capital markets

According to James Grossman, the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Public School Employees’ Retirement System (PSERS), the experience of 2017 showed just how important it is to partner with a well-respected insurance-linked securities (ILS) fund manager.

A number of insurance-linked securities (ILS) funds experienced negative performance during the month of June 2018, with further deterioration of the hurricane Irma industry loss estimate and the Lottoland lottery jackpot ILS payout both contributing. But still the average return of the ILS fund market was 0.28% for the month.

Broking, structuring, arrangement and placing activities related to capital market transactions, such as catastrophe bonds, declined slightly during the second-quarter of 2018, but this was offset by strong reinsurance revenue growth across Aon’s Reinsurance Solutions unit.

Bermuda headquartered pure-play reinsurance firm PartnerRe has significantly increased the amount of collateralized quota share retrocessional support its portfolio receives from the capital markets, with growth evident in the firms Lorenz Re sidecar vehicle at the mid-point of 2018.

Specialty lines focused Lloyd’s of London managing general agent (MGA) Sciemus is rebranding to now be called Occam Underwriting (taking its name from Occam’s razor) and at the same time one CEO has departed, another been named, and the firm continues to look to alternative capacity providers.

Florida headquartered and expansive primary insurer Universal Insurance Holdings has gone beyond its plan for second-quarter catastrophe losses, as impacts from the volcanic eruption in Hawaii and other meaningful weather events lifted its losses slightly.

Cessions to third-party capital partners continued to balloon at Bermudian insurance and reinsurance specialist AXIS Capital Holdings Limited in the second-quarter, as the firm continued the trend of placing an increasing reliance on its “strategic capital partners.”

The U.S. property insurance market is characterised by abundant capacity, but one of the benefits of the growth of alternative reinsurance capital and its appetite for catastrophe risk, alongside ample re/insurer surplus, is the expectation that this will produce a stable property market, according to AmWINS.

Digital risk trading start-up Akinova, which is developing an “electronic marketplace for the transfer and trading of (re)insurance risks,” has signed up Pierre Francotte, the former CEO of Euroclear as an advisor.

Bermudian reinsurance firm and third-party capital manager RenaissanceRe will have pleased shareholders and the institutional investors backing its insurance-linked investment strategies with its second-quarter results, as it revealed a significant drop in loss estimates for the 2017 catastrophe events.