative feedback to help shape the following year’s forum.
Cyber risk features in a couple of sessions. Do you think cyber risk will continue to grow rapidly? How should captives go about coping with such a big risk?
Cyber, along with employee benefits, continues to be a hot topic that gets discussed at captive board meetings. Currently, rate increases of 25 percent-plus are common with up to 45 percent being ‘not unheard of’.
A number of captive owners have already or are exploring the classical captive approach, putting the retention into the captive and pushing the traditional risk transfer market to a higher attachment level on their cyber programme, while simultaneously seeking to buy more limits.
Captive taxation also appears regularly. Have there been any recent updates?
Taxation continues to be an important subject matter at the Cayman Captive Forum, with Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act/ Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development common reporting standards and their implications for captives currently being some of the most recent topical matters.
What will IMAC be working on in 2016 in terms of captives?
Continuing to raise awareness of the brand ‘Cayman Clearly Better Business’ and expanding the geographical footprint of our reach to Central and South America, as well as Canada, will be ongoing themes.
What else will IMAC be doing?
Now that we have put the PICs in place, we are moving to the next rung on the innovation ladder and the executive committee of the Insurance Managers Association of Cayman is exploring a number of initiatives to keep Cayman at the forefront of the captive industry. These are currently at the whitepaper phase so I expect that our various committees will be given some marching orders over the coming weeks to progress further in 2016.
