Archive for September, 2011

Risk modeller RMS have confirmed that there will be no impact to the Montana Re Ltd. Series 2010-1 catastrophe bond as a result of the damage caused by typhoon Roke in Japan. We wrote a week ago that the market was not expecting the losses from Roke to be severe enough to trigger any catastrophe […]

Swiss based boutique finance and investment house Secquaero Advisors Ltd. has won an award for their successful securitization of  a €60m closed block of existing in-force unit-linked life insurance policies. The SQ ReVita transaction was completed in June this year and was seen as an innovative and secure transaction by investors and so received a […]

Opinions on the type of growth we can expect to see in the catastrophe bond market seem to be converging on a figure of $15 billion of outstanding cat bonds within the next five years. Currently the cat bond market has about $11 billion of outstanding transactions but market participants are predicting growth and hoping […]

A division of Citigroup has been announced today as being the indenture trustee on the recently issued $150m Embarcadero Re Ltd. catastrophe bond which transferred some of the California Earthquake Authority’s (CEA) earthquake risks to the capital markets. Citigroup’s Agency and Trust Services business, acting through Citibank, N.A., will provide trustee services for the tenure […]

Aon Benfield have estimated that insurers in Australia and New Zealand have recovered as much as $16 billion of their catastrophe losses caused by disasters during 2010 and 2011 from reinsurers. They say this shows how reinsurance has supported these insurers and the reinsurance market has remained effective as nearly two-thirds of their losses have […]

The weather derivatives market has been growing steadily with data from the Weather Risk Management Association (WRMA) showing that the overall market grew by 20% in the 2010 to 2011 year to a total size of $11.8 billion. The WRMA said that the OTC weather derivatives market alone is worth $2.4 billion. With numbers like […]

The U.S. Governments intervention in private insurance and reinsurance markets, specifically (although not uniquely) in natural catastrophe risks, places an unsustainable burden on tax payers that could be removed if the private market was allowed to participate more, according to a report published by Lloyd’s of London yesterday.

CAMRADATA Analytical Services have announced the launch of a pension risk transfer product database aimed at U.S. defined benefit plans and sponsors. It aims to provide a transparent view of the insurance options available to allow pension schemes to transfer risks, including pension buy-in and buy-outs.

The Verisk Catastrophe Index created by risk information and analysis firm Verisk Analytics just over a year ago, has won an industry award naming it the Re/Insurance Initiative of the Year at the Worldwide Reinsurance Awards in London recently. The catastrophe index provides high resolution insured property loss estimates, by county and line of business, […]

The weather risk market demonstrated its diversity and growth at the recent Weather Risk Management Association (WRMA) 12th Annual European Meeting in Dusseldorf, Germany. Over ninety weather risk professionals from six continents and seventeen countries attended, demonstrating continuing global interest in weather risk hedging and making it the most diverse WRMA event yet.