Reinsurance News

Global insurance and reinsurance losses from natural catastrophes reached $76 billion in 2018, the fourth highest in reinsurance firm Swiss Re’s sigma records.

Severe flooding and thunderstorms across the United States drove an estimated $1.3 billion or more of losses that will fall to insurance and reinsurance interests, according to broker Aon.

The World Bank is targeting the development of a second iteration of the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility, an improved PEF 2.0 as it is being called, which it expects to be marketed around May 2020, prior to the maturing of the first transaction.

StarStone, the specialty underwriting business owned by insurance and reinsurance group Enstar and investors Stone Point and Dowling Capital Partners, has named industry veterans Ed Noonan and Dick Sanford to key leadership positions.

Speciality California-based catastrophe exposed property insurer Palomar Insurance Holdings has raised its target for an impending Nasdaq initial public offering (IPO), hoping to raise as much as $110 million at the top-end of its share price estimates.

TigerRisk Partners LLC, the global reinsurance broker, risk and capital advisory, is aiming to further expand its business on the U.S. West Coast with the hiring of Kevin Feldman as Partner, who was previously a Guy Carpenter Managing Director.

Even though large catastrophe losses were under the long-term average for the first-quarter, there is a chance that insurance and reinsurance firms have their Q1 results dented anyway, due to an expectation of higher attritional weather claims, impacts from a number of man-made loss events and ongoing loss creep.

Indicative pricing for certain types of industry-loss warranty (ILW) backed retrocessional reinsurance protection has been on the rise, with Florida wind and as a result U.S. all natural perils seeing the largest increases of in advance of the mid-year renewals.

Program and fronting service specialist, Spinnaker Insurance Company, expects further organic growth as it continues to scale its operations with the support of the insurance-linked securities (ILS) space, according to General Counsel, Nicholas Scott and Senior Vice President (SVP), Adam Tyburski.

Personal lines property insurance rates in California and Florida have jumped in the first-quarter of 2019, which will partly reflect an expectation among primary insurers that they will need to pay more for their reinsurance cover this year.