capital markets

AGILE Risk Partners, a specialist and technology focused direct & facultative (D&F) property risk underwriting start-up, has partnered with experienced mapping and data experts HERE Technologies as it seeks to improve the quality of risk data used in underwriting decision-making.

After a period of relatively low activity over the first half of the year, analysts at Moody’s believe that some alternative capital investors could return to the market based on a combination of hardening prices, low interest rates, and growing clarity on COVID claims.

Brokers are reporting increasing demand for cyber reinsurance in 2020, across the range of structures available in the market, the latest annual cyber insurance market survey from PartnerRe shows.

Hamilton, the Bermuda based insurance and reinsurance holding company, is in the process of developing and establishing a collateralised retrocession offering and third-party capital manager named Ada Capital Management, as it targets the most dislocated segment of reinsurance.

Akinova, the start-up that aims to create a platform or marketplace for the transfer and trading of insurance and reinsurance risks, is adopting a focus on clearing trades, signing up Ian Axe to its advisory team, a former Group CEO of LCH.Clearnet.

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) continues to see the development of a regional catastrophe bond market as positive, highlighting at a recent workshop that cat bonds are a win-win relationship for governments and investors.

The long-awaited, significant hardening of the reinsurance market, underpinned by price increases and improving terms and conditions (T&Cs), is vital following the disappointing response to catastrophe events over the past few years, according to experts from across the re/insurance and insurance-linked securities (ILS) space.

Despite the fact insurance and reinsurance markets become increasingly sophisticated in their use of technology to reach customers and provide enhanced coverage, in North America, perhaps the most advanced economy in insured terms, the natural catastrophe protection gap actually widened by over 7% in 2019.

Broking giant Aon said that reinsurance companies included in its Aon’s Reinsurance Aggregate won’t cover their cost of capital in 2020, after loss ratios rose on the COVID-19 pandemic.

The alignment inherent in the collateralised reinsurance sidecar vehicles that Swiss Re operates has helped the company to attract fresh ILS capital even during difficult times, the firms CEO Christian Mumenthaler told us.