Archive for June, 2011

The rate of catastrophe bond maturities has picked up with five transactions maturing in the last few days and another two due to mature before the end of the month. With close to $2.4 billion of cat bonds due to mature by the end of this quarter there is plenty of excess capital which is […]

Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance, the largest general insurer in South Korea, has launched a new weather insurance product which is aimed at industries whose revenues are influenced by unpredictable and inclement weather.

We last wrote about the push to get weather derivatives listed as a tradable instrument on the commodity exchanges of India back in September last year when the Indian government approved laws to allow commodity options and futures to be traded in the country. It was hoped that the new law would lead to other […]

Marsh have announced that they are to begin selling the County Weighted Industry Loss (CWIL™) solution, which was developed in 2010 by Guy Carpenter as an index-based reinsurance contract issued by Nephila Capital. CWIL is now available to Marsh clients with exposure to U.S. windstorms or earthquakes and European windstorms.

Plenum Investments, the Zurich based investment manager with a focus on alternatives such as insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bonds, notes in its May monthly fund performance update that both the primary and secondary ILS markets were relatively calm in May as investors held their positions.

Pension Corporation have entered into another deal which see’s them take on the assets and liabilities of a UK pension scheme. The latest transaction see’s Pension Corporation take on over £60m of pension liabilities from manufacturer Toray Textiles.

In our latest interview we spoke with Brian O’Hearne, President and CEO of eWeatherRisk a provider of online weather risk management solutions. Brian is a bit of a veteran in the weather risk management market having headed up weather business at Swiss Re and before that GuaranteedWeather.

Argo Re, a Bermuda based reinsurer and part of the larger Argo Group, has begun marketing a its first multi-peril catastrophe bond through a Cayman Islands special purpose insurer Loma Reinsurance Ltd. It’s the first primary market cat bond to be issued for a while and is sure to test both investor appetite and the […]

The recent Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan cost Munich Re around €1.5 billion but the spectre of another earthquake occurring in Japan, even under Tokyo itself, is not their biggest fear according to an interview in German newspaper Handelsblatt with Munich Re board member Ludger Arnoldussen.

Last week broker Guy Carpenter published a report looking at the recent 1st June renewals and the state of the reinsurance industry. They concluded that despite the heavy catastrophe toll from the first half of the year, reinsurers are generlly well capitalised and the reinsurance industry as a whole enters the hurricane season with excess […]