Archive for April, 2012

Greg Hendrick, the CEO of Bermuda based XL Insurance, says that he does not expect to see a new wave of large re/insurers set up in Bermuda, as they have after previous spikes in demand for re/insurance capacity. Instead he says we should expect to see an influx of smaller alternative capital arrangements such as […]

Clearly catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities people don’t rest at the weekends. Over the last couple of days we’ve had a number of excited emails and phone calls from participants in the market telling us that the Everglades Re Ltd. cat bond has more than tripled in size during marketing to become a massive $750m […]

The last week has featured a lot of coverage of the catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities market during Q1 and discussions of where the market is heading through the rest of 2o12. Generally the sentiment is positive and this year is expected to be a strong one for ILS and cat bonds. Also, another cat […]

Michael Stahel, currently Managing Director and Head of Insurance-Linked Investments for Clariden Leu but soon to move to a new home at LGT Capital Management, forecasts a further shift of capacity away from traditional reinsurance markets to financial market placements, such as catastrophe bonds and insurance-linked securities. Overall he says he is bullish on the […]

Prudential have entered into a pension buy-out agreement with a closed UK public-sector pension fund. The deal see’s Prudential take on £272m of pension assets from the West Midlands Integrated Transport Authority’s part of the £7.7 billion West Midlands Pension Fund, according to this article in Financial News.

Swiss Re are bringing a new catastrophe bond to market through a newly formed Cayman Islands domiciled issuer called Mythen Ltd. Mythen Ltd. is a program which will allow Swiss Re to issue future tranches of notes and we’re told by our sources that it is likely to take over from their Successor X series […]

Michael Stahel and his portfolio management team, who currently manage insurance-linked securities funds for Swiss based investment manager and private bank Clariden Leu but are soon to move to their new home at LGT Capital Management, are planning to launch two new insurance-linked strategy funds in response to demand from investors. Currently the team manages […]

A strong flow of new catastrophe bond deals coming to market during March continued the trend for an active primary insurance-linked securities market (ILS) and continued to have an impact on secondary market ILS prices, according to Swiss based investment manager and private bank Clariden Leu in their latest fund performance report. It puts this […]

The UK, and some other countries in Europe, lead the way when it comes to awareness of longevity risk and use of longevity risk transfer instruments to reinsure or hedge against the risks of pensioners living longer than expected. The UK in particular has seen the most activity in the longevity risk transfer market thanks […]

Last June we wrote about the Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System (PSERS), the public body that organises, manages and invests the retirement funds of public school employees in Pennsylvania, and their first allocation of capital to the catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities asset class. They allocated $250m into the Palmetto Fund, an insurance-linked securities […]