About Expat Savvy — the practice and the people

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. Same reading, harder problem — nobody arrives into a national system that will catch them, so the policy has to do the whole job.

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. An insurer cannot publish that sentence. We can, because we are not one.

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.

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 percentage of the premium 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, SIP MFO Ltd firm reference 989310. The full arrangement is set out on our about page.