Archive for April, 2016

The Insurance Council of Texas reports that for the third time in a month severe hail storms and damaging winds have impacted cities in the state. The Insurance Council also revealed that insurance and possibly reinsurance industry losses from the previous two events could hit $1.3 billion.

AP3, also known as The Third Swedish National Pension Fund and one of the five managing Swedish state pension system assets, manages approximately 2.7bn Krona ($335m) of insurance-linked securities (ILS) and catastrophe bond investments, which it calls “a strategically important” piece of its portfolio.

The big four European reinsurance firms are expected to report another solid and profitable quarter in the coming Q1 2016 results season, as the continued very low level of major losses helps to boost their profits and returns, according to analysts at J.P. Morgan.

Verisk Insurance Solutions is working on enhancing the traditional parametric cat-in-a-box structure, aiming to minimise basis risk and expand its capabilities, which in turn could create opportunities for the reinsurance and insurance-linked securities (ILS) markets to deploy more capacity.

The London insurance and reinsurance market and its companies is going to find profitability is hurt by the continued softness of re/insurance pricing, but even if claims levels return to normal levels companies are expected to remain profitable anyway, according to Fitch Ratings.

The London and Bermuda stock exchange listed reinsurance and insurance linked securities (ILS) investment fund, the Blue Capital Global Reinsurance Fund, described the challenging state of reinsurance renewals in its annual report yesterday, citing risk adjusted rate declines of around 4%.

Lombard Odier Investment Managers (LOIM), the asset management arm of Swiss private banking group Lombard Odier, has announced the launch of its first catastrophe bond fund, the UCITS compliant LO Funds – CAT Bonds.

Heritage Property & Casualty Insurance has been approved for underwriting property and casualty insurance in the state of Georgia, which now becomes another potential state for its Citrus cat bond coverage to expand to.

We soft-launched our first conference in Asia just under three weeks ago and already have more than 100 confirmed attendees. We’re delighted to invite you our regular readers, your colleagues and contacts to what will become an annual ILS event for the Asia region.

Ample capacity, favourable pricing and terms & conditions (T&C) witnessed at Q1 2016 renewals are expected to continue at the important mid-year reinsurance renewal season, supporting a continuation of the buyers market seen in 2015, according to broker Aon Benfield’s latest report.