Insurance Linked Securities Interviews

The insurance-linked securities (ILS) market’s product offering is particularly attractive at this time, helped by reinsurance pricing at higher levels and the significant effort that has gone into re-underwriting portfolios, Luca Albertini, CEO of Leadenhall Capital Partners explained to Artemis recently.

Our Artemis London 2022 conference a month ago was themed as a celebration of the catastrophe bond and our opening session of the day featured a fantastic keynote speech about the cat bond market and a lightning run through 25 landmark cat bonds from the first 25 years of the sector.

The fifth and final panel session of our ILS NYC 2022 conference, that was held in New York back in April, saw our expert moderators from earlier sessions at the event come together to discuss some of the main threads of conversation from the day.

Bringing together the capital markets and natural catastrophe risk in reinsurance, makes “deep economic sense”, according to the CEO of Swiss Re, as leveraging ILS capital is a win-win-win for his company, Christian Mumenthaler explained in our recent interview.

As the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market continues to reset itself after a number of years of heavy catastrophe losses, growth is likely to be more prominent in areas such as catastrophe bonds and top-layer peak peril strategies, that have displayed more consistent performance, Twelve Capital’s Marcel Grandi believes.

Growth of the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market is not as assured as it might seem, with a number of potential threats to it. But Tom Johansmeyer, Head of PCS at Verisk, believes there is plenty of opportunity for ILS expansion, with specialty retrocession one clear area for ILS market growth.

Investing into the Lloyd’s insurance and reinsurance marketplace through its insurance-linked securities (ILS) structure has “unique capital efficiency” and Bill Cooper of TigerRisk believes the initiative could attract billions in funds from capital market investors.

After increasing the size of its reinsurance sidecar transaction in 2021, followed by the issuance of its first catastrophe bond earlier this year, Hong Kong domiciled reinsurer Peak Re aims to further leverage the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market to close the protection gap.

For the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market to reach its full-potential, expansion through the provision of new lines of risk to a growing investor-base are key, while a one-way bet versus climate change won’t deliver the growth the sector deserves, according to Vesttoo’s Brian Kirwan.

Three factors are set to continue to drive the growth of the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market, the increasing institutional familiarity with the product, the correlation story continuing to be proved out and the best reinsurance market conditions in years, according to Stephan Ruoff, Schroders Capital’s Head of ILS.