In praise of physical events

In the last 18 months or so, a new malady has swept the world, affecting businesses of every size, in every continent around the world. To date, there has been no known case of an insurance payout for this malady, which is not fatal but has been known to increase frustration levels and reduce productivity. The ailment in question is, of course, Zoom fatigue.

The insurance industry is rightly proud of the way it adapted to the new circumstances in which it found itself after the outbreak of COVID-19. From the largest, multinational commercial insurers to the smallest single parent captives, employees in the sector typically adapted well to working from home, and platforms such as Zoom and Teams allowed executives to remain in touch with each other and their clients. Businesses were able to manage risk using insurance products with little or no interruption.

However, the experience exposed the extent to which people in the insurance industry thrive on face-to-face contact with colleagues and clients. While maintaining existing relationships has been possible via new digital platforms, building new ones has been much harder. For this, insurers and their service providers rely on actual meetings and, crucially, the informal networking opportunities provided by regular conferences, seminars and other canapé and wine-fuelled events.

This is particularly true of the captive insurance industry. A captive is rarely the product of a single, cohesive team that has a history of working together in an office that can be recreated virtually on Zoom. Rather, it is usually driven by a number of separate service providers working together, each looking after a different function. These different parts work together like cogs in a machine, and industry gatherings provide the oil that ensures the cogs keep working smoothly.

It is therefore a considerable relief to many in the captives industry to see the first shoots of recovery, with a number of industry events having gone ahead in 2021, after an entirely barren 2020. A number more are planned for the fall, raising hopes that the industry might get back to its full pre-COVID schedule in 2022.

One of those due to take place in October is the Captive Insurance Companies Association’s (CICA) 2021 Fall Forum in Tucson. CICA hosts the biggest domicile-neutral captives event on the calendar in March, but this has been unable to go ahead for the last two years. It used to do a second event in the fall and, sensing a thirst for networking opportunities among its members, decided to revive the event in 2021.

Announcing the event to the industry, CICA president Dan Towle emphasised the need for captives professionals to get together and meet in person.

“Our members are burned out on virtual events and they want to get together in person to share best practices and to network,” he said. “This is a close-knit industry and they have been asking for in-person conferences now that it is safe to do so.”

Towle stressed that the fall event is not a reschedule of its annual conference, but a different event altogether, featuring the components delegates expect from a CICA conference: networking opportunities, educational sessions and, crucially, a poolside reception. If it is a success, it could lead to a longer-term reinstatement of the fall event on the annual captives event calendar.

A number of individual domiciles are also planning events in coming months. The Alabama Captive Insurance Association is going ahead with a physical conference in September, and the South Carolina Captive Insurance Association is hosting an annual executive educational conference in Charleston the same month which, besides the educational component, promises “networking, and, of course, fun!”.

Others have already gone ahead with events in 2021. One of the first out of the gate was the North Carolina Captive Insurance Association (NCCIA) which, like CICA, had been extremely disappointed to see its 2020 event cancelled.

During the first months of the COVID-19 lockdowns the NCCIA had thought the situation would be brought under control relatively swiftly and postponed, rather than cancelled, its annual conference. As the months progressed and the situation deteriorated, however, it realised an in-person event would not be possible.

That made it even more eager to make sure the event happened in August 2021 without any further delays, says Tom Adams, president and chief executive officer of the NCCIA. As this magazine goes to press the event is still due to go ahead in August 2021 as planned.

“We were determined to go ahead with the event as scheduled this year and it proved to be a good decision as the US had largely reopened in most places by that time,” recalls Adams.

“There was a lot of pent-up demand for this event, the first captive insurance event to be held in person by a major captives domicile since the COVID-19 outbreak.”

The NCCIA will hold its event at the Washington Duke Inn, which is on the Duke University campus, which has one of the best regarded medical centres in the US. The hotel and the medical centre have been worked together to assess whether the event should go ahead, giving the all-clear and making some recommendations to ensure the safety of attendees.

