Archive for September, 2010

The life reinsurance landscape is an ever changing beast particularly right now due to the sluggish economic recovery and ever changing regulatory environment according to Standard & Poor’s. In an article published yesterday S&P look at the regulatory environment and what they see the likely changes being.

Banking and finance magazine The Banker has released its 2010 ratings for international finance centres. For the second year running the Cayman Islands has been named the number one specialised financial centre.

Standard & Poor’s have published an article looking at price declines of traditional reinsurance versus price declines of insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bonds. It’s a really interesting piece of analysis and shows many of the differences between and issues with the two competing markets.

It’s time for another look at the health of the insurance-linked security and catastrophe bond indices. Again we bring you data from the Swiss Re pair of indices which give us a good indicator for how the market is fairing and also of investor appetite.

AXA Investment Managers (AXA IM) have appointed a new head for their Structured Finance division after Pierre-Emmanuel Juillard announced he is moving on. In his place, Laurent Gueunier takes over as Head Of Structured Finance, moving from his role heading up structured credit. This puts Gueunier in charge of over €34bn of assets across various […]

The Pension Protection Fund (PPF), which takes on the pension liabilities of companies which fold has formed a partnership with Club Vita, a provider of analytical services to help pension funds understand and manage their longevity risk.

Four initiatives which involve over 100 insurers from around the globe have issued a call to governments worldwide to utilise risk management, risk transfer and insurance techniques and expertise to help the developing world cope with the changing climate.

Secquaero Advisors, the Swiss based insurance-linked security investment manager, is teaming up with an Australian partner to bring insurance-linked securities to Australia for investors.

The recent earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand on September 4th which registered Mw7.0 on the Richter scale has been cited as the most damaging the country has seen in years. It is estimated that the quake may have damaged as many as 100,000 of the 160,000 homes in the city.

Information is beginning to emerge about a novel transaction undertaken by leading Swiss insurance-linked securities investment company Clariden Leu. We believe the bank has designed this new transaction type in order to create available investment capacity for clients in its cat bond fund.