Have You Tuned Up Your Captive Lately?
Jan 5, 2010
All self-funded organizations are faced with significant overhead cost for their operations, particularly in these economic times and soft market. Studies have shown that successful firms are wringing the administrative and loss expenses out of the organization by employing a cohesive team of outsourced risk professionals to complete highly specialized tasks that their staff cannot complete.
Recent Findings
For a typical captive enterprise, qualified help is very hard to find today. Add to that the complexities of the current strategic, financial, operational, and hazard risk landscape, and you could have a possible recipe for disaster.
Most firms turn to their attorney, accountant, and broker for advice to steer them through the daily business risk management process. More and more firms are turning to highly specialized, cost-effective risk solutions to drive earning and asset valuation improvements. By employing these solutions, they are gaining dramatic cost savings of 10-40% from the traditional risk management approaches.
Key Solutions
Evidence has shown that there are five key areas of risk management that will drive earnings and asset value improvement.
- Consistent, broad organizational goals to “capture” risk for decision-making, with the ultimate goals of increasing earnings and improving asset valuations for the parent and captive organization.
- Annual comparison of the risk finance programs with a highly specialized and focused approach for their type of business. The review process should consist of separately analyzing every financial and service provider, and should be appropriately benchmarked with independent, “best practice” data.
- State-of-the-art claim management with continuous reserve management.
- Retention of a qualified, experienced team of multi-disciplinary medical, financial, claim, and legal resources with significant experience in risk management to compliment the existing staff.
- Service quality and technology dedicated to carefully managing and ensuring excellence throughout the process.
While many organizations employ a variety of professionals to assist in managing risk, few have highly qualified resources to execute “forward-thinking, zero-tolerance” risk management strategies. The savings more than make up for the costs of these products and services, and the quality of the captive programs improve dramatically.
Mr. Blackburn founded Blackburn Group, Inc. in 1991 as a company specializing in marketing products and services for the risk and insurance management field. At the time of the company’s inception, Mr. Blackburn designed and developed a specialized risk management information system with associated services called RiskPro to analyze and manage an organization’s operational and human resource risks. Currently, the business platform manages $160 Billion in assets and 300,000 claims valued at $3.5 Billion in North America, South America, Europe and the Far East. Mr. Blackburn has also served as an advisor for several self-insured, insurance, and professional service companies to develop captive management and e-commerce platforms in a variety of industries. The enterprise risk and insurance management project values have been over $1 Billion. The partners at Blackburn Group, Inc. are leading independent alternative risk experts serving clients worldwide. Mr. Blackburn may be reached at rblackburn@blackburngroup.com, or at +1 (585) 586-4530.