Broadcasting Captive Wisdom with James Swanke

Description

Welcome to RIMScast. Your host is Justin Smulison, Business Content Manager at RIMS, the Risk and Insurance Management Society.

In this episode, Justin interviews James Swanke, Lecturer in Risk and Insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business. He currently serves as Director of the Risk Management and Insurance MBA program. Justin and Jim talk about his 42 years of experience in Risk Consulting with Willis Towers Watson, and his specialties there, particularly with captives. They discuss the University of Wisconsin-Madison Risk Management and Insurance MBA program, what the students learn, and the competitions they have won in the last year, and they look forward to winning this year.

Also, Jim tells of disc jockeying in college, from Classic Rock to Polka.

Listen to learn about captive design, how to prepare for emerging trends, and who wrote the best music of the ’70s.

Key Takeaways:

[:01] About RIMS and RIMScast.

[:17] About this episode of RIMScast. This is our special International Podcast Day episode because it’s released on September 30th. We will be joined by Jim Swanke. He’s a lecturer in the Risk Management Program of the University of Wisconsin.

[:46] Jim started his career in broadcasting, and he still has the voice. We’ve got a lot to talk about today!

[:54] RIMS-CRMP Prep Workshops! The next RIMS CRMP Prep Workshops will be held on October 29th and 30th and led by John Button.

[1:06] The next RIMS-CRMP-FED Virtual Workshop will be held on November 11th and 12th and led by Joseph Mayo. Links to these courses can be found through the Certifications page of RIMS.org and through this episode’s show notes.

[1:23] RIMS Virtual Workshops! RIMS has launched a new course, “Intro to ERM for Senior Leaders.” It will be held again on November 4th and 5th and will be led by Elise Farnham.

[1:39] On November 11th and 12th, Chris Hansen will lead “Fundamentals of Insurance”. It features everything you’ve always wanted to know about insurance but were afraid to ask. Fear not; ask Chris Hansen! RIMS members always enjoy deep discounts on virtual workshops!

[1:58] The full schedule of virtual workshops can be found on the RIMS.org/education and RIMS.org/education/online-learning pages. A link is also in this episode’s notes.

[2:09] Several RIMS Webinars are being hosted this Fall. On October 9th, Global Risk Consultants returns to deliver “Natural Hazards: A Data-Driven Guide to Improving Resilience and Risk Financing Outcomes”.

[2:22] On October 16th, Zurich returns to deliver “Jury Dynamics: How Juries Shape Today's Legal Landscape”. On October 30th, Swiss Re will present “Parametric Insurance: Providing Financial Certainty in Uncertain Times”.

[2:39] On November 6th, HUB will present “Geopolitical Whiplash — Building Resilient Global Risk Programs in an Unstable World”. Register at RIMS.org/Webinars.

[2:51] We’re very excited that today is International Podcast Day! Before we celebrate, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge and mourn the passing of Todd Cochrane. Todd was a podcast pioneer.

[3:06] I’ve linked in this episode’s show notes to a wonderful obituary from Podnews®, about his career, starting with his time in the Navy up to launching his own podcast, and writing Podcasting: The Do It Yourself Guide, from Wiley Publishing in 2005.

[3:25] Over the last couple of months, I’ve had the pleasure of communicating with Todd over email for the Podcast Awards, and it was only last week that I saw the unfortunate news of his passing, which occurred suddenly on September 8th.

[3:30] Our condolences go out to his family, friends, and the greater podcasting industry.

[3:47] On with the show! This is our special International Podcast Day episode, and I am delighted to be joined by James Swanke, the Director of the Risk Management and Insurance MBA Program at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

[4:06] Jim spent four decades at WTW, specializing in financial and strategic planning issues, as well as captive insurance company design.

[4:18] Jim was recently quoted in a new professional report, available on the RIMS Risk Knowledge page, and sponsored by LineSlip Solutions, titled “The Future of Captive Insurance: Governance, Technology, and Performance Optimization.”

[4:32] Jim got his start at the University of Wisconsin in broadcasting. We’re going to talk about his career path and how being a disc jockey led him to where he is today, educating the next generation of risk professionals. Let’s get to it!

[4:50] Interview! Jim Swanke, welcome to RIMScast!

[5:38] When Jim was in high school, he competed in forensics, in extemporaneous speaking. He did very well. He did well at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and it got put in the newspaper. WLDY, in Ladysmith, Wisconsin, saw it in the newspaper and contacted him.

