International SOS expands captive strategy with new Vermont formation
International SOS has established a second captive insurance company in Vermont, expanding its global captive strategy with a US-based vehicle designed to complement its long-standing Singapore captive.
Odeon Insurance Inc. was formed in Vermont on 1 January 2026, and is managed by Aon.
The captive will initially underwrite medical stop-loss and selected property and casualty risks originating in North America, with scope for additional lines over time as the captive matures and the organisation’s needs evolve.
Speaking to Captive Review in advance of the VCIA conference, Franck Baron, group deputy chief financial officer at International SOS, said the company had reached a point where a single captive was no longer the optimal structure for its growing global operations.
“The decision was driven by the continued evolution of our risk profile and our desire to strengthen the resilience of our risk financing strategy,” Baron said, highlighting an increasingly complex environment characterised by medical, travel, crisis response, security, and liability exposures the global health and security risk services provider is facing.
“While our Singapore captive has served us exceptionally well for many years, we saw an opportunity to expand our captive strategy to better align with the scale and geographic distribution of our business. Establishing a US captive allows us to optimise the financing of risks originating in North America, gain greater flexibility in coverage design, and create additional capacity to support future growth and innovation.”
The Singapore captive, Odeon Insurance Re PTE. Ltd, remains a core component of the group’s global risk financing framework and continues to play an important role across a number of our international programmes.
However, Baron added that the broader objective for the new Vermont captive is not just risk retention, but the creation of a scalable platform that supports enterprise risk management, capital efficiency, and long-term business resilience.
“The US captive complements our Singapore captive by creating a more balanced and geographically aligned captive architecture. It enables us to retain and manage selected US-based risks more efficiently while creating additional flexibility for future programme development,” he added.
Explaining the choice of domicile, Baron said Vermont’s established captive infrastructure and regulatory expertise made it the preferred location and “a natural choice.”
“Vermont demonstrated a strong understanding of our strategic objectives and a pragmatic approach to innovation. As we evaluated different domicile options, we felt Vermont offered the right combination of regulatory certainty, responsiveness, infrastructure, and long-term scalability,” he said.
“We wanted a domicile capable of supporting future development, including the addition of new lines and potentially more sophisticated captive structures. Vermont’s track record and collaborative approach made it the best fit for our ambitions.”
Looking ahead, Baron said the captive would become an increasingly important part of the group’s enterprise risk management strategy.
“We view the US captive as a long-term strategic asset rather than a standalone insurance vehicle,” he said.
“Over the coming years, we expect it to expand both in terms of the risks it supports and the value it creates for the organisation. As our understanding of exposures continues to improve through data analytics and operational insights, the captive will provide a flexible mechanism to retain risk where appropriate, stabilise insurance costs, and support innovative approaches to emerging risks.
And equally important, he added, was that the captive strengthens the parent’s ability to align risk financing with business strategy.
“It gives us greater control over coverage structures, improves resilience during challenging market cycles, and creates opportunities to support new services and business developments,” he said.
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