Cat bond news

Nephila, one of the world’s largest and longest-standing insurance-linked securities (ILS) managers, has made changes at the leadership level, with Jessica Laird promoted to become CEO of Nephila Capital, as one of its co-founders, Frank Majors, steps back from the top team to focus on portfolio construction.

As per S&P Global Ratings, despite several catastrophe bonds defaulting following record-high insured losses from the California wildfires in early 2025 and through recent catastrophe years, the default rate across both rated and non-rated catastrophe bonds remains very low at just 2.3%.

There is just one week left until our next catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities (ILS) conference, Artemis London 2025. Held in London on September 2nd, the event will feature a full-day of in-depth discussion about the ILS market and valuable networking. Register to attend and join the crowd.

Another private catastrophe bond issuance has come to light, as an Artex Risk Solutions owned and operated entity has issued a roughly US $40.6 million Artex Axcell Re (Series FE0003) cat bond lite transaction that being denominated in Japanese Yen suggests the underlying risk transfer arrangement likely covers perils within that country.

Record levels of catastrophe bond market issuance in 2025 are reshaping the pricing landscape, AM Best believes, but the rating agency sees no sign of a slow-down ahead, as “all indications point to continued growth.”

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending August 24th 2025, 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.

A recent paper authored by Kensuke Molnar-Tanaka, OECD Development Centre and Hiroaki Sakamoto, Kobe University, explores how catastrophe bonds are being viewed as being more advantageous compared to taxation, when it comes to tackling the increasing rise in costs related to global natural catastrophe events.

The catastrophe bond market has shown increasing confidence in assuming wildfire risk even after the major disaster that struck the Los Angeles region of California at the start of this year, with already over $3.375 billion of cat bonds issued in 2025 that have an exposure to the wildfire peril.

A quieter July in catastrophe loss terms resulted in US insurer Allstate only reporting $184 million in pre-tax impacts from severe weather events, which has lifted the total for the current annual aggregate risk period for its catastrophe bonds to $2.174 billion so far.

According to equity analysts from Berenberg, alternative capital and insurance-linked securities instruments have become an increasingly important component of property catastrophe reinsurance limit, notably in the United States as cedants see value in diversified sourced capital.