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A Year In Review

It has been just over one year since SPARTA commenced formal marketing efforts at the 2007 Vermont Captive Conference.  Since that time, we have seen a steady flow of submission activity and worked through the broad range of opportunities to average one  program bound per month. The underwriting portfolio as presently constituted reflects our objective, in a challenging market, to work with premier production sources in the segments, lines and classes of business contemplated in our plan. The infrastructure required to support the business has performed beautifully, and we are well on our way to making it even more adaptable and agile. We believe our successes validates SPARTA’s value proposition: to provide the unbundled program marketplace with expertise, breadth of product offering, strong capital and leading technology, all to the benefit of our customers.

In 2009, we expect to build upon a great foundation and further penetrate those areas of the market, such as group, franchise and association captives, where we think we offer unique expertise. Thank you for your support and contribution to our Collective Purpose.

Best regards,

Geo Estes, Chairman & CEO 
and Kevin Costello, President & COO

Feedback From the Market

Starting a new insurance company is an exciting experience. Making a business plan operational is exceptionally challenging, especially in a soft insurance market and volatile macroeconomic environment. Anyone who starts a company has confidence in the philosophical and financial underpinnings of their plan. They are also keenly aware that the ultimate proof of concept is validation in the marketplace. In looking back on the past year in which we created SPARTA Insurance (Specialty Program and Risk Transfer Alternatives) and established a presence in the unbundled captive programme marketplace, four factors have dominated the positive reception and transaction of business – Expertise, Commitment, Financial Strength and Technology.

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By: Kevin Costello, President & COO
SPARTA Insurance Company

(This article appeared in Captive Review, Cayman Conference edition in December 2008)
 


SPARTA Financial Strength

The storm buffeting the financial world has debunked many notions and much of the conventional wisdom about what constitutes financial strength. Swift and catastrophic failures, government bailouts and plummeting stock prices of household-name financial services giants has proven that bigger isn’t always better, or stronger, or more sophisticated, or more prudent.

In fact, the notion that mega-companies with super-diversification of products will be financially stable through all business cycles has been rendered suspect. And the complex diversification strategy that led to company forays into products and investments whose complexity and potential downside they did not understand or comprehend, was the road to financial impairment and ruin. Now we know that no company is “too big to fail.”

Throughout the crisis we have had submissions from producers seeking shelter from the storm surrounding well known insurance companies whose balance sheets have been affected. In addition, we have ongoing opportunities from producers seeking to diversify their portfolio of carriers away from large companies whose financials are not sufficiently transparent to accurately assess their relative strength. SPARTA has been successful, in part, because it has offered producers a more transparent and complete view of “financial strength” in these troubled times.

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By: Dawne Ware, Chief Financial Officer,
SPARTA Insurance Company

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