SCOR lifts ILS assets to $2.4bn as fronting relationship with Global P&C begins

SCOR Investment Partners, the asset management company of the global reinsurance group SCOR, has raised fresh capital for its insurance-linked securities (ILS) strategies in the first-half of 2020, lifting its ILS assets managed to $2.4 billion.

The increase in ILS assets under management at SCOR Investment Partners came as it began leveraging the fronting capabilities of SCOR’s Global P&C underwriting unit.

As we revealed a year ago, SCOR had plans to place ILS at the heart of the business and part of this was to adopt a more coordinated approach to ILS for its clients, offering its traditional reinsurance capacity alongside collateralised capacity from SCOR Investment Partners’ long-standing ILS fund Atropos as well as from Coriolis Capital, the London-based ILS fund manager SCOR acquired last year.

Within this coordinated approach was a plan to perhaps front business for the ILS funds, to make it simpler for clients to access their collateralised capacity and easier for the ILS funds to enter into transactions with an increasingly broad range of SCOR clients.

The fronting relationship between the SCOR owned ILS funds and its SCOR Global P&C reinsurance underwriting unit began this year, with SCOR Global P&C fronting capacity used ILS over-the-counter transactions on behalf of SCOR Investment Partners strategies.

In addition, the SCOR ILS funds have benefited from a coordinated market approach, to SCOR Global P&C’s client base, between the SCOR Global P&C underwriting teams and SCOR Investment Partners origination team.

Added to this, the coordinated approach has enabled the design of investment solutions managed by SCOR Investment Partners using SCOR Global P&C underwriting capacity.

This has all helped SCOR to gain new capital inflows to the SCOR Investment Partners ILS funds in the first-half of 2020, despite the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

SCOR’s overall ILS assets under management (AuM) rose 9%, from $2.2 billion at the end of 2019 to $2.4 billion at the end of June 2020.

The growth has been experienced in the SCOR Investment Partners ILS strategies, which rose from $1.47 billion at the end of 2019 to $1.71 billion at the end of H1 2020.

Coriolis Capital experienced a slight decline in assets during the period to $652 million.

The integration of Coriolis continues apace though and SCOR explained today that this is “well on track, with the objective to have a single integrated ILS platform fully operational by year-end 2020.”

Bringing together the SCOR Investment Partners and Coriolis platforms, alongside the coordinated interaction with SCOR Global P&C, positions the company well to continue expanding its ILS assets under management.