☰A rent-a-captive is an arrangement where your business uses someone else's licensed captive instead of forming its own. The facility owner provides the insurance company, the license, and the capital; your program operates inside it, typically with collateral posted to protect the facility, and you receive underwriting results attributable to your own risk.
The appeal is speed and zero formation burden: no entity to stand up, no capital to commit, no company to govern. The limits mirror the appeal. You do not own the insurer, surplus builds inside someone else's company on negotiated terms, and the strategic options ownership creates, dividends, new lines, insuring affiliated parties, mostly are not yours to take. Rent-a-captives suit programs testing the waters or too small to justify a structure of their own; the modern cell captive has absorbed much of this territory with cleaner legal separation.