Archive for December, 2009

The market for trading and securitization of longevity risks has never really taken off as much as we initially thought it would. Most market participants have been waiting for capital to flood in as companies and pension fund managers discovered how easily they could hedge the risk of longevity amongst the members of pension schemes. […]

Horseshoe Group, a company offering insurance and reinsurance management services, is expanding its presence to the Cayman Islands to take advantage of the increasingly dominant position the islands hold in the catastrophe bond SPV market. The Caymans have been host to the majority of cat bond special purpose vehicles over the last couple of years […]

SCOR has announced that its latest foray into the insurance-linked securities market Atlas VI Capital Ltd. has closed successfully. Atlas VI provides SCOR with €75m of protection against certain European windstorms and Japanese earthquakes.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, has officially launched the long awaited Global Index Insurance Facility. I’ve written about the facility in the past when it was still in pilot phase but now it has been launched in partnership with the European Commission and the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign […]

The Tropical Storm Risk (TSR) research initiative is the first to issue a very early long-range forecast for the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season. After a benign 2009 you might think that we’d be in for more of the same next year, however the forecast from TSR is for an above average season with a higher […]

The tail end of 2009 is proving to be an extremely busy time for the catastrophe bond market, compare it to last year when no deals were issued beyond August and it looks like a different market completely. The latest transaction to be launched is Longpoint Re II Ltd. from Travelers Indemnity Company.

Swiss Re is preparing another catastrophe bond for launch hot on the heels of the successful issuance of Successor X Ltd. The latest cat bond to be marketed by long time market participant Swiss Re is a new deal in its Redwood series providing it with cover against California earthquakes.

The UK’s Environment Agency, a governmental organisation responsible for protecting and improving the environment and promoting sustainable development, has put out to tender the management of a bond portfolio for its pension fund. They’re seeking bond managers for a global bond portfolio with a value of between £10m to £150m, a small part of their […]

The Successor X Ltd. catastrophe bond from Swiss Re has now completed and upsized yet again to $150m. Given that this transaction from Swiss Re started marketing at just $50m it’s testament to the strength of demand that this has tripled in size.

PERILS, the independent company based in Zurich which was set up to aggregate and report on European catastrophe insurance data, has announced the launch of an industry loss index for European windstorm events.