[6:03] They were looking for a radio jock to “spin vinyls,” do some DJing, and read sports and news. That job helped Jim get into the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

[6:21] Jim studied actuarial science and risk management. He went into the Bachelor’s program, the MBA program, and the graduate program in risk management, insurance, and corporate finance.

[6:40] Jim was hired by the Wyatt Company and did lots of feasibility studies. After 42 years at Willis Towers Watson, he retired. Now he teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

[6:57] Broadcasting set Jim on his path. He says that everything about what we do in the captive and risk management area is about communication. If you’re not communicating, listening, helping out, and building stuff, you’re not going to be a success.

[7:28] When Jim was a DJ at WLDY, they played different kinds of music. On Sundays, he played polka music. On Saturdays, it was country western, and Monday through Friday, it was rock music. Rock music is what he enjoys. At the top of every hour, he did the news and weather.

[8:13] Justin recalls his own career. He was just waiting for podcasting to be invented, then he was able to make it all work out.

[8:31] Jim worked with captives at Willis Towers Watson. He is quoted in a new LineSlip paper, “The Future of Captive Insurance: Governance, Technology, and Performance Optimization.” Justin saw his name there and thought it would be good to have him on RIMScast.

[8:53] Jim described captives as a lifeline during extreme market conditions, comparing today’s hard market to the turbulence of the 1980s. Jim tells what makes captives effective under hard conditions. Captives allow organizations to control their own destiny.

[9:20] When you’re in a hard market, having a captive allows you to take premiums that you normally pay to a commercial insurance carrier and put them into your captive insurance company. A captive is a subsidiary of the captive owner.

[9:41] Most of the Fortune 500 companies in the United States have a captive. It allows them to arbitrage whatever’s going on in the insurance marketplace. When we’re having a difficult market, they put more of their premiums into the captive and rely on the captive more.

[9:58] When the market softens, carriers may provide insurance at premiums that are lower than the expected losses. Organizations will buy commercial insurance all the time when the premiums are less than their projected losses.

[10:14] Depending on where it is in the market, a captive has a role in an organization’s risk management program.

[10:27] Jim says a lot of organizations have looked to captives since 2020. We were in the midst of the pandemic, with all kinds of economic hardship. The insurance industry was in despair, as well. A lot of insurance companies cut back on the limits they were willing to offer.

[10:49] Insurance companies put additional exclusions onto their insurance, so organizations had to rely on their own sophisticated ways of financing their losses. If they hadn’t set up a captive, they set up a captive. If they had a captive in the past, they re-engineered it to do more.

[11:15] They also used their captives to access the reinsurance marketplace. Reinsurance is insurance for insurance companies. A captive can be used as a platform to access reinsurers.

[11:37] Even in difficult markets, having reinsurers involved created more competition, provided more limits, and there was more flexibility in the coverage terms.

[11:48] That was when the pandemic was going on, which triggered the hardening of the market and the lack of availability of insurance. Organizations with captives relied on them and did more. Organizations without captives had captive feasibility studies done and formed captives.

[12:09] Jim says the CEO of a captive should be a senior person who will monitor what’s going on, fairly senior in the organization. It’s not a full-time position. It takes three or four hours a month, plus board meetings.

[12:46] A captive is required to have a captive manager, who is an accountant. They keep the books and interface for the captive with the regulator. The President or CEO of the captive relies on the captive manager to do a lot of the daily work.

[13:09] Jim says you need a senior person involved so people take the captive seriously. The senior person is going to be the driver in reducing the severity of loss through loss prevention and loss reduction. Having a senior person is so important to the success of the captive.

[13:40] There are lots of considerations when you’re looking to make changes to your captive. Changes could include adding emerging types of risks, like cyber risk. If you’re a hospital, a lot of medical malpractice captives have been hugely successful and have grown surplus.

[14:08] Healthcare institutions are passing on some of their capitated risk exposures into their captives because they’ve done quite well with their medical malpractice. These risks are not correlated with each other, so there is a diversification benefit.

[14:22] As you look to make these changes, you need to look at increasing risk assumptions, different attachment points on reinsurance, and changing your investment policy. You have lots of levers, and if you make changes, you need to analyze what the impact will be on your captive.

[14:52] Jim talks about leaning into technology. Before 9/11, we didn’t have the sophisticated software we’ve created in the last few years.

[15:06] To look at covering all the possibilities and changing your captives, from adding new coverages to reinsurance reattachment points, was a monumental amount of actuarial work to figure out how to optimize your captive.

