Opinion: Could captive appetite uptick present opportunity for brokers?

Conference season well and truly kicked off this spring (April 2026), with my Outlook calendar looking like a beleaguered game of Battleships as I hopped between hotels to gather an array of market insight across the general insurance and risk management landscapes.

One of my key learnings from the past month has been around captive arrangements – a form of self-insurance where businesses will establish an insurance subsidiary to cover certain risks and exposures with their own capital, rather than purchasing a commercial insurance policy.

The buzz around these models is almost deafening on the conference circuit. Although captives have historically been more front of mind in hard market cycles – to mitigate lacklustre insurer capacity and sky-high premiums in particular lines of business – momentum and organisational investigation around their use is continuing with pace in today’s soft market due to the deluge of emerging and geopolitical risks shaping the modern day-to-day.

Insurers are on board with risk managers’ exploration of captives too, especially when these plan to cover niche, sector specific, emerging risks that the insurers themselves have little to no data on and, therefore, are not confident to price. Data generated from captives have the potential to be underwriting gold dust moving forward.

But what about the role of the broker? Do captives take away chances for client conversations by introducing more self-insurance, or do they pose an important retention and relationship building tool if brokers can tap into the opportunity of helping to structure and manage clients’ captives from the get-go?

For example, brokers could steer corporates on what risks to transfer or retain, what insurers or reinsurers to potentially partner with, as well as help to determine which captive set up to move forward with.

Steven Rance, head of strategy and innovation in the reinsurance team at broker Miller, told me that although risk managers may be currently talking about captives more than ever, this is not reflected in the broker world – he said that, in his experience, a proportion of brokers still view captives as “a dark art” that “can be obfuscated by captive related language”.

A well stocked toolkit

Despite this cohort, Rance emphasised that captives “should always be in a broker’s toolkit” when having conversations with commercial clients – whether this is purely an awareness raising task highlighting a programme possibility or to cement a captive as the “spine of the [insurance] solution”.

He said: “The broker is [often] the first port of call with a client, [so] it is incumbent on the broker to be educated in captives and be able to discuss that because the client isn’t going to necessarily bring that up if they don’t have that knowledge or experience. That’s the brokers’ role.

“You may decide that it’s not the right route for all sorts of reasons – but it should be present and under consideration. [Captives are] not inherently complicated – no more complicated than insurance and reinsurance – but it’s a tool within an overall structure.”

For Rance, captives should be part of the client consultation process – in much the same way that brokers would discuss portfolios or aggregated retentions.

Seeing firsthand the collective curiosity of the risk management community in how captives can be an important rung in their corporate strategies suggests an important in that brokers can take advantage of – not only to solidify existing client relationships and captive success, but also to offer captives as an additional option to firms that had not previously considered them.

Rance suggested that some brokers have a more visible captives function than others.

In today’s soft market conditions, where business is all to play for, having a viable and knowledgeable captives offering could be the extra string to brokers’ bows that sees them win and retain clients more easily, demonstrating risk management panache and meeting risk professionals’ demand.

Captives are certainly captivating corporate client consideration – and it is up to brokers to become part of the conversation in order to succeed in a soft market.