At September 13, 1999, the Cayman Islands had 493 captive companies on its register. Nine further licences had been approved in principle, with three licences under review.

The Cayman captives wrote $3 billion worth of gross premiums in the last year for which they had, collectively, supplied data to the CMA. Their net income, in round terms, was just shy of half a billion dollars a year, at $426 million.

On the balance sheet side, the companies had assets, when last measured, of $11.9 billion and a total net worth of $3.3 billion. Net worth is an old-timey term abandoned by the American accounting jargon which appears to be sweeping the world in favour of the more exact term, Shareholders' Equity.

The CMA uses net worth as a basis for statistically grouping the companies it monitors. Bermuda uses capital and surplus, usually a smaller measure, to classify its companies.

Cayman has five companies with a net worth in excess of $100 million. Bermuda does not publish a comparable figure, but the number must be dozens by now.

Bermuda's insurance sector has attracted a good number of giants, led by ACE, which has a net worth around $30 billion, which is, perhaps, a quarter of the latest Bermuda total.

The CMA also reports on total assets, the largest number of them all, and reports that it has 11 companies with assets in excess of $200 million. A further 14 have total assets between $100 and $200 million. Cayman may be smaller than Bermuda, but this is by no means chickenfeed: all up, the assets of the Cayman insurance sector totalled $11,862,835,577 ($11.9 billion) at September 13, 1999.

Healthcare and workers' compensation captives between them make up half the number of companies on the register. The other half of the sector is comprised of property, general liability and a host of smaller lines such as professional liability, automobile and credit life.

Three of every five Cayman captives are `pure' captives, which insure the risks of a parent or small group of parents and write little third-party business; one in five is an association captive and the balance is made up of group captives. A significant and growing five percent are open market insurers.

The CMA issues a table of the location in which the risks being covered apply.

To a Bermuda-based reporter familiar with a paucity of up-to-date information, such details are a treasure trove of information, a veritable cornucopia.

The Bermuda Registrar of Companies, generally, has historically taken the view that its information is private, as if giving up the data was an act of weakness.

One imagines previous Registrars have enjoyed the complicity of their master, the Finance Minister in their statistical reticence. In an era when the release of public information appears, in general, to have a low priority, it will be interesting to see if new Registrar Jeremy Cox and his father, the Finance Minister, adopt the caution of their predecessors, or the more open style of the Cayman Monetary Authority.

Bermudians argue that putting the information out is, somehow, to risk giving something up. The fact is that you are at the foot of a column of data about the Cayman Islands because, as a reporter, I was given fantastically detailed and current information the moment I asked for it.

Next: New insurance products in Cayman.