Best of Artemis, week ending 16th September 2012

Last week saw the annual reinsurance industry event in Monte Carlo, the Rendez-vous de Septembre, take place. Hopefully those of you who attended will have been able to keep up with the market news but if you didn’t our regular monday catch up will help. The last week was extremely busy with many companies releasing news and PR. You can read everything on our news blog and here are the ten most popular news articles from the last seven days on Artemis.

Top ten most viewed articles on Artemis.bm, week ending 16th September 2012:

1. Hurricane Isaac is a qualifying event for Combine Re catastrophe bond: Moody’s
   It transpires that the losses caused by hurricane Isaac have had an impact on an outstanding catastrophe bond. According to rating agency Moody’s, losses from Isaac have qualified under the terms of the Combine Re Ltd. (Series 2012-1) cat bond transaction.
2. Tokio Millennium Re to become full-service capital market & ILS facilitator
   Reinsurer Tokio Millennium Re Ltd. has today signalled their intention to become more deeply involved in the collateralized reinsurance, insurance-linked securities, capital markets and insurance management space, with the announcement of the formation of two new corporations.
3. The reinsurance market has converged: Guy Carpenter
   It looks like one of the hot topics of conversation at Monte Carlo this year is the convergence of the reinsurance and capital markets. Reinsurance broker Guy Carpenter is more bullish than most on this and believe that its time to accept that non-traditional capacity is here to stay.
4. Met Office launches new data service to facilitate ‘low wind’ insurance
   The UK’s Met Office, the national weather forecaster and data provider, have launched a new service called Site Wind Index which will offer 30 years of climatology data detailing hourly wind speeds for customer defined sites and heights which is updated monthly and annually.
5. RBS Group pension fund makes first allocation of assets to reinsurance
   We wrote recently that the Fire and Police Pension Fund of San Antonio had deployed capital into the DaVinci Re sidecar and that the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (already an investor in ILS and cat bonds) had become the largest investor in Dutch specialty re/insurer ANV Holdings BV. Large deployments of capital by pension funds into the reinsurance space, be that directly in a re/insurer, into a collateralized reinsurance fund or ILS fund and even directly into instruments like catastrophe bonds, is becoming more and more common.
6. Hedge fund backed reinsurers investment assets pose a risk: Fitch Ratings
   In an article published by Fitch Ratings their director of insurance Martyn Street says that hedge fund backed reinsurers may find achieving their goals, of “using stable premium flows in lower-risk underwriting business to support higher returns on the companies’ asset portfolios” a challenge.
7. Third Point Re fundraising for new $250m property catastrophe fund
   Bermuda based reinsurer Third Point Re, backed by a hedge fund and institutional investors, is actively raising capital for a new fund to support underwriting additional property catastrophe business.
8. Investors largely uninterested in a ‘reinsurance class of 2011′: S&P
   There are a number of theories as to why we didn’t see a group of new reinsurers start-up after the record natural catastrophe losses suffered by the industry in 2011. Some say reinsurance capacity was sufficient, others say that the losses were not sufficiently impactful to push rates to the point where profitable opportunities emerged.
9. Dedicated investment funds dominate catastrophe bond and ILS market
   Of the investors involved in the sector, participation increased from dedicated catastrophe and ILS funds, who became the dominant form of capital in the market.
10. Collateralized capacity increasing share of retrocessional business: Aon Benfield
    The retrocessional reinsurance market, where reinsurers look for their own reinsurance cover, is an area where collateralized capacity from reinsurance funds, sidecars and catastrophe bonds or ILS, is increasingly being put to work.

If you’ve missed any of our weekly catch-ups due to being on vacation you can find them all here.

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If you’re looking for details on catastrophe bond and ILS transactions our Deal Directory has more than 260 listed.

If you want to track hurricanes or tropical storms visit our 2012 Atlantic Hurricane Season page.