Reinsurance News

Howden RE, the reinsurance broking arm of the broader Howden broking group, has announced the hire of non-marine retrocession broking expert Doreen Tan from Aon, who joins the company as a Director.

The Florida insurance market capital stack is likely decimated after hurricane Ian’s landfall last week, raising the question of how this marketplace replenishes it and also highlighting the need for access to efficient sources of capital.

Alternative capital investors are about to have their resilience tested again, according to S&P Global Ratings, who said that although it is too early to have an accurate quantification of industry losses from hurricane Ian, it’s clear this is a major event for the reinsurance and ILS sector.

After hurricane Ian, there is the potential for “significant” erosion to aggregate catastrophe bonds, according to investment manager Twelve Capital.

The global market for catastrophe bond issuance slowed down dramatically in the third-quarter of 2022, resulting in below-average issuance for the period. But still the outstanding cat bond market stands $4.7 billion bigger than at the same time a year earlier, Artemis’ latest quarterly report shows.

Analysts at KBW have tried to put some figures on the potential hurricane Ian loss impact for some of the main insurance and reinsurance names they cover, with RenaissanceRe currently seen by the firm as the company likely to take the biggest hit, as a percentage of its common equity.

KatRisk, a specialist provider of catastrophe modeling solutions for flood and wind risk, has published an estimate of wind, surge and flood related economic losses from hurricane Ian, pegging the total at $46 billion, but that figure could be plus or minus $16.1 billion.

Hurricane Ian is expected to change the insurance market landscape entirely in Florida and litigation is still expected to be an issue in the claims process despite the attempts at legislative reform, RMS’ Chief Risk Modeling Officer Mohsen Rahnama has implied.

Bermuda headquartered re/insurer Arch Capital eventually secured $201 million of capital markets backed mortgage reinsurance protection with its latest ILS issuance, the Bellemeade Re 2022-2 Ltd. deal, using traditional reinsurance to top-up the rest of the layers.

Verisk has come out with its first post-landfall and official estimate of insurance and reinsurance market losses from hurricane Ian, saying that the onshore property insured loss is estimated to be in a range from $42 billion to $57 billion.