Archive for August, 2008

It would seem so. Don Palmour, owner of the Clean Car Turnpike, a car wash in Northwest Houston has covered his business against rain using the services of Weatherbill. The deal will pay out if there are more than 20 days of rain in any three month period and the rainfall is measured at the […]

Catastrophe cover in Florida has been a hot topic in the last few days. First the arrival of tropical storm Fay set the press alight with talk of the lack of cover available and the high property insurance premiums customers pay in Florida state, and then yesterday it became a Presidential campaign issue as John […]

Tropical Storm Fay moved across the middle of the Florida panhandle today bringing with her sustained winds of up to 65mph, heavy rains of 5 to 10 inches and the odd tornado. Despite being over land for most of the day her winds haven’t weakened much and she is still capable of causing some havoc […]

AIFAM, an investment firm focusing on alternative assets and strategies who have an insurance-linked securities fund, have signed up to use AIR Worldwide’s CATRADER® tool to help them analyse catastrophe reinsurance, ILS and catastrophe bonds. From the Business Wire press release: “Diversification is an area of focus for us and AIR’s CATRADER supports the analytics […]

The sixth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season has formed between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic on Friday. Fay is currently heading over Hispaniola and will emerge back over the sea on a track for Cuba. Currently packing 45mph winds Tropical Storm Fay has the potential to intensify when she emerges over the […]

Winter storms are an increasing hazard to re/insurance companies. Unpredictable, often severe, winter storms are a difficult risk to mitigate and risk transfer to the capital markets is not that common (yet). Some cat bonds cover European windstorms but not many (if any?) have been issued to cover U.S. winter storms. Now Risk Management Solutions […]

A.M. Best Co. has withdrawn Starbound Reinsurance II Limited’s (Bermuda) ‘A’ credit rating as a result of Starbound Reinsurance II terminating its one year retrocessional reinsurance agreements with Renaissance Re. The initial debt proceeds and remaining equity have been distributed to investors. We haven’t seen any sign of Renaissance Re tapping the capital markets to […]

Priceline, the online travel agent, has been running a promotion (which I blogged about here) on their website which offered a refund should the weather be inclement while a customer is on holiday. Weatherbill provided the structure and derivatives traded backstop for this promotion. Now some figures are emerging from one of the internet measurement […]

AIR Worldwide have announced new releases of their CATRADER®, CLASIC/2TM and CATStation® software systems. A lot of the improvements made seem to hint at a move to significantly simplify the analysis and therefore the issuance of insurance linked securities and catastrophe bonds. Version 10.0 improvements/additions include quicker import of insurance-linked securities, storage and querying of […]

Evolution Markets has today announced the launch of a new division focused on broking and structured transaction services for the catastrophe derivatives market. The new division will offer the ability to tailor transactions to suit a particular reinsurance or risk management need. That combined with the weather derivatives desk puts Evolution Markets in a strong […]