Captive insurance,
built right from day one.

Captivedge designs, forms, and manages captive insurance companies for businesses ready to take control of their risk and their cost of insurance. Based in Charleston, South Carolina, we work with companies and groups across the country who are done overpaying the traditional market.

The Challenge

Traditional insurance is a one-way street. You pay premiums, the carrier keeps the underwriting profit, and when claims run clean for a few years, your rates barely move. Hard markets, capacity pull-backs, and coverage gaps leave well-run companies paying for someone else’s bad year.

A captive changes that. It lets you retain the risk you can manage, access reinsurance markets you can’t reach on your own, and keep the underwriting profit and investment income that would otherwise go to a carrier — all inside a properly licensed, regulated insurance company that you own or participate in. Additional benefits include the potential to lower the overall costs of risk financing, stabilize insurance pricing for budgeting purposes and create custom coverages that may not be available in the marketplace.

Done right, a captive is a long-term financial asset. Done wrong, it’s a compliance headache and an IRS target. The difference is who’s managing it.

Feasibility & Formation

We analyze your unique needs to determine the best approach for your captive. This service helps you understand the potential benefits and requirements involved.

Captive Management

Our experienced team oversees the daily operations of your captive, ensuring compliance and optimal performance. We tailor our management to fit your specific needs.

Ongoing Strategic Review

We evaluate your business risks and provide strategies for effective risk management. This helps you mitigate potential issues and maximize your captive’s effectiveness.

Why Captivedge?

Independent

We don’t underwrite, we don’t sell insurance, and we’re not owned by a broker. Our advice isn’t shaped by what else we’re trying to sell you. We work with a wide variety of industry-leading partners to allow you to customize your service team. Our unbundled pricing allows you to see exactly what you are paying each service provider.

Senior attention

Personalized approach. Unlike the large firms, our principals are actively involved in each of our captives, and you work with a dedicated team.

Domicile-fluent

We work across the major U.S. captive domiciles and select offshore jurisdictions, and we’ll tell you plainly which one fits your situation instead of defaulting to wherever’s easiest for us.

Built for the long haul

A captive is a long term investment. We structure and manage with that horizon in mind — not for a quick formation fee..

Your Trusted Partner

Who We Serve

Companies and groups in construction, healthcare, professional services, transportation, manufacturing, and hospitality — anywhere risk is large enough, predictable enough, unusual enough or expensive enough in the traditional market to justify owning a piece of it.

If you’re spending real money on commercial insurance and wondering why none of it comes back to you, that’s the conversation to have.

About Captivedge

Captivedge is a captive insurance management and formation firm based in Charleston, South Carolina, founded by Simon Kilpatrick and Matt Watson. We built the firm on a simple premise: captive owners deserve managers who treat their captive like the financial asset it is, not just a recurring compliance file. We work with company leadership, CFOs, brokers, and advisors directly — no layers between you and the people actually managing your captive.

Domiciles

Where you domicile your captive matters almost as much as why you formed it.

We help you weigh the real tradeoffs — not just whichever jurisdiction is easiest for the manager.

Vermont

The gold standard. The largest captive domicile in the world by number of licenses, with over four decades of regulatory experience and the deepest bench of specialized service providers anywhere. The right call when you want maximum infrastructure and a regulator who has truly seen it all.

South Carolina

Our home state, and one of the original “big three” U.S. domiciles alongside Vermont and Hawaii. SC offers an experienced regulator, efficient licensing timelines, and a strong fit for small to mid-sized captives that don’t need Vermont’s scale.

Delaware

Known for corporate flexibility and a business-friendly statute. Popular for cell structures and sponsored captives, with flexible capitalization options including letters of credit.

Tennessee, North Carolina, Utah

Newer but increasingly competitive onshore domiciles, with modern statutes and active business-development efforts to attract captives away from the legacy leaders.

Cayman Islands & Bermuda

The two leading offshore domiciles, with decades of infrastructure, deep reinsurance market access, and global recognition. Worth considering when your captive will write meaningful premium volume or needs access to the broader reinsurance and ILS markets.

No domicile is tax-free, and no single domicile is right for every captive. We work with your advisors to model premium tax treatment, capital and collateral requirements, and ongoing operating costs across your real candidates before we recommend one — and we tell you when your home state is good enough that there’s no reason to look elsewhere.

Types of Captives

A Quick Guide

Here are some definitions and information to help guide you with Captives.

Single-Parent Captive

A wholly-owned insurance subsidiary that insures the risks of its parent company (and, in some cases, affiliates). Maximum control, maximum customization — and the full responsibility of owning and capitalizing a standalone insurer. Best suited to larger organizations with stable loss history and the scale to justify the structure.

Group Captive

Multiple unrelated companies join together to own and capitalize a shared captive. Each member contributes capital, shares in underwriting results, and gets a vote in how the program runs. Group captives let mid-market companies access captive ownership — and the underwriting profit that comes with it — without bearing the full cost and risk alone. The tradeoff: success depends on every member’s commitment to genuine loss control, since one member’s bad year affects the group.

Cell Captive

(Protected Cell / Segregated Portfolio Company)

A single licensed entity divided into legally segregated “cells,” each owned by a different participant with its own assets, liabilities, and underwriting results — insulated from the other cells in the structure. Cells let a company get the benefits of a captive without standing up and capitalizing a full standalone insurer, which makes them a common entry point for companies testing the waters.

Risk Retention Group (RRG)

A member-owned liability insurer formed under the federal Liability Risk Retention Act, allowing companies in the same industry or line of business to insure each other’s liability risk and operate across state lines under a single home-state license. RRGs are liability-only and best suited to groups with shared, well-understood exposure (think: similar professional liability or product liability profiles).

Agency Captive

Owned by an insurance agency or broker rather than the insureds themselves, typically reinsuring a share of the business the agency places. A different ownership model from the structures above — built around aligning agency incentives with underwriting performance rather than putting the insured directly in the risk-sharing seat.

Not sure which structure fits? That’s exactly what the feasibility study is for.

Simon Kilpatrick — Co-Founder

Simon has over 25 years’ experience in the insurance and financial services industry, specifically in private banking, investment management and captive insurance. Simon graduated from the College of William & Mary in Virginia in with a BBA in Finance with a minor concentration in Physics. Mr. Kilpatrick obtained his Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Charter in 2002. He has also obtained his Associate in Captive Insurance (ACI) by the International Center for Captive Insurance Education (ICCIE).
Mr. Kilpatrick’s specific captive experience has been with captive formations, both domestically and internationally as well as in the management of a diverse portfolio of captive insurance company types including pure captives, cell captives, RRGs and a traditional insurance carrier. This work entails assisting prospective clients with developing their captive insurance companies to best fit their corporate structure and self-insurance needs.

Matt Watson — Co-Founder

Matt has over 25 years’ experience in the financial services industry, including over 15 in captive insurance. Matt previously worked in corporate accounting and public accounting. Matt graduated from Clemson with a BS in Financial Management. Matt also has an MBA from Kennesaw State University. Matt is a licensed CPA in South Carolina.
Matt leads the account management team at CE. Matt leads the preparation of financials for all our clients including RRGs, pure captives, and cell captives. Matt is a past president of the SC Captive Insurance Association.

Find out if a captive makes sense for you

Get in Touch

A feasibility study isn’t a sales pitch — it’s the analysis that tells you, with real numbers, whether captive ownership clears the bar for your business. Let’s start there.

Captive insurance, built right from day one.