Archive for May, 2012

The California Earthquake Authority governing board has approved the issuance of further catastrophe bonds through a transformer reinsurance vehicle (likely Embarcadero Re Ltd.) during 2012. At a recent governing board meeting approval was sought to issue up to $300m in additional catastrophe bonds this year if the market terms and pricing are conducive and the […]

USAA are aiming to achieve $200m of fully collateralized cover through the issuance of their latest catastrophe bond, Residential Reinsurance 2012 Ltd. It’s USAA’s eighteenth cat bond and see’s the regular sponsor attempt to secure another multi-year source of multi-peril capital markets cover. When it began marketing the deals size was not publicised as one […]

London, UK based insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bond investment manager Leadenhall Capital Partners has added a new hire to their team, taking them to eight people, and announced that they are targeting to further grow their assets under management. Earlier this month Leadenhall announced that their assets under management had passed $650m but todays announcement […]

Back in January we wrote that U.S. crop insurance losses had hit record levels of $9 billion for the year 2011, with much of those losses attributed to freezing weather across the Southern U.S. states, droughts in the Plains, flooding along the Mississippi river, severe rainstorms and hail from severe thunderstorms. That beat the previous […]

The winter of 2011/2012 will be remembered not for extreme freezes, snowfall levels (although they were high in many areas) or winter windstorms (although the European season was marginally active, rather it will be remembered for being warmer than average. March 2012 was the warmest since records began in the U.S. and just the other […]

At least once every year the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund hits the headlines as people discuss the lack of financing the fund has to cope with an extremely severe Atlantic hurricane season. In 2012 this hasn’t changed, its’ still thought that the cat fund could only cope with two reasonably sized landfalling hurricanes and if […]

French reinsurer SCOR have announced that they have extended the cover available to them through their natural catastrophe contingent capital facility which they launched back in 2010. They have elected to extend the innovative contingent capital solution, which acts as an event-driven guaranteed equity line, by an additional €75m taking the amount of cover SCOR’s […]

Not only was April a record-breaking month in terms of the amount of risk capital issued in catastrophe bond transaction, as we wrote the other day, it also saw the amount of cat bond and ILS risk capital outstanding rise to $14.7 billion according to Swiss insurance-linked securities investment manager Plenum Investments. When Artemis last […]

Wells Fargo & Company, the massive financial services group headquartered in the U.S., have announced that they are bringing their successful range of insurance trust products to the UK and EU. To date these insurance trust products have only been available in the U.S. where they are used in place of letters of credit and […]

PERILS AG, the independent Zurich-based company providing industry-wide European catastrophe insurance data and loss indices,has published their latest newsletter today updating the market on the events of 2011 and the progress that PERILS have made. The last time we reported on PERILS progress they had just reached $3.18 billion of risk transfer capacity placed using […]