Insurance Linked Investments

According to Goldman Sachs equity analyst team, the “end of free money”, by which they are referring to the end of quantitive easing by Central Banks, is set to have ramifications for reinsurance pricing and also for the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market.

AXIS Capital reported its third-quarter 2022 results yesterday, with another decline in reinsurance premiums written as its exit from property reinsurance underwriting takes hold, but a more significant dip in Strategic Capital Partner fee income, which could also be a sign of hurricane Ian’s impacts.

The reinsurance market looks set to undergo further hardening as the January renewals fast-approaches, and with insurance-linked securities (ILS) players struggling to raise capital and reports of deals failing to get done at any price, it could be a truly hard market, according to Brad Adderley, Bermuda Managing Partner, Appleby.

For the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market, the ‘G’, or governance, within ESG, should always have been a given, as the industry needs to have strong governance around its underwriting practices, Luca Albertini, CEO of Leadenhall Capital Partners explained to Artemis.

Vesttoo, the insurance-linked securities (ILS) focused insurtech company, has announced the completion of a Series C funding round sized at $80 million, which it says values the firm at $1 billion.

The Caribbean island nation of Barbados is one of the first in the world we’ve heard of to embed a parametric natural catastrophe event trigger within a sovereign bond issuance, with the occurrence of a natural disaster able to trigger a deferral of payments to holders of the dollar-denominated bond.

Overall assets under management (AuM) of the main UCITS catastrophe bond funds as a group shrank almost -8% during the third-quarter of 2022, with hurricane Ian ending a period of decline with a -4.3% hit to assets of this group of cat bond funds.

Hong Kong’s Insurance Authority (IA) is set to increase its efforts to promote its nascent insurance-linked securities (ILS) framework and attract more catastrophe bond or ILS issuance activity to the country.

Investing in insurance bonds looks even more compelling now against the broader macro-economic backdrop of volatile markets, according to Dinesh Pawar, Head of Insurance Bonds at specialist sector investment manager Twelve Capital.

Cyber risk modelling specialist CyberCube has launched a set of exposure databases for cyber risk, claiming them as the first of their kind, something seen as a key pre-requisite for broader cyber insurance-linked securities (ILS) activity.