Hotel staff serving guests have been advised to wear masks and hand sanitiser will be provided throughout the venue. Other than that, the event is expected to feel much like they did in the days before the pandemic, Adams says.

Adams insists that while an urge to socialise and mingle was a significant driver of demand for the captives conference, there was more to it than a group of executives looking for an excuse for a party. It is also important to the NCCIA to get the message out about developments in the domicile, he says, including a premium tax holiday for companies redomiciling existing captives to the state.

Sean King of CIC Services is due to speak at the event to share his thoughts about the implications of the Supreme Court ruling in its case against the IRS (see A showdown for the ages), while another session will discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic might impact office working and design in the future.

For some domiciles, the decision about whether to go ahead with a conference was more difficult to make. Travel restrictions made it a particularly vexed issue for the Hawaii Captive Insurance Council (HCIC). It is hard to plan an event when you don’t know whether the majority of your delegates will be able to fly to the island to attend it.

Paul Shimomoto, partner at Goodsill Anderson Quinn & Stifel and president and chair of the marketing committee for the HCIC, says: “Going ahead with an in-person conference this year was a very difficult decision to make for obvious reasons. The COVID-19 situation was in constant flux and change, so we were constantly reactive.

“When we first considered the prospect of going in-person, we concluded we could not, given the state of affairs at that time. But, within a couple of months later, things were changing for the better, and our perspective changed.”

Shimomoto adds: “Throughout the pandemic, Hawaii has been one of the most restrictive places to travel to in the US. On one hand, it kept our COVID-19 case counts very low, but, on the other hand, it presented real challenges in determining whether we could get travellers to Hawaii for our conference, even if we decided to proceed with it.

“For a long time, we could only hope that travel entry and social gathering restrictions would be eased or lifted in time for our conference.”

The HCIC polled its members early on to see if they were interested in attending an in-person conference in Hawaii and the results were overwhelmingly positive. “When we eventually opened up the conference room block with the hotel, we blew through our allotted room nights within a matter of 48 hours,” says Shimomoto.

“We had to negotiate for considerably more rooms due to the tremendous interest and demand. We are cautiously optimistic that the initial room reservations translate into actual attendance. If this happens, it could be the best-attended event we have ever had.”

Shimomoto emphasises the different and equally important roles physical events play in the industry. “After 18 months of restricting personal and professional gatherings, people are craving face-to-face interaction,” he says.

“Conferences like ours are intended exactly for that kind of interaction. Conversations are inherently different when face to face as opposed to over videoconference, and relationship-building opportunities are also vastly different when they are done in person.”

At the same time, there was a solid business case for hosting the event. “We were concerned about not having an educational event in or for Hawaii for two years running,” he admits. “We felt that if we could manage an in-person event, we had to try even if it was going to be complicated and difficult, because we wanted to remain top-of-mind for our membership and prospective captives owners.”

None of this is to play down the advances that have been made with virtual conferences in the last 18 months. Virtual events have played an important role standing in for physical events, and have certainly helped meet the content side of the demand for events, from those wanting to learn more about the industry for example.

“Our goal should be to explore ways to deliver our educational content to the widest possible audience,” says Shimomoto. “This can be achieved through events that feature a combination of in-person as well as digital/remote participation. Technological advancements that have been made during the pandemic will encourage that kind of engagement going forward.”

The itch that virtual events have not found a way to scratch, despite some valiant attempts, is the social side.

“We never considered trying to do a virtual event, which just cannot be a meeting in the full sense of the word,” says Adams. “People want to be among other people, to spontaneously exchange ideas in an informal setting with colleagues. That is what the annual event is supposed to be about.”

Commercially, too, digital-only events have struggled, despite some initial enthusiasm and novelty value. “We have heard some grumbling from exhibitors who participated in other virtual events and we had the feeling that they did not feel they had much value for the money spent,” Adams says.

Despite this, he commends those captives organisations that tried to make a virtual event work. “These were the first real attempts to do something like that, and two years ago, before COVID-19, nobody would have thought to try it,” he says. “The virtual event concept is not going to go away and they can definitely get better.”