PERILS to investigate European windstorms Niklas and Mike

PERILS AG, Zurich based provider of industry-wide European catastrophe exposure, industry loss data and indices, will investigate the two recent European windstorms that impacted a number of European markets, Niklas and Mike.

As Artemis wrote yesterday, storm Niklas is expected to have an impact on the insurance industry, with the potential to spill over into reinsurance programmes if losses rise high enough, but is not anticipated to have any impact on any European windstorm exposed catastrophe bonds.

PERILS AG has placed both of these windstorm events under investigation, which means it will assess the potential for the resulting insurance industry losses to reach the EUR200m level, beyond which PERILS would report on the storms following its typical reporting schedule.

For the moment PERILS intends to investigate Niklas and Mike as two separate storms, but could end up concluding that one or both of the events do not qualify or combining them if the market treats them as a single loss event. The latter can sometimes happen where two storms occur so close together that identifying which event caused a loss becomes impossible and they are as a result combined.

So that comes down to whether insurance companies that report data on loss events to PERILS can separate losses from Niklas and Mike accurately. If that can’t be done then the two storms may be combined and treated as a single loss occurrence.

PERILS said that the fact that it has decided to investigate the storms means that in its opinion the two storms have the potential to result in over EUR200m of insurance industry losses.

Mike struck the north of Europe on the 29th March, followed by Niklas shortly after on the 30th. Niklas’ impacts went on into the 31st as well, with countries such as Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Austria all reporting damage.

We’ll update you should PERILS elect to report on either or both of these two rather late-season European windstorms.