Archive for December, 2011

The Texas House of Representatives has established a joint committee who are to be tasked with looking at alternative ways to provide property insurance to Texans living in coastal regions. Currently that protection is provided by the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association (TWIA) who recently looked into issuing catastrophe bonds but then decided against that route […]

Well that didn’t last long. The life insurance-linked notes issued by Avondale Securities SA. have been placed back on CreditWatch negative by ratings agency Standard & Poor’s after the long-term counterparty credit rating of the Bank of Ireland was placed on CreditWatch negative.

The recently completed Atlas VI Capital Ltd. 2011 catastrophe bond from SCOR, which secured them a $337m layer of reinsurance cover for certain of their U.S. hurricanes, U.S. earthquakes and European windstorm risks, was a first under the Irish SPV regime. All of SCOR’s Atlas cat bond have been domiciled in Dublin, Ireland but this […]

We understand from a number of contacts that Amlin’s first catastrophe bond transaction, Tramline Re Ltd., has doubled in size by the time it priced to secure them $150m of cover. The Tramline Re cat bond, Amlin’s first through a newly established shelf program, launched two weeks ago and was marketed to provide subsidiary Amlin […]

Ratings agency Fitch Ratings have finally downgraded the ratings or Signum Finance Cayman Ltd. Series 2010-09, a life securitization type transaction which provides Goldman Sachs with a mortality hedge for a defined block of life insurance. The Signum Finance deal has been threatened for a while and Fitch placed the ratings on watch negative back […]

Here’s an interesting graph which shows how rapidly the catastrophe bond market has moved from one which was dominated by transactions with collateral structured as a total return swap to one predominantly using Treasury money market funds. Swiss Re shared this graph during their insurance-linked securities media event last week and it shows how the […]

Another two weeks has passed and it’s time for another of our fortnightly looks at the Swiss Re Cat Bond Performance Indices to see how they have performed and what their movement can tell us about the mood and sentiment within the insurance-linked securities market. At this time of year the main thing to look […]

It’s been another busy week of news in the markets we cover on Artemis, here’s your Monday morning chance to catch up on the top news you may have missed. We’ve seen further discussion on enabling flood risk to be hedged as derivatives or issued as catastrophe bonds, the CEA begin planning for their next […]

Ratings agency A.M. Best have published four updated draft criteria reports which relate to the insurance-linked securities market. They have updated and published draft criteria reports for their rating methodology for natural catastrophe bonds and sidecars. A.M. Best are requesting comments from market participants or other interested parties, so now is the time to have […]

Airline British Airways has managed to offload £1.3 billion of longevity risk through what they called a ‘longevity swap, under an insurance contract’, with Rothesay Life. In June 2010 the same two parties completed a similar transaction for £1.3 billion, which at the time was said to cover 20% of the British Airways schemes pensions […]