Archive for January, 2024

The insurance industry loss from October’s European windstorms Babet and Aline is now estimated some 34% higher at €683 million by catastrophe data aggregator PERILS AG.

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending January 21st 2024, 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.

There are now over 300 attendees registered for our upcoming insurance-linked securities (ILS) conference. ILS NYC 2024 will be held in New York City on February 9th 2024, with the global ILS community set to come together for a day of thought-leadership, discussion and valuable networking.

Having significantly increased the size of its catastrophe excess-of-loss reinsurance treaty for 2024, US insurer Travelers is pleased with the extra protection and expects the additional cost will be covered by inward price increases, according to its CFO Dan Frey.

Analysts at J.P. Morgan say that the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market is returning to health and also point out an interesting fact, that the average return of ILS funds tracked by the Eurekahedge ILS Advisers Insurance Linked Securities Fund Index in 2023 actually beat the sum of returns over the previous 9 years.

US primary insurance firm Travelers has significantly increased the amount of protection it receives under its occurrence catastrophe excess-of-loss (XoL) reinsurance treaty, lifting it from 2022’s $2 billion excess of $3.5 billion, by 76% to provide $3.525 billion of cover for 2024.

Aetna, the health, medical and benefits insurance unit of CVS Health, is now targeting reduced pricing for what will be its fifteenth Vitality Re health insurance catastrophe bond issuance, with spread guidance reduced for the $200m of reinsurance it hopes to receive from the Vitality Re XV Ltd (Series 2024) transaction.

US primary insurer Allstate has reported a much lighter catastrophe loss burden for the fourth-quarter of 2023, which has served to slow down what was looking like a very rapid build-up of annual aggregate catastrophe losses across the first six months of the risk-period for its in-force catastrophe bonds.

Fermat Capital Management has been investing into catastrophe bonds ever since John and Nelson Seo launched the company in 2001, so it says something for the current attractiveness of the insurance-linked securities (ILS) asset class when you learn that Fermat’s cat bond funds had their best ever year in 2023.

Among the property insurance related topics up for debate in the Florida legislative session are measures that could trigger another growth surge for insurer of last resort Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, moves that would likely see it needing to grow its reinsurance and risk transfer.