The Cayman Island National Insurance Company’s latest report reveals how the state-backed insurer’s ambitious expansion plan is progressing.
In 2022, then Deputy Premier and Finance Minister Chris Saunders announced that CINICO would undergo a radical transformation. The government gave CINICO a $5.35 million equity injection to fund expanding its health insurance coverage to more people and add property and casualty (P&C) business lines.
Now, the CINICO 2025 Annual Report, which was brought before Parliament on 24 June, provides an update on how much of that plan has been achieved.
In 2022, $5 million of the government equity injection was earmarked for developing CINICO’s property and casualty business, with the first home and motor products launched in 2024.
In 2025, P&C generated almost $2 million in premium income. From that, it recognised $1.28 million as insurance revenue for 2025, up from $161,418 in 2024. But although P&C revenues are growing quickly, it’s still not generating profit. CINICO expects it to be profitable by 2028.
“We achieved the growth that we anticipated in the Homeowners policies with very little claims,” said CINICO CEO Michael Gale. “The Motor income was a little less than anticipated, but this was offset by the better than projected claims experience.”
Gayle is particularly proud of CINICO’s parametric cover, which is index-based insurance that covers the likelihood of a loss-causing event, such as a hurricane or earthquake. Unlike conventional insurance, which requires assessors to evaluate the cost of damage to ascertain how much the insurance company should pay to the policyholder, parametric insurance automatically pays out if certain parameters – for example, meteorological conditions – are met.
“We have been heavily promoting our Parametric cover and this feature which is included in our Homeowners policy appears to be the only one of its kind in the world, at the time of its introduction,” said Gayle.
The report reveals that 193 policyholders in Cayman had signed up to CINICO’s home insurance by December 2025, up from 65 in December 2024.
CINICO has also been advertising its motor insurance and the report revealed that policyholder numbers are rising, albeit from a small base. There were 543 auto policyholders in December 2025, up from 247 in December 2024.
Health growth despite delayed plans
Only $350,000 of the 2022 capital injection went to health insurance. That’s because CINICO had already an existing book of health insurance products, plus a customer base of thousands of civil servants, seafarers and veterans, indigents and members of the Standard Health Insurance Contract (SHIC) plan.
In 2023, CINICO CFO Frank Gallippi told the government’s Finance Committee that CINICO would first expand its health insurance offerings beyond the current SHIC and then roll out a new plan for retirees.
That didn’t happen. “The budgeted introduction of a new Health product, which did not occur for reasons out of our control”, the report noted.
But CINICO still has ambitious health plans.
“The first venture into this arena will be the launch of a low-cost entry level open-market product,” according to the report. “We plan to use this product as a new base product upon which we can seek to develop an open-market retiree product within the next couple of years.”
Gayle told the Compass on 9 July that the first health product should be launched before the end of 2026.
Despite the delayed launch of these new products, CINICO’s health business saw growth. Health membership stood at 19,462 in December 2025, up from 18,434 in December 2024. Average covered lives also rose to18,847, up from 18,281 in 2024. The growth in customers, coupled with price increases for some products, pushed insurance revenue to $166.7 million.
But profit in CINICO’s health segment was battered by huge medical cases, with 13 cases costing more than US$600,000. That meant the profit came in at just $380,715 in 2025, down from $4.57 million the previous year.
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