About Expat Savvy — the practice and the people
Meet the people who review your cover, see the work a review produces, and read how we are paid. Our role and the placement relationship with SIP are set out below, with the entities and register links identified.
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 has advised international residents on insurance from Zürich since 2017. Two sites, one practice: expat-savvy.ch covers Switzerland — arriving, the three-month deadline, the cantonal particulars — and expatsavvy.com covers international cover for people moving anywhere else.
The international half 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 next review needs to consider local healthcare rights, private cover and international needs together, because those arrangements change from one move to the next.
Worth stating plainly, because the arithmetic runs the other way to how it looks: the practice is not new. This site is. What is behind it has been reading contracts in Zürich since 2017 — which is where the advisers, the reviews and the case notes on this site all come from.
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. The report explains the reasons and the questions still to resolve. You can read a fictional example before booking.
What can be checked
2,500+ households advised from Zürich since 2017
The Swiss practice's number, and stated as theirs rather than quietly adopted here. It is the same count expat-savvy.ch publishes, and this site is the same practice.
A registration you can look up
Cover is placed through SIP. The Swiss entity, SIP Switzerland AG, is registered with FINMA as a non-tied insurance intermediary under F01111824, and the register entry opens in one click. It is SIP's entry, not ours — we hold no licence of our own, and print no number that isn't checkable.
5 advisers, named
Robert Kolar, Nicole Bohne, Virginie Josten, Davide Nezel and Chantal Leprêtre — each with a page saying what they work on and which languages they work in. 3 of them are colleagues at SIP Medical Family Office, whose licences this practice's international cover is placed under. You book a person, not a queue.
Courtage, published rather than mentioned
The insurer pays a courtage when a policy is placed — a percentage of the premium — and the mechanism is written out in full rather than asserted in one adjective. How we work sets out the whole arrangement.
4.8 from 55 reviews
Reviews of our Swiss practice on Google — clients of the Zürich desk, in their own words, with the profile open to read. Theirs, not this site's, and said that way for the same reason as the count above.
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. His own site is benjaminwagner.ch.
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 and holds no insurance licences of its own. International cover is placed through SIP Medical Family Office. Availability depends on your residence, the product and the relevant SIP entity; we check the placement route before arranging cover.
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.
The registrations below belong to the named SIP entities. They are not Expat Savvy registrations or a promise that every product can be placed in every country. The relevant entity and terms must match your circumstances.
The entities
- SIP Switzerland AG — Am Stadtrand 11, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland
Registered and regulated by FINMA, registration number F01111824 · Full terms of business - SIP Europe AG — Im Alten Riet 156, 9494 Schaan, Liechtenstein
Registered and regulated by the Liechtenstein FMA, registration number 10116 · Full terms of business - SIP MFO Ltd — 98 Theobalds Road, London WC1X 8WB, United Kingdom
Registered and regulated by the FCA, firm reference number 989310 · Full terms of business - SIP Medical Family Office AG — Baarermattstrasse 10, 6340 Baar/Zug, Switzerland
Check it rather than take our word
- FINMA intermediary register — Switzerland, SIP Switzerland AG registration F01111824
- FMA register — Liechtenstein, SIP Europe AG licence 10116
- FCA register — United Kingdom, SIP MFO Ltd firm reference 989310
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 expert
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 and protection expert
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
Virginie Josten
IPMI expert
Came to insurance from luxury and consulting, where the clients were demanding and the work was international. Then a Swiss insurer’s international desk — cross-border employees, expats and retirees abroad. Legal training and a master’s from Paris Dauphine. English and French.
Book with Virginie
Davide Nezel
IPMI expert
FINMA-certified independent insurance intermediary, who began in financial advice at Swiss Life. He works with globally mobile households, and coordinates with the insurer when a medical need actually arises — which is where a policy is finally tested. German, French and English.
Book with Davide
Chantal Leprêtre
Client Advisor
Client advisor for international private medical insurance at SIP Medical Family Office, the partner through which international cover is placed. She works from London, in English and French.
Book with ChantalHow we are paid
The arrangement, in plain words.
Expat Savvy is an advisory practice and holds no insurance licences of its own. International cover is placed through SIP Medical Family Office. Availability depends on your residence, the product and the relevant SIP entity; we check the placement route before arranging cover.
We hold no exclusive arrangement with any insurer, and no insurer owns part of this business. That does not mean every insurer or product is available to every client. The scope of a recommendation depends on the cover we can consider and arrange for your circumstances.
International cover is placed on a courtage basis: the insurer pays a percentage of the premium when a policy is placed. A higher premium can mean higher remuneration; this payment model does not remove that potential conflict. Our written report sets out the reasons for a recommendation, the alternatives considered and whether keeping existing cover is appropriate. There is no fee for the review or written report, whether or not you arrange cover through us.
Ask us to explain the remuneration attached to a proposed placement. You can read the reasoning before deciding, ask why an alternative was left out, or take the report to another adviser.
These register entries identify the relevant SIP companies, not Expat Savvy: FINMA intermediary register — Switzerland, SIP Switzerland AG registration F01111824 · FMA register — Liechtenstein, SIP Europe AG licence 10116 · FCA register — United Kingdom, SIP MFO Ltd firm reference 989310. The entities and their terms of business are 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.