Cayman licenses 33 insurers in 2017
The Cayman Islands licensed 33 new insurers in 2017, including 27 new class B insurers (captives and other commercial re/insurers) and six class C insurers (special purpose insurers).
Compared with previous years, Cayman licensed 39 new insurers in 2016 and 22 in 2015.
The domicile did see a few surrenders and cancellations of insurance licences, largely due to consolidation in the healthcare sector, maturing programmes and catastrophe bonds.
Altogether there was a total of 696 class B, class C and class D (reinsurers) licences at the end of the year. Pure captives and group captives represent the two main categories in the domicile, with 317 and 121 companies, respectively.
The total premiums of Cayman’s insurance industry were $12.4 billion as of December 31, and total assets were reported at $61 billion.
The Cayman Islands continues to be the leading jurisdiction for healthcare captives in 2017, with this sector representing more than half of all captives domiciled there.
Medical malpractice liability is the largest primary line of business in the jurisdiction, with approximately 32 percent of companies re/insuring this risk. This is followed by workers’ compensation, with 21 percent of companies assuming the risk.
“The expertise is hard to match, every time healthcare is mentioned Cayman comes to mind,” says Ruwan Jayasekera, head of the Insurance Supervision Division at the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority (CIMA). “We have some healthcare captives that were licensed 30 or 40 years ago. Some of the larger healthcare systems in the US will also have a connection to Cayman.”
Jayasekera adds that while the number of new licences in 2017 is down from the previous year, the programmes CIMA is seeing coming in now are much broader in scope and operations. This includes formations of more captives with liability lines and brokers setting up companies to write for their clients as well as commercial reinsurance operations.
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