With close to 800 attendees from the international insurance and reinsurance industry, the 2016 Bermuda Captive Conference was the best attended in the event's 12 year history.
The importance of the event was highlighted in opening remarks provided by the Hon. Michael Dunkley, Premier of Bermuda. This beautiful island continues its attraction as the world's leading off-shore captive domicile with strong traditional links to the UK, its proximity to Canada as well as the US, and increasing interest from Latin America. Bermuda is further one of the few non-EU jurisdictions to qualify for Solvency II equivalency.
The programme focused on emerging issues and trends affecting the global insurance market, primarily on the P&C side. However, employee benefits topics with a focus on health care management were also on the agenda.
According to Marsh LLC international employee benefit programs were the fastest growing risk category placed in captives in 2015. Based on recent RFP experience, this trend appears to continue.
International healthcare and technology futurist Joe Flowers gave a keynote speech highlighting the impact of technology, pharmaceuticals and diagnostics on the future of healthcare.
The panel "Employee Benefits - not just a bolt-on", outlined the history of employee benefits & captives, most significant trends and challenges, and focused on the monitoring & pro-active management of global health care expenditures faced by multinational employers. The panel, moderated by Brian Quinn, Managing Director of Granite Management Ltd., consisted of Eric Butler, the New York based Vice President of Global Healthcare at MetLife, Bill Fitzpatrick, the London based Vice President of Global Insurance/Risk Management at DHL and Marc Reinhardt, the New Jersey based Director of Sales & Distribution for GEB.
Eric Butler demonstrated the medical reporting tools available to clients and the advantages these can bring to captive managers in controlling spiralling global healthcare costs. Bill Fitzpatrick outlined that DHL was able to achieve medical cost savings of 18-20% through the centralized captive program in place. Without this, medical plans would not be sustainable in the future with annual costs increasing by 8 -10%.
In his presentation, Marc Reinhardt gave an overview on how the employee benefits captive market developed over time and explained the recent shift away from pure financial savings, through the reduction of premium rates and plan design changes, to data analytics and the requirement for service aggregation. GEB with its reinsurance based network infrastructure and extensive experience in the captive market is well prepared to work with clients in any industry.
GEB looks forward to participating in the 2017 Bermuda Captive Conference.
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