Captives urged to embrace technology and flexibility to tackle emerging risks

Captives will need to become more accessible, flexible and technology-driven if they are to address emerging risks and play a bigger role in corporate risk management, speakers told delegates at the 2026 Airmic Guernsey conference.

The panel session, ‘2030 and beyond: What does the captive of the future look like – building new insurance capacity from gap to opportunity’, heard that the captive market was already evolving beyond its traditional role of filling deductibles and participating in insurance programmes.

Will Thomas-Ferrand, global leader, captive solutions, Marsh, said that if the captive industry were being designed today, barriers to entry would need to be reduced so more companies could benefit from captives.

He pointed to the expansion of captive use in markets including France, the UK and the Middle East, saying regulation in more parts of the world could help grow the overall market.

John Rowson, managing director, Howden, said captives had to be considered within the wider legal and regulatory environments in which companies operated, including company law, consumer protection and tax.

He highlighted migration legislation and protected cell companies (PCCs) as examples of structures that could make captives more accessible and flexible.

Neil Campbell, consultant, SRS Europe, argued that captive managers should be independent of large brokers to enable them to take a more strategic role alongside corporate risk teams.

He said captives were increasingly moving from simply financing deductibles towards becoming “captive-centric” risk strategies, participating across multiple lines and using long-term reinsurance and alternative capital to manage volatility.

Campbell said captives could also act as a data and insight engine, helping companies identify emerging risks such as geopolitical, cyber, AI, climate change and supply chain aggregation before the commercial insurance market was able to respond.

Alison Tamm, global risk director, Control Risks, said flexibility was particularly important for companies facing rapidly changing risks and operating environments.

She cited the challenge of arranging insurance for vessels travelling through the Gulf of Aden during a period of heightened piracy, when existing insurance wordings did not readily address the risks involved. Captives, she said, could provide the flexibility to develop and incubate solutions while the wider insurance market became comfortable with the risk.

Rowson said captives could similarly help address protection gaps around supply chain and political risks, where traditional insurance might offer only limited capacity or where there was insufficient information to price emerging risks.

The panel also discussed the role of alternative capital, parametrics and structured reinsurance in expanding capacity. Rowson said parametric products could provide solutions for risks that were difficult to transfer through conventional reinsurance, while Thomas-Ferrand highlighted structured reinsurance as a way of using diversification within a captive to access capital.

Succession and skills were identified as another important part of the captive’s future.

Rowson said Guernsey was seeing younger people entering the independent non-executive space, alongside wider apprenticeship and training schemes. He argued that greater interaction between teams and risk managers around the world could help develop talent.

For Thomas-Ferrand, the future captive would provide companies with “confidence” by giving them options when risks materialised, even where those risks had not originally been written into the captive.

He cited the release of cash from captives during the Covid-19 pandemic and the use of captives by companies with cargo affected by disruption around the Straits of Hormuz as examples of how captive infrastructure could provide flexibility when unexpected events occurred.

Looking ahead to 2030, Thomas-Ferrand said technology would be the biggest change he wanted to see, with captive owners having access to sophisticated dashboards and consolidated risk data.

Tamm called for greater flexibility and fewer barriers, while Rowson highlighted succession and apprenticeship schemes. Campbell said the industry needed to continue “demystifying” captives and move away from viewing them as a purely tactical insurance tool.

Instead, he said, captives could become risk aggregators that collected exposure information across businesses and countries and converted it into a tool for better corporate decision-making.

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