Introduction
Captive premiums have crossed roughly $79 billion globally, so why are so many captive programs still managed in Excel and email? In this episode, Joshua Hollander talks with Illia Pinchuk, CEO and founder of DICEUS, about where manual workflows leak value in a captive program and what it takes to move a captive manager off spreadsheets. Listeners will hear how feature-based pricing changes the cost math for captives, why data onboarding is the real adoption barrier, and where AI actually helps today.
Guest Bio
Illia Pinchuk founded DICEUS in 2011 and has led the company for fourteen years, evolving from professional services for insurers, brokers, MGAs, and TPAs into ready-made products. DICEUS now offers 22 products across business lines, with captive insurance among its strongest segments, anchored by a captive management platform and a captive owner portal. Pinchuk trained as an engineer in mechatronics and robotics and has completed executive coursework through Harvard Business School Online.
Key Topics
-A young market with about 7,000 captives - Roughly half of the world's registered captives sit in the US, with Bermuda, Cayman, and a developing UK regime behind it, and business processes remain largely unstandardized.
-Why captive managers can't scale on spreadsheets - The consultant headcount a captive manager needs grows roughly in proportion to the captives it onboards, which turns a service business into a people business.
-Where value leaks in a manual captive - A/B fund premium allocation, loss runs arriving from 10 to 20 different TPAs in incompatible spreadsheets, investment reconciliation, and end-of-period compliance workbooks.
-Feature-based pricing, not module-based - Clients pay only for the specific features they use, which matters in a segment where the entire case for a captive is cost.
-The measurable payoff - Clients report the platform saves the work of one to one and a half business analysts or captive consultants, and policy issuance that once consumed a dedicated person compresses to about a week and a half.
-Key-person risk in Excel - When the one employee who knows the spreadsheets leaves, the knowledge leaves with them; built-in onboarding and AI guidance get a replacement productive in one to two weeks.
-AI needs clean data first - DICEUS runs the full extract, transform, load process itself, cleaning years of unstructured spreadsheet data before the platform's AI features can pay off.
Notable Quotes
"They cannot grow without adding new people. So it becomes more people business than just a service business."
"At the end of the month you're getting twenty completely different spreadsheets, and you somehow should make a magic work in order to calculate the loss ratio."
"Our system can save, for a traditional captive manager organization, at least one or one and a half consultants. But in reality, I think it's even more."
"They should pass through the digital onboarding step, just filling in all the details, and it should be automatically enrolled. Like, for example, if you want to open a bank account. That will be a big game changer."
Resources
Guest:
DICEUS: https://diceus.com/
Illia Pinchuk on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/illiapinchuk/
Host & Organization:
Joshua R. Hollander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
Horton International (USA): https://www.horton-usa.com/
Insurtech Leadership Podcast (LinkedIn Showcase): https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/insurtech-leadership-show
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