Reinsurance News

IncubEx, the product and service development firm that counts its founder and Chairman as insurance and reinsurance entrepreneur and Brit co-founder Neil Eckert, is in the market raising funds and we’re told that one of the target products the firm is working on is catastrophe risk trading.

Prudential Financial and Pension Insurance Corporation (PIC) have joined forces to broaden pension de-risking for smaller pension schemes, by expediting the availability of longevity reinsurance through a flow arrangement, that sees Prudential providing guaranteed capacity to back PIC’s pension risk transfer deals.

The insurance and reinsurance industry loss estimate for Cyclone Debbie has been finalised at AU $1.74 billion by PERILS AG, a 5% on the previous report of the market-wide loss from the storm and now equivalent to roughly US $1.34 billion.

Insurance and reinsurance companies face a conundrum. Driven by their need to modernise, innovate, digitalise and generally shift towards technology driven risk transfer business models, re/insurers are spending increasing amounts of money, causing their expenses and costs to rise as a result.

Insurance and reinsurance industry losses from a storm system that struck the Ontario and Quebec regions of Canada and also affected four states across the border in the U.S. in February look set to rise to at least US $230 million once the full damage is tallied, according to Property Claim Services (PCS).

The acquisition of XL Group was not the expensive option for insurance giant AXA, according to the firms CEO Thomas Buberl, who said that the company had a number of potential acquisition targets on the table which had more expensive valuations.

Artex, one of the largest insurance management firms and a key facilitator in the insurance-linked securities (ILS) and collateralised reinsurance space, has hired one of its co-founders back from competitor Aon, with Peter Mullen set to return in the position of CEO-elect.

The reinsurance and ILS market places itself at risk of arbitration by their use of ambiguous and unreliable industry loss trigger data sources, which can be as random and varied as “any credible source”, according to Property Claim Services (PCS), a Verisk Analytics business.

There remains a relative dearth of cyber risk models for insurance and reinsurance markets to use, compared to the availability of risk modelling tools and analytics for other lines of business. So when a new company launches dedicated to cyber risk and with the backing of tech giant Symantec Corporation it’s worth a closer look.

AXIS Capital Holdings is not an asset manager, CEO Albert Benchimol said recently, but the firm is making “substantial fees” for managing and deploying third-party capital into its reinsurance underwriting business.