Pandemic cat bond news

French reinsurance company SCOR “kicked itself” for not having renewed its mortality catastrophe bonds in the past, the firms new CEO Laurent Rousseau explained today.

After a particularly busy first-half of 2021 for catastrophe bond issuance, global reinsurance firm Swiss Re’s Capital Markets unit believes that a $50 billion market is possible by 2025 and that two drivers of further insurance-linked securities (ILS) market growth could be pandemic risk and ESG.

The World Heath Organization (WHO) has raised the subject of catastrophe bonds as a potential source of capital for funding development of tools to help in the response to the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The World Bank’s 2017 pandemic catastrophe bond has provided a blueprint for how insurance-linked securities (ILS) technology can be leveraged to transfer pandemic risk, according to Joanna Syroka, Director of New Markets, Fermat Capital Management, LLC.

Reinsurance Group of America (RGA) has explored a variety of ways of transferring mortality risks related to pandemics off its books, including capital markets backed instruments such as catastrophe bonds.

A working group of the Indian insurance and reinsurance regulator IRDAI has proposed the creation of a parametric Indian Pandemic Risk Pool, which could use pandemic bonds as part of its capacity.

The participation of the capital markets in financing the world’s most pressing risks is an important source of capacity and investors could support up to $2 billion of capacity to back pandemic catastrophe bonds, Hannover Re CEO Jean-Jacques Henchoz explained in a recent interview.

Media reports state that the World Bank has shelved plans for any future issuance of pandemic catastrophe bonds and for a version two of its Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF).

Payments from the World Bank’s Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) to member countries of the International Development Association (IDA) could begin as early as next week, as the capital lost by holders of the triggered pandemic catastrophe bonds and swaps looks set to be mobilised rapidly.

The World Bank issued pandemic catastrophe bonds and pandemic risk-linked swaps have now been triggered and will pay out $195.84m, we’ve learned today, after the final trigger parameter of the growth-rate of coronavirus cases turned positive.