Bermuda’s captive insurance market has strong prospects for growth, as the types and uses of captives grow increasingly innovative and sophisticated.

That is the view of PwC Bermuda, one of the sponsors of the Bermuda Captive Conference, which starts at the Fairmont Southampton Resort today.

“There are significant opportunities for growth in North American markets as companies increase their risk sophistication,” said David Gibbons, director of the captive insurance group at PwC Bermuda.

“One major trend is the increasing use of captives by large multinationals to fund employee benefit programmes. Many captives are over time moving these programmes into their captives in order to centralise the process for managing those risks.”

Middle-market clients in the US are also now catching on to the use of captives for a variety of risk management planning reasons.

“There’s a growing use of captives in the US middle market, among companies who may not have considered or understood the benefits of captives before,” said Mr Gibbons.

Mr Gibbons also noted there’s been an increase in captives from Latin America as Bermuda pursues tax information exchange agreements with partner countries.

“Latin America is growing,” Mr Gibbons said. “There has been significant captive growth coming from Colombia and Mexico specifically, and heightened interest from Peru and Chile,” Mr Gibbons said.

And with the Canada-Bermuda Tax Information Exchange Agreement (TIEA) in effect since 2011, it is hoped more Canadian corporations will incorporate captive insurance companies in Bermuda.

PwC Bermuda experts Richard Irvine, Scott Slater and Sean Kelly are among the panellists at this week’s conference.

The professional services firm is sponsoring the Welcome Party on Monday evening for delegates and industry partners at the host hotel’s Beach Terrace.