Based on previous years, we expect around 600 registrants for the 2016 Captive Insurance Companies Association (CICA) International Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. This location is always one of our attendees’ favourite venues. The Westin Kierland in Scottsdale is a destination resort on the inside, with a high-end shopping and dining district right next door.
How many attendees are you expecting for the 2016 CICA International Conference?
Dennis Harwick: Based on previous years, we expect around 600 registrants for the 2016 Captive Insurance Companies Association (CICA) International Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. This location is always one of our attendees’ favourite venues. The Westin Kierland in Scottsdale is a destination resort on the inside, with a high-end shopping and dining district right next door.
The biggest difference between CICA’s registrants and those at the various domicile conferences is that the people attending CICA are almost exclusively the key decision makers in their captives, ie, there are very few captive board meetings going on, so CICA gets its registrants by ones and twos, not group registrations of an entire captive board.
The other key difference is that CICA is domicile neutral, so the CICA International Conference is a level playing field for owners of captives, prospective captive owners, service providers, captive regulators, and domicile representatives throughout the world.
What can delegates expect from this year’s conference?
Harwick: CICA’s conference is always one of the premier gatherings of the captive industry. It is unique in that it hosts both the captive domicile association’s leaders and the captive domicile regulators.
The Captive Association Leadership Council is a group consisting of the leaders of all the captive domiciles who have the unique opportunity to meet face to face during the CICA conference to discuss challenges and opportunities for the captive industry.
The captive regulators also hold a meeting at CICA exclusively for captive regulators, so they can talk candidly about the issues they face.
Registrants can expect a lively blend of networking and education. There are three lavish receptions, including the opening reception on Sunday evening (6 March), the Monday night (7 March) reception, and the closing reception on Tuesday evening (8 March), which create vibrant opportunities to network, meet new connections, and mingle with both captive owners and service providers.
The conference theme, ‘Think Big’, was designed to allow for provocative sessions challenging captive owners and service providers to expand their thinking.
The keynote speaker, Peter Navarro, will be presenting a big picture macroeconomic analysis of the business environment and financial markets for investors and corporate executives.
Cyber features in the conference schedule. What are CICA members’ main issues with cyber risk right now? What will the conference give them in terms of advice?
Harwick: CICA members may be unconsciously retaining risk, because while most of them likely employ anti-malware measures to safeguard their systems from intrusion, few of them likely employ the appropriate internal monitoring measures to identify and respond quickly to breaches that may have occurred. The conference will address this and other cyber-related issues, such as establishing proper coverage for cyber events.
What other hot topics will be the main focus at this year’s conference?
Michael Bemi: Critically important topics such as employing analytics, utilising reinsurance most effectively, attracting new and much needed talent to the industry, auditing, accounting and taxation updates, and the implications of international regulatory initiatives, will all be addressed by experts in those fields.
What sessions are you most looking forward to?
Bemi: It is hard to pick favourite sessions because there is a different answer for every one of our hundreds of attendees. The CICA programme committee has worked hard to offer sessions designed for a wide range of experience with valuable content in so many topical areas, all presented by industry experts.
In the later part of 2015, CICA gave advice to its members on micro captives. Do you feel this was well received?
Harwick The response has been universally well received. The captive industry has struggled with how to differentiate between micro captives that are being formed for legitimate insurance purposes versus those that are being promoted strictly for tax purposes without clear insurance risk shifting and risk distribution.
The CICA information statement was specifically designed to be read in conjunction with CICA’s other best practices guidelines. We hope that the Internal Revenue Service will recognise that CICA’s information statement provides those utilising micro captives for legitimate purposes with a road map for forming legitimate risk transfer captives.
What other education initiatives are you planning in 2016?
Harwick Obviously, the CICA International Conference is the ‘crown jewel’ of CICA’s educational offerings. In addition, CICA has always offered a fall webinar on a hot topic in the captive industry. Recently, the CICA board of directors asked that we expand our webinar offerings throughout the year to respond to our members’ needs.
The 2016 CICA Market Study, which will be unveiled at the 2016 CICA International Conference, confirmed that CICA members want regular webinars on both hot topics and issues that were covered during the CICA International Conference.
Repackaging the international conference content in regular webinars will allow those who couldn’t attend the conference, or those who couldn’t attend a specific session, to get the benefit of conference programming.
