About Us

Palmetto Consulting of Columbia, LLC (“Palmetto”) was founded in 1998 by John A. Weitzel, an insurance executive whose career spanned nearly 50 years working for, or consulting with, insurance companies, primarily as a Chief Financial Officer.

Since 2003, Palmetto’s services have been focused almost exclusively on the captive insurance industry. Clients have included prospective and established captive insurance companies and captive managers. Palmetto fills a void in the marketplace based on the premise that many captive managers provide adequate to excellent service fulfilling the Controllership function for captive insurers. Their accountabilities include general ledger maintenance, cash receipt and disbursement operations, financial statement presentation, and regulatory reporting.

Relatively few captive managers provide the full menu of Chief Financial Officer functions, including Treasury (bank account structures), Investment monitoring, Tax planning, Budget analysis, Reinsurance negotiations, Rating agency relationships, and Internal audit. While supporting the fundamental score-keeping needs of its clients, Palmetto specializes in delivering a proactive approach to the value-added service that progresses a client from compliance to best practices.

Palmetto assists our clients in assembling teams of top-notch insurance management, underwriting, claims, investment management, actuary, audit, and legal experts during the formation stage of a new captive. Palmetto is uniquely equipped to serve as a client’s captive manager or guide a selected captive manager to assure that the team will select appropriate domiciles, develop and document business plans, project financial results, and walk a captive application to regulators from submission to approval. Long term relationships with regulators based on mutual respect facilitate this process. Once a client is fully operational, we act as a team captain to assure that all team members are achieving their individual benchmarks and properly contributing toward the collective success of the client.

In 2015, Palmetto admitted Matthew A. Holycross, CPA to membership in order to accommodate continued growth.  Matthew’s background in both traditional Property & Casualty carrier management, as well as his experience in the Alternative Risk/Captive market, brought new perspectives and assets to Palmetto’s clients.  In 2018, in an effort to add further resources focused on regulatory compliance related issues for prospective clients, Palmetto engaged a Director of Compliance.  In 2020, Michael D. Hunter, CPA joined Palmetto.  Michael has significant experience as both an external audit manager for a national accounting firm, and the CFO of multiple AM-Best Rated Property and Casualty insurers.

In 2020 and beyond, Palmetto remains uniquely focused on the intersection of the captive insurance and the traditional insurance marketplace; primarily on those opportunities where our backgrounds can add the most value to our clients and partners.