About Expat Savvy — the practice and the people
This page will not tell you we are passionate about insurance. It tells you who reads your cover, how we are paid for reading it, and why both are written down where you can check them.
Free · 45 minutes · With Robert or Nicole
Not ready to book? Read how the practice works
The practice
From Zürich, since 2017 — and built on one refusal.
Expat Savvy began as a Swiss practice — expat-savvy.ch — advising people arriving into one of the world's most particular insurance systems. The global practice grew out of a pattern we kept seeing: the same clients moving on, to Lisbon and Dubai and Singapore, carrying cover shaped for a country they no longer lived in.
The refusal that shapes everything else: we do not sell you a policy in the conversation. The product is a written review — what you hold, what it does, what we would change and why — and sometimes the report says keep what you have. An insurer cannot publish that sentence. We can, because we are not one.
The founder
Built twice, and the second time deliberately.
Benjamin Amos Wagner started in Swiss insurance the ordinary way and built expatcare.ch before any of this existed. It taught him the thing the rest of the practice is built on: that the internationals arriving in Switzerland were not badly served because the products were bad, but because nobody was reading them on their behalf. The advice in the market was attached to a sale.
He founded Expat Savvy in Zürich in 2017 to do the other thing — a boutique consultancy whose product is a written review rather than a policy. It grew into a practice that relocation companies and corporate HR teams refer their people to, which is the only measure of trust in this business that means anything: the firms who move people for a living have no reason to send them anywhere except somewhere that will not embarrass them.
He is also the practice's builder in the literal sense — a self-taught developer who ships its sites and systems himself — and its proof of persona: he left Switzerland in 2020 and has run everything remotely since, from the Emirates, Thailand, Vietnam, Bali, Georgia and Turkey among others. Where he is this week is public, at benjaminwagner.ch/whereami. A practice for people living between countries, run by someone who actually does.
Expat Savvy remains the Swiss practice at expat-savvy.ch. This site is the same discipline applied to the harder problem — people who are not arriving in one country but living between several, where no national system is going to catch them and the policy has to do the whole job.
Benjamin does not sell insurance. He runs the practice, writes most of what is published here, and takes the conversations that do not fit anyone's speciality.
How cover is placed
Whose licences we work under.
Expat Savvy is an advisory practice. We do not hold insurance licences of our own, and rather than let you assume otherwise, here is the actual structure: international cover is placed through SIP Medical Family Office, and we work under their licences and their contracts with insurers.
SIP describe themselves as independent consultants in health management and international medical insurance, established in Switzerland since 1997, with group companies licensed as medical insurance intermediaries for the EU/EEA and the United Kingdom. Those are their words, from their own site, and they are the words this arrangement rests on.
Working under a principal's licences is ordinary in this industry and rarely admitted. We put it on the page because the alternative — letting you assume we hold our own paper — is exactly the kind of small omission the rest of this site exists to argue against.
The entities
- SIP Switzerland AG — Am Stadtrand 11, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland
- SIP Europe AG — Im Alten Riet 156, 9494 Schaan, Liechtenstein
- SIP MFO Ltd — 98 Theobalds Road, London WC1X 8WB, United Kingdom
- SIP Medical Family Office AG — Baarermattstrasse 10, 6340 Baar/Zug, Switzerland
Check it rather than take our word
- FINMA intermediary register — Switzerland
- FMA register — Liechtenstein, SIP Europe AG licence 10116
- FCA register — United Kingdom
Entity names, addresses and the licensing description are read from sip.ch, checked 2026-08-06. We publish no registration number of our own because we hold none — printing one would imply an authorisation this practice does not have.
The team
The people who'll actually review your situation.
Specialists by topic, not a rota. You'll know who you're speaking to before you book, and you'll speak to the same person again next year.
Robert Kolar
Health insurance
Twenty-plus years spent on the distance between what a health policy promises and what it pays when a claim actually lands. German and English. He has been the foreigner working out somebody else's health system from the outside, which is its own kind of qualification.
Book with Robert
Nicole Bohne
Life · Protection · Planning
Spent her career inside Basler Versicherung and Zurich Insurance before crossing to this side of the table. Nicole reads a life-cover decision against the whole household — who depends on whom, what already exists, and whether the answer is a policy at all.
Book with Nicole
Hans Steiner
Pension · Tax · Cross-border
Financial Planner IAF, Federal Diploma of Higher Education. German, English and French. Hans takes the cases where a move collides with a pension, with two tax systems, or with both at once.
Book with HansWhy you can trust us
Independent by structure, not by adjective.
Comparison sites are paid by the insurers they list. Captive agents represent one carrier. Neither of those is independent, however the homepage words it.
Here is our structure, plainly. International cover is placed through SIP Medical Family Office — independent consultants in health management and international medical insurance, established in Switzerland since 1997, whose group companies are licensed as medical insurance intermediaries for the EU/EEA and the United Kingdom. We hold no insurance licences of our own, and that arrangement covers Switzerland, European Union, United Kingdom.
Working under a principal's licences is ordinary in this industry and rarely admitted. We say it in the first paragraph because the alternative — letting you assume we hold our own paper — is the kind of small omission this page exists to argue against. We hold no exclusive arrangement with any insurer, and no insurer owns any part of this business.
Here's the mechanism, because "independent" is easy to write and hard to check. International cover is placed on a courtage basis: the insurer pays a brokerage fee when a policy is placed. It is a percentage of the premium, which means we have no reason to sell you more cover than you need and no reason to steer you towards the most expensive plan. What we do have a reason to do is place you well — because we review your cover with you every year, for as long as you're our client, and a policy that turns out to be wrong is our problem too.
Check it rather than take our word for it. The entries are SIP's, not ours — we hold no licence of our own to look up: FINMA intermediary register — Switzerland · FMA register — Liechtenstein, SIP Europe AG licence 10116 · FCA register — United Kingdom. The full arrangement is set out on our about page.
Ready for a calm conversation about cover?
A first review is free — 45 minutes, in English, wherever in the world you happen to be. We'll listen first. Then you'll hear exactly what we would arrange if the situation were ours. What you do with that is yours to decide.
Book a reviewOr write to hello@expatsavvy.com — we reply within the working day.