Reinsurance News

In some situations, parametric insurance and risk transfer arrangements can benefit the protection buyer by providing coverage that wouldn’t have been available under a traditional indemnity insurance policy. You can learn about this and more in our upcoming live webcast (register here).

Scientists, meteorologists and other experts with a view on wildfire related conditions in the state of California are warning of the potential for an extreme, potentially catastrophic 2021 wildfire season, as tinder dry conditions begin particularly early in the year.

Having restarted the clock and extended the deadline for a decision on the process to approve or deny the proposed merger of insurance and reinsurance broking giants Aon and Willis Towers Watson (WTW) just a few days ago, the European Commission (EC) has now pushed it forwards again by another roughly two weeks.

A catastrophe has been declared for the impacts of Cyclone Seroja in Western Australia, after the storm made landfall on Sunday, April 11th close to the town of Kalbarri as a Category 3 equivalent tropical cyclone, with gusts of up to 170km/h (105mph).

James Vickers, Chair of Willis Re International, has said that insurance-linked securities (ILS) investors have showed increasing maturity at recent reinsurance renewals, as demand proved strong at 4/1.

The CCRIF SPC (formerly known as the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility), a parametric focused risk pooling and transfer facility for the Caribbean and Central America, is targeting further expansion in terms of its scope, as well as in terms of the range of risk transfer products it offers and to whom.

The Governments of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines have received $20 million in disaster risk financing support from the World Bank to aid their recovery from the recent eruption of the La Soufrière volcano, after a catastrophe contingent line of credit was triggered.

Reinsurance rates and pricing are expected to increase again at the upcoming mid-year 2021 June and July renewals, likely increasing further into 2022 as well, but by next year these rises may be losing momentum, Fitch Ratings believes.

The underwriting performance of reinsurance firms tracked by broker Willis Re improved in 2020, with the group reporting the first full-year improvement in normalised combined ratio since at least 2014, albeit still over 100.

NOAA has updated the concept of an ‘average’ Atlantic hurricane season, shifting the 30-year period forwards by a decade, which now means the benchmark average year contains two more named tropical storms and one more hurricane than before.