North Carolina Captive Conference Canceled Due to COVID-19 Pandemic

Citing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the North Carolina Captive Insurance Association (NCCIA) has canceled its upcoming annual conference.

The conference, originally scheduled for May, was earlier rescheduled to August 30–September 2, 2020, at the Washington Duke Inn in Durham, North Carolina.

However, on July 1, 2020, the NCCIA's board of directors announced that they had canceled the conference. The NCCIA had hoped that the earlier delay would have given healthcare officials enough time to develop treatments or a vaccine for COVID-19.

"Unfortunately, that has not proved to be the case," the NCCIA said in a news release.

"The board really wanted for this conference to happen or we would not have gone through the effort to reschedule from the original date. To our disappointment, the dominos did not fall in the right direction to allow us to safely conduct the conference," NCCIA Chairman Lea Riddle said in the news release.

The NCCIA now plans to go ahead and plan for its next annual conference, which will be May 2–4, 2021, also at the Washington Duke Inn.

"While the committee is disappointed that we could not go forward we will immediately turn our attention toward planning for the 2021 meeting," David Littlehale, chair of the NCCIA's Conference Planning Committee, said in the news release.

North Carolina joins the growing number of domiciles whose captive associations have either decided to offer their annual conferences online or delayed or canceled their annual events due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Vermont Captive Insurance Association, for example, will offer its annual conference as an online virtual event August 11–13, 2020. Earlier, the Captive Insurance Council of the District of Columbia (CIC-DC) canceled its annual conference that had been scheduled for May 5–7, 2020, in Washington, DC. The CIC-DC intends to reschedule the conference for later this year.

With 235 captives at the end of 2019, North Carolina is one of the largest US captive insurance domiciles. Those captives last year generated $928 million in gross written premiums.