Reinsurance News

Global reinsurance firm Swiss Re is targeting further growth and diversification within its portfolio of natural catastrophe risks, with investor-backed alternative sources of capital set to play an increasingly important and supportive role.

Indonesia’s government has reportedly secured approximately US $770 million of natural disaster insurance coverage for state buildings and assets, as the country begins to implement its plans to transfer some of the financial risk of catastrophes to private insurance and reinsurance markets.

Artex Risk Solutions, the captive and alternative risk transfer solutions subsidiary of Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., has continued to build-out the breadth of its offering with the acquisition of another reinsurance related servicer EWI Re, Inc.

Industry backed catastrophe loss data aggregator and estimator PERILS AG is investigating three recent events around the globe, to establish whether they will meet the various thresholds for each region and peril to warrant regular reporting.

Retrocessional reinsurance focused investment manager Markel CATCo Investment Management expects that the combined impacts of recent catastrophe events typhoon Hagibis, typhoon Faxai and hurricane Dorian will result in a roughly 25% impact to capital deployed in the 2019 portfolio of its listed fund.

Year-to-date 2019 pre-tax catastrophe losses for U.S. primary insurance giant Allstate have risen to $2.5 billion, after 12 events in October added another $237 million to the running total.

Recent developments in the re/insurance and ILS markets have resulted in a significant expansion of parametric solutions, and executives at Descartes Underwriting believe many opportunities for further growth are now available to companies offering these kinds of products.

Neon Underwriting, the specialty insurance and reinsurance operation that is part of American Financial Group, Inc., has confirmed that it is pulling back from all property treaty reinsurance underwriting, citing a mismatch in pricing between retrocession and its inwards business.

With retrocessional reinsurance capacity expected to be constrained at the January 2020 renewals, particularly collateralised from the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market, some reinsurers and in particular Lloyd’s players may have to rethink their premium growth plans, analysts have suggested.

The General Insurance Association of Japan (GIAJ) has reported that already domestic insurers in the country have paid out just under US $2.5 billion for claims from typhoon Faxai, while for more recent typhoon Hagibis the claims are still mounting up.