Archive for July, 2013

Third-party capital and reinsurance-linked fund management firm Blue Capital Management has grown its contribution of net reinsurance premiums written and earned to parent company, Bermudian reinsurer, Montpelier Re’s latest quarterly financial results. The increase will be welcome as Montpelier Re suffered a quarterly loss due to investment losses.

Bermuda headquartered global insurer and reinsurer XL Group is teaming up with reinsurance focused private equity firm Stone Point Capital LLC to form a new Bermuda based company to act as an investment manager in insurance-linked securities and reinsurance-linked investments.

Towers Watson Capital Markets (TWCM), the capital markets and private catastrophe bond specialist arm of professional services firm, has bought another new sponsor to the catastrophe bond market with the completion of a $60m cat bond, Sullivan Re Ltd. (Series 2013-1).

CEO of insurer and reinsurer ACE Group Evan Greenberg said that the firm expects the catastrophe reinsurance pricing trend to continue for the foreseeable future. The comments were made on the Zurich-based re/insurers latest quarterly results conference call when Greenberg also suggested they would pull back from catastrophe lines if necessary.

According to data released by Impact Forecasting, the catastrophe model development center of excellence at reinsurance broker Aon Benfield, the first-half of 2013 saw natural catastrophes cause $85 billion of economic losses, with around 24% insured leaving an insurance industry catastrophe loss of approximately $20 billion.

With a number of reports on the insurance-linked securities (ILS) and catastrophe bond market at the end Q2 2013 having been published in recent days, we wanted to look at some of the statistics contained within. The ILS market has experienced strong issuance and achieved outright growth so the make-up of the market has shifted […]

Richard Brindle, CEO of Lancashire Holdings, a global provider of specialty insurance and reinsurance products and third-party reinsurance capital firm, said that the firm is insulated from feeling too much of the impact of new third-party reinsurance capital due to its focus on specialty and non-elemental exposures.

One of Bank of America’s leading re/insurance sector analysts Jay A. Cohen downgraded Bermuda based global insurance and reinsurance group AXIS Capital Holdings Limited from Buy to Neutral in a report published yesterday. The analyst becomes the latest to cite reinsurance pricing pressures as a potential earnings headwind.

The fourth named tropical storm of the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season has formed today in the eastern Atlantic ocean, not far to the south and west of Cape Verde. It’s the first named storm of 2013 to have originated off the east coast of Africa, a traditional hurricane breeding ground.

London based insurance-linked securities and reinsurance-linked investment manager Leadenhall Capital Partners currently attributes a huge 91.5% of its ILS assets as commitments sourced from pension funds, according to data shared by Luca Albertini, CEO of Leadenhall Capital Partners at an event this morning.