Archive for July, 2018

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending 29th July 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.

Broking, structuring, arrangement and placing activities related to capital market transactions, such as catastrophe bonds, declined slightly during the second-quarter of 2018, but this was offset by strong reinsurance revenue growth across Aon’s Reinsurance Solutions unit.

Bermuda headquartered pure-play reinsurance firm PartnerRe has significantly increased the amount of collateralized quota share retrocessional support its portfolio receives from the capital markets, with growth evident in the firms Lorenz Re sidecar vehicle at the mid-point of 2018.

Specialty lines focused Lloyd’s of London managing general agent (MGA) Sciemus is rebranding to now be called Occam Underwriting (taking its name from Occam’s razor) and at the same time one CEO has departed, another been named, and the firm continues to look to alternative capacity providers.

Bermudian reinsurer and third-party reinsurance capital management firm RenaissanceRe has continued to increase the size of its collateralized reinsurance and retrocession vehicle Upsilon, issuing another set of shares to investors during the second-quarter, increasing the overall size of the vehicle to more than $1 billion for the first time.

Nephila Climate, the weather and climate risk transfer focused unit of the largest asset manager in insurance and reinsurance linked investments, Nephila Capital, has signed up to provide indicative pricing through the Speedwell Weather run parametric weather risk transfer platform weatherXchange.

After picking up roughly 20% of the roughly $92 billion of insurance industry losses from major hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, half of the top 20 global reinsurance firms tracked by rating agency Standard & Poor’s have actually increased their exposure to natural catastrophe risks.

Florida headquartered and expansive primary insurer Universal Insurance Holdings has gone beyond its plan for second-quarter catastrophe losses, as impacts from the volcanic eruption in Hawaii and other meaningful weather events lifted its losses slightly.

Cessions to third-party capital partners continued to balloon at Bermudian insurance and reinsurance specialist AXIS Capital Holdings Limited in the second-quarter, as the firm continued the trend of placing an increasing reliance on its “strategic capital partners.”

French headquartered global reinsurance player SCOR has reported its second-quarter results today, which reflect further expansion in the firms appetite for risk in the better priced 2018 market environment, but also reflect the deceleration of pricing after the January peak.