Archive for January, 2012

Aetna have completed their third insurance-linked security transaction which allows them to transfer the risk of catastrophic levels of medical benefit claims hitting the firm. The $150m medical benefit linked ILS issued through Cayman Island domiciled Vitality Re III Ltd. provides catastrophe bond type cover to Aetna subsidiary Health Re Inc. against medical benefits claims […]

Bermuda based catastrophe, insurance-linked securities and reinsurance-linked investment manager Juniperus Capital (and it’s Juniperus Insurance Opportunity Fund) has been sold to private-equity firm Aquiline Capital Partners who have bought out their existing shareholders. Founded in 2008 by Benfield, Transatlantic Re and the funds managers, this move has been coming for a while as we had […]

One of the topics we discuss regularly on Artemis is the potential for the cat bond and ILS market to broaden their scope to include new classes of risk and new geographical locations. Broadening the scope of the market by enabling new risks and locations to be included in transactions is one of the key […]

PERILS AG, the independent Zurich-based company providing industry-wide European catastrophe insurance data and loss indices, has published an initial loss estimate for European windstorm Joachim, which struck western Europe from the 15th to 17th December 2011. PERILS data is used to measure losses for and their indices are used to set trigger points for many […]

Almost every participant in, and commentator on, the catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities market is expecting the volume of outstanding cat bonds and ILS in the marketplace to increase over the course of 2012. Issuance volume for the year is expected to be at least comparable with 2011 (as long as no major events affect […]

2011 saw a big change in the use of risk models for catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities transactions. The launch of a new U.S. hurricane model by risk modelling firm RMS at the end of February 2011, which increased modelled expected loss across many cat bond covered regions, caused a slowdown in issuance as the […]

Tea growers in Kenya could soon have access to a new way to protect themselves against loss of earnings caused by frost damaging their tea plantations according to this article in Business Daily Africa. The Kenya Tea Development Agency, which is a marketing agency for half a million small farmers, is looking to launch an […]

In the third of our prediction pieces, where we ask a leading participant in the insurance-linked securities, catastrophe bond and reinsurance convergence sectors to give us their opinion on how these sectors will evolve in 2012, we spoke with Luca Albertini, CEO of Leadenhall Capital Partners LLP, an investment fund manager with a focus on […]

2011 was a year that saw a lot of records broken in weather and natural disaster events, the results of which were insured losses for the year of between $105 billion to $110 billion across the globe. Now data has been published which shows that U.S. crop insurance claims payments have hit a record for […]

It’s time for another look at the Swiss Re Cat Bond Performance Indices which help to illustrate the performance of outstanding catastrophe bond returns. The indices track the performance of most of the outstanding cat bonds in the market so are a good indicator of the health of the market and investor sentiment in the […]