Allianz Commercial has appointed Stephen Morton (pictured) as its new global head of captive fronting and captive solutions, effective March 1, 2027, the insurer announced Tuesday.
Morton will be based in Paris and report to Lara Martiner, global head of Alternative Risk Transfer (ART) at Allianz Commercial. He succeeds Brian McNamara, who is retiring at the end of September after roughly seven years in the role. McNamara joined Allianz in December 2019 as head of global fronting for North America before being named head of AGCS Captive Solutions in July 2022.
In his new role, Morton will oversee a portfolio the insurer said has "strongly grown over the past 15 years," delivered through Allianz Group's international licensing network. That range spans classic captive fronting for single-line coverage to multi-year, multi-line structures that combine cross-border products from other Allianz business units, the company said.
Morton has more than 30 years of experience in insurance, mostly in the multinational and captive space, according to Allianz.
He joins from AIG, where he most recently served as global chief underwriting officer for fronting and multinational business. Before that post, Morton held other senior AIG roles, including head of complex multinational solutions, along with regional multinational and captive leadership positions based in Bermuda, London and Paris.
Martiner said: "Our captive solutions team has gone from strength to strength in recent years." She added that Allianz aims "to continue to expand our services for clients and brokers across our network," and thanked McNamara "for his outstanding steering of this important part of our business over the last seven years."
Martiner tied the appointment to broader momentum in the captive sector, saying the market now totals $60 billion in premiums across around 6,000 captives globally.
Independent industry data points to even larger figures. A Swiss Re Institute sigma report published in September 2025 estimated that captives represent an estimated $60 billion to $80 billion in global premiums, allowing corporations to self-insure frequent losses while using reinsurance for larger exposures.
Separately, Marsh's annual benchmarking report found that Marsh-managed captives alone wrote $79.1 billion in gross written premium in 2025, with Fortune 500 companies recording premium growth of 9% even as Marsh's Global Insurance Market Index recorded a 4% decline in commercial pricing that year. Marsh also recorded 118 new captive formations in 2025, up from 92 the previous year.
The growth has not been confined to traditional lines. According to Marsh, property and liability remained the most common starting points for newly formed captives in 2025, followed by workers' compensation, while cyber liability ranked fourth among lines written by new entities, with a 22% increase in the number of captives writing cyber over the past two years.
Separate 2026 outlooks from Zurich and WTW describe captives increasingly being used as strategic tools rather than reactive ones, with WTW noting that new captive formations in the first half of 2025 remained strong, with Vermont reporting new formations as of August 2025 already exceeding the total number of new captive formations in 2024.
