Archive for February, 2014

The Bermuda Finance Minister Bob Richards has highlighted the issue that insurance linked securities funds and institutional investor backed reinsurance capital managers do not create the same number of jobs as traditional reinsurance companies.

The return advantage provided by an investment in catastrophe bonds, over an investment in other forms of yielding debt instrument, has narrowed over the last two years, largely due to pricing pressure lowering yields on cat bonds more quickly.

New capital that flowed into the reinsurance market from alternative sources, like pension funds and other capital markets investors, is more intelligent than capital seen in previous softening markets, according to one insurance and reinsurance group CEO.

Reinsurance broker Guy Carpenter has launched a new satellite-based service, GC CAT-VIEWSM, which aims to provide initial loss estimates of catastrophe events using satellite imagery and other data sources.

Evidence of the buyers market for reinsurance continues to emerge, with the latest insurer to reveal how the current reinsurance renewal pricing environment has benefited them being multi-line primary player United Fire Group.

Bermuda headquartered insurance and reinsurance group Hiscox deployed $110m of its own and third-party sourced capital through collateralised reinsurance and insurance-linked securities (ILS) funds at the beginning of the year, less than it expected.

Specialist reinsurance and retrocessional insurance-linked securities manager CATCo Investment Management is strengthening its underwriting team with the hire of two experienced underwriters both with previous experience from AQR.

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending 23rd February 2014, on catastrophe bonds, reinsurance capital and related risk transfer topics, from the last seven days on Artemis. To ensure you never miss a thing  subscribe to the weekly Artemis email newsletter updates.

U.S. primary insurance group Chubb is returning to the catastrophe bond market for reinsurance cover for the first time in two years, with its sixth cat bond transaction, named East Lane Re VI Ltd. (Series 2014-1), a four-year multi-peril deal.

Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s said today that, at the current levels of insurance industry loss estimate, the financial impact of recent UK floods appears unlikely to result in any insurer rating downgrades.