Reinsurance News

Severe convective storm, thunderstorm and severe weather impacts reached a record high last year, as the peril drove the largest share of annual natural disaster losses that were covered by insurance and reinsurance in the United States during 2020, according to data from Munich Re.

It is time for the world to act on climate change as it will play an increasing role in disaster losses, Torsten Jeworrek of reinsurance company Munich Re warned today.

The “hardening” of the reinsurance market is expected to be limited to just this year, unless the industry faces losses above expectations throughout the rest of 2021, equity analysts at Barclays said this morning.

AbsoluteClimo, a climate and weather modeling, forecasting and risk management firm based in Hawaii, has teamed up with AKR Zell, a Singapore-based actuarial consultancy, with the collaboration set to deliver climate-driven risk services to the insurance, reinsurance and insurance-linked securities (ILS) sectors.

The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has explained the structure of its $1.153 billion National Flood Insurance Program’s (NFIP) traditional reinsurance renewal for 2021.

Catastrophe exposed property insurance rates surged higher through the fourth-quarter of 2020, with hurricane exposed property in Florida and wildfire exposed property in California seen to experience some of the steepest increases.

With reinsurance rates and pricing having increased at the key January 2021 reinsurance renewals, there is now an expectation that future renewals this year should follow-suit, with some saying rate rises may be even “more pronounced.”

At the January 2021 reinsurance renewals, property rate increases were seen to be at the lower end of expectations, while property retrocession rates also didn’t firm as much as anticipated, broker Guy Carpenter has confirmed.

Australian primary insurance group IAG has successfully renewed its catastrophe reinsurance tower to provide it with the same $10 billion level of occurrence coverage as it had for the prior year, citing only “modest” increases in rates at the renewals.

Zurich North America, a division of the global insurance and reinsurance firm Zurich, has launched a new product to provide insurance protection for weather related non-physical impacts to the construction industry in the United States.