Sixty years of captives in Bermuda

THIS EDITION OF CAPTIVE INTERNATIONAL is dedicated to Bermuda as it celebrates a very significant milestone—the 60th anniversary of the creation of the first captive insurance company on the Island, the first of many domiciled there.

It’s worth taking a step back and thinking about how much has changed over those six decades. John F Kennedy was in the White House in mid-1962, a year before his fateful trip to Dallas, the Cold War was raging, the Beatles had not yet crossed the Atlantic, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was about to start. The world was a very different place.

Bermuda was also very different, certainly from where it is now. Then, it was a colonial outpost with the Royal Navy and US Navy using various bases around the islands. Tourists were starting to discover the place, but cruise ships were far smaller than they are now, planes very different. Attitudes were also different—Bermuda was not the offshore financial centre it is now.

We would not recognise that Bermuda. Voting was restricted by property ownership, racial attitudes were very different in some places and the infrastructure was lacking in many regards. Few if any of the familiar insurance names were present.

As we see in this edition, from the small acorn planted by Fred Reiss a forest of captives has grown, and we celebrate Bermuda’s place in the world of captive insurance. Jonathan Reiss, Fred’s son, gives his views on what Bermuda was like in those first days of captive growth.

We get a look at how a captive is run, a potted history of captives on Bermuda and list some of the reasons that Bermuda remains such an attractive area for captive insurers to set up shop.

Two of the executives behind the creation of the new Bermuda Captive Network give an insight on what drove the amalgamation of three existing captive organisations on Bermuda into one new network as the Island looks beyond the COVID-19 pandemic and at the future that lies ahead.

We have a wide range of articles from some of the companies that have done business in this highly niche area of the market, looking at topics from learning how to use alternative capacity to how long the current hard market will last.

Bermuda, like many places around the world, has had a hard time in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily ended the tourism trade on the Island, with planes grounded and cruise ships berthed due to lockdowns and cancelled voyages. But life goes on—the world is opening up again and places such as Bermuda can celebrate that normality is appearing on the horizon again.