Curriculum

Insights

Articles, deep dives, and commentary on captive insurance practice.

  1. Why Captive Insurance Rules Are Changing — and Why It's Safe to Act Regulators in the UK, EU and US are competing to make captives easier to own. Here's why the trend is durable — and what it means if you're still deciding.
  2. The RBC Rules Changed. What Should Insurers and Captives Do Now? The NAIC adopted new capital treatment for collateral loans and CLOs in June 2026. Here is the readiness agenda — not another recap of the debate.
  3. Circular Risk: When Insurance Capital Becomes Its Own Collateral Regulators are examining structures where insurer money loops back to affiliated managers, borrowers, or assets. A five-question test for finding the loops in your own programme.
  4. Captive Insurance vs Self-Insurance: What Is the Difference? Both keep risk instead of paying an insurer to take it. The difference is what formalising that decision inside a licensed insurance company buys — and what it costs.
  5. What Is a Fronting Arrangement in Captive Insurance? When a policy must be issued by an admitted, rated insurer, a fronting carrier issues it and the captive reinsures it. The fee is visible; the collateral is the real negotiation.
  6. How Much Capital Does a Captive Insurance Company Need? The statutory minimum is the licence floor, not the answer. What actually sizes a captive's capital: the business plan, the regulator, and the premium-to-surplus yardstick.
  7. Collateral 101: LOCs vs Trusts — and What's Actually Negotiable Once the regulatory floor is understood, the real decisions are the form the security takes and the terms written around it. A plain-English guide to trusts, LOCs and funds withheld — and where the negotiation actually lives.
  8. Capital Credibility 2.0: Can the Structure Be Explained Without the Structure's Sponsor? Independent explainability as a governance standard: if a structure's risk can only be explained by its originator, model vendor, or architect, it is not governable by the party holding it.
  9. 831(b) vs 831(a): Who Elects What Two tax regimes, one box that is hard to un-tick. What each section actually taxes, why the election that saves the most tax draws the most scrutiny, and a decision test that starts from expected losses.
  10. From Look-Through to Look-Across: The Next Stage of Insurance Investment Oversight Look-through tells you what an instrument owns. Look-across finds duplicated exposures, affiliated dependencies, and correlated collateral hiding between the schedules.
  11. Fronting Carriers: What They Do, and What They Charge For The fee is the visible cost and the small one. What the carrier is actually selling, the three layers of what it charges, and why the collateral call at year four is the number that decides whether the programme works.