[15:19] Recently developed software looks at all the possibilities in terms of changing your captive to optimize what you’re doing. 20 years ago, Jim would spend months doing the actuarial work, working with an investment bank and charging them heavy fees.

[15:39] Now, with new software, what took Jim months and months to do can be done in a matter of two to three days. The productivity today, in terms of optimizing your captive, is far greater than it was 20 years ago, because of the software that has been developed.

[15:55] Jim likes that the software looks at all the risks and how these risks interact with one another. Looking at risks in a captive holistically is very important because many of these risks are hardly correlated with one another.

[16:15] Looking at risks holistically, you can figure out the diversification benefit of having all of these risks within your captive, which has a major impact on the amount of economic capital that your captive will need to maintain. This software has been a game-changer.

[16:34] RIMS Events! On October 1st through the 3rd, the RIMS Western Regional Conference will be held in North San Jose at the Santa Clara Marriott. The agenda is live. It looks fantastic! Visit RIMSWesternRegional.com and register today!

[16:55] On November 17th and 18th, join us in Seattle, Washington, for the RIMS ERM Conference 2025. The agenda is live. Check out Episode 357 for Justin’s dialogue with ERM Conference Keynote Presenter Dan Chuparkoff on AI and the future of risk.

[17:14] Visit the Events page of RIMS.org to register.

[17:17] RISKWORLD 2026 will be in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from May 3rd through May 6th. RIMS members can now lock in the 2025 rate for a full conference pass to RISKWORLD 2026 when you register by September 30th!

[17:32] This also lets you enjoy earlier access to the RISKWORLD hotel block. Register by September 30th, and you will also be entered to win a $500 raffle! Do not miss out on this chance to plan and score some of these extra perks!

[17:46] The members-only registration link is on this episode’s show notes. If you are not yet a member, this is the time to join us! Visit RIMS.org/Membership and build your network with us here at RIMS!

[17:56] If you are listening to RIMScast on our broadcast day, that means today is September 30th. It is last call for registration at the Earlybird rate!

[18:08] In the spirit of it being September 30th, which is International Podcast Day, let’s return to our interview with Jim Swanke!

[18:22] Jim is the Director of the Risk Management and Insurance MBA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The curriculum includes technology, AI, and automation. In his classes, Jim is using the new software he discussed earlier.

[18:46] Jim taught a class the day before on the principles of risk management. He talked about how risks are interrelated with each other and how you need to analyze them holistically, figuring out how they are correlated, not in siloes.

[19:13] The holistic view will give you the best answer in terms of the economic capital that will be required to put into your captive. If you’re analyzing risks silo by silo for each risk, that will lead you to having more economic capital in your captive than you need.

[19:35] Jim has learned, in 42 years of consulting, that the CFOs in these organizations don’t want to trap cash in their captives. Teaching this software to this new generation of students, they will be able to step into the roles of captive managers that the industry will need.

[20:07] We’re at the tip of the iceberg with AI. We’re still learning in Academia what the power of AI is going to be. Jim foresees AI being very important in handling claims and in underwriting.

[20:30] AI will allow commercial insurance companies to have a better way of doing their pricing and making decisions on whether or not risks should be accepted. It will also be beneficial to captives.

[20:43] Jim thinks AI will advance the technology far ahead. We’re just beginning to touch on some of the advantages within the insurance industry and within captives.

[21:05] Jim started teaching in 2011. When University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Dan Anderson retired, Jim was chosen to teach a class on sustainability that was started by Professor Anderson. He has taught it since 2011.

[21:41] At the time, some students did not think anything was going on with climate change. A couple of students stood up in class and said all of this was just made up. It was a fantasy. [22:03] Today, when Jim goes into class, students are there a half-hour early and stay late. They are very connected and working together to figure out how to reduce CO2 emissions to slow down the heating of the planet and the extreme weather events that are coming more often.

[22:24] The class has evolved over the years, and the students are more engaged than they ever have been.

[22:33] The students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison were the winners of the Spencer-RIMS Risk Management Challenge at RISKWORLD 2025 in Chicago. Jim knows all of those students and had a couple of them in his class yesterday.

[23:04] The students won with the Huntington, West Virginia case study, a six-month project. Huntington is on the Ohio River, and with extreme weather events, flooding has become a big issue in that community. They competed with students around the world to solve the issue.

[23:49] Each school’s team came up with things that could be done and conducted an analysis on what they thought was the best way of handling it. The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s team focused on resiliency with levees and dikes to hold back the flooding.

