Data Accessibility and AI Continue to Shape Captive Insurance Operations

Editor's Note: The following Q&A-style feature includes perspectives from Christina Card Zbar, founder and CEO of Piko Labs AI, regarding the evolving role of data management and artificial intelligence in the captive insurance industry.

Data continues to play an increasingly important role in captive insurance operations, influencing reporting, benchmarking, pricing, and strategic decision-making. As captive managers work with growing volumes of information across multiple systems and document types, technology providers are introducing new tools aimed at improving efficiency and accessibility.

One company focused on this area is Piko Labs AI, a data platform developed specifically for the captive insurance sector. According to Christina Card Zbar, founder and CEO of Piko Labs AI, the platform was designed to address operational inefficiencies associated with fragmented data management processes.

"Captive management firms tell us they spend roughly half their time on clerical work—sorting through files across inconsistent formats to find answers or moving data between documents for reporting," said Ms. Card Zbar. "Much of it is handled manually or outsourced, and as firms grow, balancing scale with profitability becomes harder.

"Our platform removes that bottleneck. Beyond efficiency, a structured and unified view of each entity gives captives a sharper negotiating position when placing reinsurance."

According to Ms. Card Zbar, the platform ingests data related to captive entities across multiple file types and formats, extracting financial and transactional records and organizing them into a centralized structure.

"Today, this information is scattered across spreadsheets, PDFs, email threads, and internal systems, and captive management firms carry the workload of making sense of it," said Ms. Card Zbar. "The underlying integrity of captive risk has always been strong; the infrastructure around it has made that integrity hard to showcase. Our platform changes that. Lower workload, less manual re-keying and cross-referencing, stronger traceability of inputs, and cleaner data sharing between managers, service providers, and brokers."

AI and Data Management Trends

Ms. Card Zbar said that while data has long been central to reporting, benchmarking, and pricing within insurance and reinsurance operations, the supporting technology layer continues to evolve. In particular, she noted that artificial intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly being used to extract information from unstructured documents and organize it more efficiently.

However, she emphasized that increased use of AI also raises expectations around data governance, oversight, and security. Buyers evaluating AI platforms, she said, should understand where data is hosted, how it is protected, and whether it is being used to train broader models.

"AI is powerful when it's built carefully and risky when it isn't," said Ms. Card Zbar. "Our view at Piko is that captive data is too specific and too sensitive for general-purpose models running unsupervised. We narrow our models to defined tasks, keeping captive insurance experts in the review loop on outputs.

"The industry doesn't need AI that replaces judgment—it needs AI that gets the slow, manual work out of the way so that staff can spend their time on the decisions that leverage their unique expertise."

Ms. Card Zbar identified data inconsistency and fragmentation as major operational challenges facing captive managers. She noted that firms often work across multiple service providers and legacy systems, resulting in information being dispersed across PDFs, email threads, spreadsheets, and other documents.

"The opportunity is to turn that into a structured, unified view at the entity level," said Ms. Card Zbar. "Once you have that, the downstream wins follow: faster and more credible reinsurance placement, sharper benchmarking against peers, real-time visibility for boards and [chief financial officers], and the ability to model program design changes and risk management solutions in hours rather than weeks. This is the gap Piko was built to close—a seamless experience with no learning curve that integrates into the tools captive management firms already use."

Looking ahead, Ms. Card Zbar said broader access to structured data may influence how captive insurers, managers, and reinsurance partners evaluate performance and make operational decisions.

"Data has always been central to insurance and reinsurance—good underwriting can't exist without it," said Ms. Card Zbar. "What's changing is access. In an industry where data has historically sat in silos, greater transparency at the entity level will widen reinsurance capacity, sharpen pricing, and open the door to applications that simply weren't practical before: faster renewals, more granular benchmarking, and richer feedback loops between captives and their reinsurance partners."