Archive for July, 2013

Last Friday, global insurance and reinsurance firm XL Group announced a new venture it was launching with reinsurance focused private equity firm Stone Point Capital LLC to create an investment manager in insurance-linked securities and reinsurance-linked investments. More detail on the plans have now emerged from the re/insurers earnings call yesterday.

Bermuda domiciled insurance, reinsurance and third-party reinsurance capital management group Validus Holdings announced its results for the second-quarter of 2013 last week. The firms AlphaCat third-party capital management segment increased its share of income created during the quarter, but investment losses from joint-venture PaCRe Ltd. weigh on the results.

The largest asset manager in the insurance-linked securities and reinsurance-linked investment space with just over $7.89 billion of insurance-linked assets under management at the firm, Nephila Capital, has grown its senior team by one with the addition of Guy Swayne as a new partner.

The Bermuda insurance and reinsurance market saw 34 new insurer registrations during the first-half of 2013, up from the 24 registered in the first-half of 2012 a year earlier. Special purpose insurers (SPI’s) make up a growing contribution to these statistics, with 20 of the total registered being new SPI’s so far in 2013.

The reinsurance market is closely watching SAC Re, the Bermuda based Class 4 reinsurer backed by Steven A. Cohen, billionaire hedge fund manager and founder of hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors LP, to see if there will be any fall-out after its parent company SAC was charged with insider trading by the U.S. government.

High profile investor Warren Buffett’s reinsurance firm Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has entered into another large reinsurance transaction in the life & health sector. Berkshire Hathaway will reinsure $923m (€700m) of healthcare related claims for Irish state health insurer VHI.

It’s been another busy week of news on Artemis. Here are the ten most viewed stories but there are many more to catch up on. As always, you can read every market news story and article here on the Artemis news blog, subscribe to our weekly email newsletter updates and for your convenience here are […]

The insurance-linked securities markets first ever storm surge catastrophe bond has been extremely well-received by investors with demand helping the deal to increase in size and enabling the sponsor, First Mutual Transportation Assurance Co. (FMTAC) to secure the fully-collateralized reinsurance protection at attractive pricing terms.

Hampden Underwriting Plc, a Lloyd’s of London firm which gives investors direct access to the Lloyd’s market, largely focusing its portfolio on property insurance, reinsurance and motor business, has announced a 50% collateralized reinsurance quota share agreement with Bermudian reinsurer XL Re.

One of the issues facing reinsurers that launch dedicated insurance-linked securities and capital markets focused reinsurance divisions is how to raise capital without a track record in reinsurance-linked investments. One way of doing this is to reallocate risks underwritten by the traditional side of the business into the third-party capital management division.