[24:27] The four Wisconsin students presented their paper and won, out of 61 schools competing. The University of Wisconsin-Madison received $10K. The second-place university, DePaul, received $7.5K, and the third-place school, IIRM Hyderabad (past year winner), got $5K.

[25:04] The University of Wisconsin-Madison team entered two other contests last year and won them both. The CICA Captive competition involved case studies around Kaneka captives. It required an essay and a PowerPoint deck.

[25:52] The MBA students entered the A.M. Best competition for insurance solutions to a global issue. The students used a combination of parametric and indemnity triggers to provide insurance to the disadvantaged in the Caribbean and Latin America.

[26:23] If there was hurricane damage, it would trigger a parametric to allow an amount of money to be paid immediately to these disadvantaged families. Then there would be the indemnity insurance that would look at the actual losses and true them up to the loss amount.

[26:49] It involved the combination of parametrics and conventional indemnity insurance, which was noteworthy and probably pushed the team over the top.

[27:11] The professor who was the advisor in the Spencer Challenge is Carl Barlett. Carl is an attorney by training, and he has the energy to work with bachelor’s students. He’s graduated hundreds of people out of his program over the last four or five years.

[27:59] The University has Career Fairs where 60 or 70 companies will come to meet with students. That’s a credit to Carl. Not a lot of companies will come to a university to meet with students. Because of the program he put together, lots of organizations want to hire students.

[28:21] The University of Wisconsin-Madison business school is typically ranked number 1.

[28:31] A Final Break! The Spencer Educational Foundation’s goal to help build a talent pipeline of risk management and insurance professionals is achieved, in part, by its collaboration with risk management and insurance educators across the U.S. and Canada.

[28:50] Since 1999, Spencer has awarded over $2.9 million to create more than 570 Risk Management Internships. The Internship Grants application process is now open through October 15th, 2025.

[29:06] To be eligible, risk managers must be based in the U.S., Canada, or Bermuda. A link to the Internship Grants page is in this episode’s show notes. You can always visit SpencerEd.org, as well.

[29:19] Let’s Get Back to Our Interview with Jim Swanke of the University of Wisconsin-Madison!

[29:46] Jim tells his students that we don’t know today what the emerging risks are going to be. What we need to do is design our risk management program and keep our eyes and ears open to what is going to happen next.

[30:04] Jim cites The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It gets into what we need to do as people of risk management and societies to try to identify the emerging risks that will impact us going forward.

[30:21] In risk management, we look at the past to try to project what’s going to happen in the future. We were caught by the pandemic. Very little business interruption insurance was offered. If we had been forward-thinking, we would have thought about coverages for the emerging risks.

[31:19] An emerging risk after 9/11 was that insurance companies put exclusions on their insurance policies, excluding terrorism. The Federal Government passed the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) and offered it as a backstop to insurance companies.

[31:55] Anybody with a captive could access that reinsurance through the U.S. Treasury, using their captive insurance company.

[32:23] Jim sees more employee benefits going into captives. The advantages you have in the P&C area are also in place for employee benefits. Organizations with large workers’ compensation self-insurance programs are putting excess workers’ compensation into captives.

[32:57] Jim says you need to be nimble and on your toes. Emerging risks are going to come out over the next 10 to 15 or 20 years. Keep your eyes and ears open so when they emerge, you can deal with them to reduce the frequency and severity of loss and see how to finance them.

[33:19] Jim highly recommends reading The Black Swan. It’s a good way to begin to think about how you should think about emerging risks.

[33:42] Jim says school is going really well. One thing he noticed this year is the diverse nature of his students. There are more disciplines within the risk management area that people are interested in.

[33:56] In class recently, Jim had a group that was in the investment banking area, a group that was in HR, and a couple of students from China. There was a broad diversity in the class.

[34:16] It enriches the conversation to have people coming from different places with different backgrounds and different educational experiences. It shows the power of having diversity in the classroom. It’s exciting.

[34:32] The class will write papers on Enterprise Risk Management and talk about captives, and more. They’ll compete in the CICA Captive Competition again, to maintain their number one rating there! They’re off to a great start! It’s nice to see students so highly energized!

[34:53] Jim says the future is bright with the students graduating from the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

[35:22] Justin and others have liked Jim’s broadcasting voice. Jim thanks Justin for commenting on it.

[35:55] Jim’s time as a DJ was 50 years ago. He recalls two or three instances of hot mikes, when some of the FCC’s seven deadly words may have been spoken. He says nobody wants that, but it was a real learning experience.

