Archive for June, 2015

James Few, the new Global Managing Director of Reinsurance at London headquartered insurance and reinsurance firm Amlin, brings with him experience of setting up managed funds operations at his previous employer, which is expected to benefit his new employer.

The pace of issuance of new catastrophe bonds and insurance-linked securities (ILS) continues to be seen as a risk to some asset and fund managers, who see the reinsurance asset class as an attractive complement to their portfolios but worry about issuance volume.

The war of words in the reinsurance merger & acquisition battle between PartnerRe, its original suitor AXIS Capital and Italian investment and holding company EXOR continues, with PartnerRe’s board today citing the “unacceptable level of risk” associated with EXOR’s bid.

Specialist insurance and reinsurance linked investment manager Leadenhall Capital Partners LLP has added a new hire in business development, with the announcement that Edward Johnson is joining the ILS manager from Aon Benfield Securities.

Catastrophe risk modeling company AIR Worldwide has released Version 3.0 of its catastrophe modeling platform, Touchstone®, today. The new version brings some new features to the platform that allows insurance and reinsurance users to develop their own view of risk.

The amount of capacity provided by special purpose syndicates (SPS) in the Lloyd’s of London insurance and reinsurance market saw no real growth in 2015, as one more SPS took the total number to 14 but only providing somewhere over £500m of capacity.

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending 21st June 2015, covering catastrophe bonds, ILS, reinsurance capital and related risk transfer topics. To ensure you never miss a thing subscribe to the weekly Artemis email newsletter updates.

While the reinsurance market remains challenging strategically sound business models become more important than ever and while casualty lines offer several structural advantages, this can mean higher barriers to entry, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs.

The latest media reports about the reinsurance M&A activity involving AXIS Capital, PartnerRe, EXOR and, the most recent name added to the fray, Arch Capital Group, state that AXIS has not been approached by Arch.

For German reinsurance firm Hannover Re acting as a service provider in the ILS industry, through fronting and transformation of risks, is increasingly becoming a key growth area bringing in incremental revenues and helping the reinsurer to build new relationships.