Bermuda Captive 07, the Island's top annual captive insurance market event, has been hailed a big success by organisers and delegates alike.

The conference, which is in its third year, pulled in 520 attendees from across the globe to the high-profile Fairmont Southampton resort over its three-day duration between Monday and Friday.

It is hoped that next year's event will attract yet more people and plans are already afoot to make it even better than this year.

Organiser and managing director of Marsh, Jill Husbands said the feedback had been very good and was pleased to see months of hard work come to fruition.

"I am very pleased - I think it was a great success," she said.

"We have had feedback from the risk managers who are the clients of Bermuda and they all felt it was a very successful event, and we had 520 people, which is very encouraging.

"Obviously we try and set a target (number of attendees), but the final number was in excess of our target and we are delighted by that number considering it is only our third year and so hopefully we will get many more next year."

Next year's event has been scheduled three months earlier for June so clients can attend at the same time as their company AGM's in Bermuda, according to Ms. Husbands.

"Part of the rationale behind it is that clients have to file their statutory return with th Bermuda Monetary Authority within six months of year end at the end of June, so it means that many captives have their AGMs in June and with feedback from our clients many more would attend because they will be in Bermuda for the AGMs at that time," she said.

And despite, being in the captive industry for the past 22 years, she reckons there is always an opportunity to learn more about the business on a personal level and to get the chance to network from a company perspective.

"I had actually been going to some of the sessions at the conference and I learnt some things which were new to me, which is always a great experience - it is really great to come away having learnt something from the session," she said.

"The most important thing for us here at Marsh is the networking with clients and to build our relationship with them and it was certainly very successful from that point of view."

For now though Ms. Husbands is just planning to put her feet up before thinking about the next conference.

"We are going to take a couple of weeks' break and then we are going to meet and discuss it," she said.

"But as decisions are made we will put them up on our website and one of the themes that we are keen to develop is that the key note speaker gives a donation to local charities after their speech.

"It was a lot of hard work from a very big team of volunteers - everybody involved did it in their own time on top of their day job and it has been a great effort."

Roger Gillett, chairman of the Bermuda Insurance Development Council, who was also instrumental in organising the conference, echoed Ms. Husbands' sentiments.

"From our stand point it was a success way beyond our expectations," he said.

"Considering we had 200 odd in the first year, 320 for the second year and we exceeded 500 in our third year, so we have done well with that progression and has led us to believe that we could expect to have an even more successful conference next year.

"But it is not just about numbers and turnout - it is about what your experience is at the end of the day and there is a certain energy when you have a critical mass of people and there was a buzz that was quite definite at the conference.

"There was much more going on this year and the quality of the attendees was very high with a large number from overseas, either direct buyers or advisors."

Another plus side to come out of the conference for Mr. Gillett was the backing they received from their sponsors, which all contributed to make the event a hit.