Archive for April, 2018

London headquartered insurance and reinsurance firm Beazley has updated the technology systems and user experience of its parametric weather insurance products, in order to provide what it calls the first fully personalised insurance policy and to enable automatic payouts to claimants.

The catastrophe bond and related insurance-linked securities (ILS) market has reached a new high, according to Artemis’ latest data on the market, as 2018 issuance sets a record pace in passing $5.7 billion already, while the outstanding market has hit a new record size at $33 billion.

The mid-year reinsurance renewal at June 1st is expected to yield pricing that is lower than last year for Florida headquartered primary insurance company Universal Insurance Holdings, which expects to be able to keep its retention static, while buying more coverage at comparable or lower rates.

Much of the trading team behind the long-standing Cumulus weather and energy investment funds are transferring over to investments and hedge fund giant Citadel LLC, as the Cumulus funds are being shuttered, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Reinsurance brokerage Guy Carpenter has announced the promotion of its Bermuda Head of Retrocession broking John Fletcher to become the new Chairman of its island operations, as well as the hiring of James Morris as SVP, who joins the broker from Aon Bermuda.

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending 29th April 2018, 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 or get our email alerts for every article we publish.

Insurance-linked securities (ILS) demonstrated the value of its protection offering last year and the capital markets are expected to respond to the need for additional capacity to help close the expanding disaster gap in 2018, which could result in cat bond market growth of 20%, according to John Seo of Fermat Capital Management.

The continuing growth of the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market, the strong appetite being shown by catastrophe bond investors and the ongoing inflows of alternative capital from institutional investors into the reinsurance market, will limit rate increases at the mid-year 2018 renewals, KBW says.

Japan is set to back and help fund the launch of the Southeast Asia Disaster Risk Insurance Facility, a parametric disaster insurance pool that will be established to serve ASEAN nations including Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia to begin with.

The private catastrophe bond issuance platform Resilience Re, which is owned and operated by insurance and reinsurance broker Willis Towers Watson, has issued its latest transaction, a $150 million Resilience Re Ltd. (Series 1841A) zero-coupon deal.