Cat bond news

Swiss Re has returned to the catastrophe bond market for its first sponsorship of this year, seeking $125 million or more in peak peril aggregate and subsequent event retrocession covering North American wind and earthquakes from a Matterhorn Re Ltd. (Series 2026-1) transaction, Artemis can report.

US insurer Allstate has announced an estimated pre-tax catastrophe loss for the fourth quarter of 2025 of $209 million, which lifted the total for the current annual aggregate risk period for its catastrophe bonds to $2.757 billion while the run-rate of losses slowed in recent months.

According to Fitch Ratings, recent catastrophe bond and insurance risk letters (LRS) issuances within Latin America represent a strategic opportunity to expand and sophisticate the regions’ insurance debt market.

Catastrophe bonds and insurance-linked securities (ILS) have transitioned from being niche alternatives to essential diversifiers, while their blend of uncorrelated event premia, low volatility, and robust risk-adjusted performance remains valuable in a landscape marked by macroeconomic uncertainty and concentration risks, says Sage Advisory Services.

A notable surge in secondary catastrophe bond market trading in the final days of 2025 suggests a “robust year-end repositioning”, according to Azimut Switzerland SA’s Isacco Loconte, who highlighted a number of key trends seen when analysing the period of more elevated cat bond market liquidity.

With 2025 seeing catastrophe bond market activity accelerate to deliver the new annual records we detailed in a recent article, it’s also notable that the final quarter of last year saw a number of records broken in a particularly busy three months for the insurance-linked securities industry.

With the insurance-linked securities (ILS) space continuing to gain significant momentum, reinsurance giant Swiss Re and GAM Investments have affirmed their commitment to continue developing new products and identifying opportunities within the ILS market.

The full agenda with speaker allocation to panels is now available for our upcoming insurance-linked securities conference in New York. Tickets are starting to run low for ILS NYC 2026, so we urge you to register to guarantee you can attend the event.

SageSure, the fast-growing catastrophe-exposed property specialist MGU, is back in the catastrophe bond market initially seeking $765 million of broad multi-peril reinsurance from a Gateway Re Ltd. (Series 2026-1) issuance that could become the largest in the series of deals so far, Artemis has learned.

The London Stock Exchange is home to an insurance-linked securities fund strategy again, as the King Ridge Capital Advisors LLC managed UCITS exchange traded catastrophe bond fund (ETF) was listed on the exchange yesterday, further broadening its reach to investors.