Alternative reinsurance capital

Unless there are “substantial” losses to insurance-linked securities (ILS) from catastrophe events in the second-half of 2024, Fitch Ratings said it expects “continued strong supply growth in the alternative reinsurance capital market into 2025.”

Strong and still rising demand for reinsurance protection is expected to be a ballast for underwriting profitability for the sector, even as pricing comes off its recent peaks and the market begins to soften somewhat, analysts at investment bank Berenberg have said.

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending August 25th 2024, covering catastrophe bonds, ILS, reinsurance capital and related risk transfer topics. To ensure you never miss a thing subscribe to the weekly Artemis email newsletter updates or get our email alerts for every article we publish.

Yesterday’s launch of Leadline Capital Partners represents a “natural evolution” to third-party reinsurance capital management activities at global re/insurer Ascot, Justin Keith, President and Chief Executive Officer of Ascot Bermuda Limited, told Artemis in an interview.

Over the last couple of years the amount of capital trapped in collateralized reinsurance, retrocession and other insurance-linked securities (ILS) has declined significantly, which makes for a much larger and more impactful ILS capital market than you might think, AM Best rightly points out.

As the busy reinsurance conferencing season approaches, kicked off in September by our Artemis London 2024 ILS market event and soon after the Monte Carlo Reinsurance Rendezvous, it’s perhaps no surprise that talk of the reinsurance market cycle re-emerges.

Ascot Group, the specialist global re/insurance underwriter owned by Canadian pension allocator CPP Investments, has launched a new dedicated third-party capital management platform named Leadline Capital Partners, as it looks to expand its activities in the space and brings on new investors to support it.

Over the first-half of this year, US headquartered insurance holding company W. R. Berkley Corporation ceded fewer premiums to its Lifson Re collateralized reinsurance sidecar, despite the vehicle remaining the same size in capital terms for 2024.

In time, as wildfire risk models advance and the market becomes more accepting of them, Guy Carpenter executives suggest investor confidence may increase, resulting in a growing willingness to deploy ILS capital to support the California market’s need for wildfire protection.

The management of fronting specialist Clear Blue Insurance are praised for the rapid and determined response to the issues that arose when the company found itself caught up in the reinsurance letter of credit (LOC) fraud perpetrated by Vesttoo, according to rating agency KBRA.