Archive for February, 2013

Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance, the property insurer of last resort in the hurricane prone sunshine state, is to increase its spending on private market reinsurance and risk transfer in 2013, upping the amount of cover it will look to acquire by almost 17%. 2012 was a landmark year for Citizens and the Florida insurance market […]

The Lloyd’s of London insurance and reinsurance market must look to embrace new and alternative forms of capital which are showing an interest in the reinsurance sector as an investment opportunity, suggested chief executive of Amlin Charles Philipps in a lecture held in London yesterday. Speaking at an Insurance Institute of London lecture on ‘London […]

In an article published yesterday on its BestWire service, rating agency A.M. Best discussed the maturation of the catastrophe bond market, citing the near record levels of issuance in 2012 as evidence of a rapidly maturing market. While the market may be maturing, A.M. Best agree with our position that the market needs to find […]

2012 saw rollercoaster-like conditions for secondary catastrophe bond trading as the market saw ups and downs over the course of what was a very good year for primary cat bond issuance. With primary cat bond issuance high and capital readily available to put to work in new transactions at the start of the year, the […]

Reinsurance-linked investments as an asset class is growing in popularity amongst investment managers who are perhaps considered more mainstream now that the profile of the reinsurance and insurance-linked investment space is rising. The latest example comes as a well-known UK investment house increased its allocation to reinsurance through investments in CATCo Investment Management’s fund operations.

German reinsurer Hannover Re recently held a conference call to discuss its progress during 2012 and at the important market juncture of the January reinsurance renewals. The reinsurer said that despite the reinsurance market environment being considerably more competitive than in the previous year, citing increased capacity from new reinsurers and the insurance-linked securities space, […]

Lower than expected issuance levels of new catastrophe bonds and insurance-linked securities so far this year has made secondary cat bond trading opportunities elusive, according to one ILS fund manager. Investment managers are currently awash with excess cash, thanks to new capital inflows and money returned from maturing cat bonds. But this excess cash could […]

One of the largest mutual life insurers in the U.S. has shown its interest in the UK pension risk transfer and de-risking market by investing in one of the leading players in that sector in the last week. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, or MassMutual for short, has made an investment in leading UK pension […]

We’ve covered the recently completed Skyline Re Ltd. (Series 2013-1) private catastrophe bond placement in some detail in our original article announcing the transaction and a follow-up where we talked at some length with Towers Watson Capital Markets (TWCM) about its role in structuring and placing the cat bond. However to date we had not […]

CATCo Investment Management, the specialist Bermuda based reinsurance-linked investment business which manages investment clients assets and deploys them as retrocessional reinsurance capacity, has published its annual financial report today. In it CATCo’s new Chairman Nigel Barton comments that CATCo has become one of the largest providers of retrocessional reinsurance capacity in the industry, having deployed […]