[36:29] Jim recalls when the studio tower was hit by lightning. Jim was alone in the radio station when it happened. Lightning bolts were flying around the building after the tower got hit. The station went off the air, and Jim had to figure out a way to put it back on the air.

[36:58] Jim highly recommends to young people, if you get an opportunity to get involved with radio or TV, give it a shot, because it’s a lot of fun! Justin ties it to podcasting and video blogging.

[37:42] Jim likes all the music of 1976 and didn’t have a favorite album. He likes Deep Purple and Bob Seger. He says there’s no better songwriter than Bob Seger. There was a diversity of good music going out at that time. It was a wonderful time to be working in a radio station.

[38:47] Justin is a father of two young people under 12 who like to listen to classic rock. “Dancing in the Moonlight,” by King Harvest, is a greatest hit in the family. They love Van Morrison.

[39:56] On the subject of podcasting, Jim thinks there is an opportunity to develop content that helps the everyday American with their personal insurances, like homeowners, auto, health, life, and how they buy their insurances.

[40:45] In class recently, the MBA students, the brightest and best, designing plans for New York investment banks and worldwide financial institutions, told Jim that they had questions about what to buy in auto policies and homeowners policies.

[41:07] Jim states that an insurance podcast for the everyday American is something the industry needs to be doing. Justin suggests that members of the global RIMScast audience could pick up the baton and get to work!

[41:27] Maybe it becomes part of the coursework for a class like Jim’s. It could be part of a challenge, like the Spencer-RIMS Risk Management Challenge.

[41:48] Jim says being able to talk about this with graduate students gives them some familiarity with what risk is, in terms of the instability of results. They can relate to it because they need to buy an auto policy or a homeowners policy.

[42:03] While these coverages don’t match up perfectly with what’s going on in the commercial insurance marketplace, learning about them gives students a sense of what insurance is about, what risk management is about, and how to reduce the frequency and severity of losses.

[42:22] Jim, it has been such a pleasure to speak with you and to pick your brain on risk management education, broadcasting, and music! Thank you so much for joining us here on RIMScast!

[42:33] Good luck to you and your students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as you look to the 2026 competitions. I can only imagine they’re going to do great things!

[42:58] Special thanks again to Jim Swanke for joining us here on RIMScast! For more information, check out the links in this episode’s show notes.

[43:06] Remember to check out “The Future of Captive Insurance: Governance, Technology, and Performance Optimization”, a Professional Report sponsored by LineSlip. It is available through the Risk Knowledge Page of RIMS.org. That link is also in this episode’s show notes.

[43:22] The paper features a lot of Jim’s fascinating perspective and insights on captives.

[43:28] Plug Time! You can sponsor a RIMScast episode for this, our weekly show, or a dedicated episode. Links to sponsored episodes are in the show notes.

[43:56] RIMScast has a global audience of risk and insurance professionals, legal professionals, students, business leaders, C-Suite executives, and more. Let’s collaborate and help you reach them! Contact pd@rims.org for more information.

[44:14] Become a RIMS member and get access to the tools, thought leadership, and network you need to succeed. Visit RIMS.org/membership or email membershipdept@RIMS.org for more information.

[44:33] Risk Knowledge is the RIMS searchable content library that provides relevant information for today’s risk professionals. Materials include RIMS executive reports, survey findings, contributed articles, industry research, benchmarking data, and more.

[44:48] For the best reporting on the profession of risk management, read Risk Management Magazine at RMMagazine.com. It is written and published by the best minds in risk management.

[45:02] Justin Smulison is the Business Content Manager at RIMS. Please remember to subscribe to RIMScast on your favorite podcasting app. You can email us at Content@RIMS.org.

[45:15] Practice good risk management, stay safe, and thank you again for your continuous support!

Links:

RIMS ERM Conference 2025 — Nov. 17‒18

Spencer Internship Program — Registration Open Through Oct. 15.

RIMS Western Regional — Oct 1‒3 | Bay Area, California | Registration open!

RISKWORLD 2026 — Members-only early registration through Sept 30! — Last Call!

RIMS-Certified Risk Management Professional (RIMS-CRMP)

The Strategic and Enterprise Risk Center

RIMS-CRO Certificate in Advanced Enterprise Risk Management — Featuring Instructor James Lam! Next bi-weekly course begins Oct 9.

RIMS Diversity Equity Inclusion Council

RISK PAC | RIMS Advocacy | RIMS Legislative Summit SAVE THE DATE — March 18‒19, 2026

RIMS Risk Management magazine | Contribute