Ep 27 How captives insure the uninsurable, with Oliver Schofield of RISCS

Tuesday Jun 02, 2020

One of the main aims of this podcast is to introduce you to some of the exceptional people I have been lucky enough to meet during the course of my work as an insurance journalist.

Some are not the CEOs and public-facing executives, but the strategic visionaries and innovators who work behind the scenes doing extraordinary things.

Today’s guest is just one such character. Oliver Schofield has had over 30 years in insurance working at brokers Alexander Howden and Aon and then RKH and RFIB.

He is now an independent consultant working in the captive space at a business called RISCS.

https://www.riscs.org/

As you’ll soon find out Olly is as bright an insurance brain as you will find working in the sector.

And because captives are vehicles that can insure almost anything they allow all his creativity to shine through.

Listen on and you’ll find out how they are an excellent way of covering systemic risk – including pandemics – as well as all sorts of uninsurable enterprise risk that the traditional market would run a mile from because of the problem of moral hazard.

One of the other aims of the Voice of Insurance is to give us all a chance to learn about parts of the market that we don’t often get to interact with.

I think captives fall into that category – we all know what they are but there are a lot of things we think we know about them that just don’t stand up to close scrutiny so we will be doing a bit of myth-busting in this session.

It soon became obvious that I should get back to Olly to talk about Covid-19 and how captives might play a role in filling in the large gaps in pandemic cover that have since emerged.