Archive for November, 2010

It’s been over a month since our last look at the Swiss Re catastrophe bond indices. Both indices remain at five year highs after strong rises have been the trend all summer. However we have seen the first drop in one of the indices since July.

Munich Re has reiterated its standpoint that the high number of weather extremes experienced in 2010 are a strong indicator of climate change and there is a strong probability that there is a connection between the two.

New, different approaches to microinsurance for farmers are appearing at an increasing speed with the Philippines seemingly being one of the markets where innovative attempts to create affordable, index-linked agricultural insurance are happening.

Here’s a few extracts from the recently filed third quarter report of Chubb Corp. There was quite a lot of information about their use of catastrophe bonds and what portion of their reinsurance and risk transfer is made up of cat bonds which we thought of interest to our readers. Chubb have been using cat […]

Goldman Sachs has been involved in an interesting structured finance transaction recently. Through its special purpose vehicle, the Cayman Islands based, Signum Finance Cayman Ltd. Goldman Sachs has issue $200m of Series 2010-09 notes designed to provide it with a mortality hedge for a defined block of life insurance.

Finding ways to smooth your revenue stream whatever the weather is becoming easier with more types of weather risk transfer and weather insurance products available than ever before. Finding ways to refund your customers if the weather’s bad and not lose out yourself is increasing in popularity too it seems.

PERILS AG, the independent Zurich-based company providing industry-wide European catastrophe insurance data, has published its second newsletter updating the market on its activities and progress over the last six months. They now have greater than 50% total market coverage in the countries they cover.

Update, 9am GMT Friday: Hurricane Tomas has now passed Jamaica and is heading to Haiti within the next few hours. Winds have increased to 80mph and Tomas is once again hurricane Tomas. The forecast track for Tomas now takes it right between Haiti and Cuba meaning both will be impacted (Haiti more so) but also […]

Aon Benfield has stated in a press release today that the formulas for calculating natural catastrophe capital requirements under the proposed Solvency II Standard Formula are outdated and ignore 15 years of evolution in the field of risk modelling. In response they are offering a suite of services to help re/insurers make the most of […]

Risk modeller EQECAT has announced that Bill Keogh has been promoted to President of the organisation. Previously Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, Bill succeeds Rick Clinton who will stick around at EQECAT in a consulting role until the end of the year.