Catastrophe bond news

With the consultation on reforms to the UK’s insurance special purpose vehicle (ISPV) regulatory regime underway, Sam Woods, the CEO of the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) has highlighted this as a priority for driving competitiveness and growth.

On Friday some catastrophe bonds saw further negative secondary market price movements due to potential exposure to aggregate attachment erosion, or actual losses, from the Los Angeles and Southern California wildfires. Here we detail the latest information we have on names that experienced the most meaningful moves in the last week.

Swiss Re is now targeting as much as $225 million in North American earthquake and named storm retrocessional reinsurance protection from capital market investors, through its new Matterhorn Re Ltd. (Series 2025-1) catastrophe bond, Artemis understand.

Mercury General Corporation, one insurance company with meaningful exposure to claims from the Los Angeles, California wildfires, has said today that it has not yet determined whether it will consider the fires as two separate events under its reinsurance arrangements.

Analysis by catastrophe bond fund manager Plenum Investments suggests that the cat bond market is implying a roughly $30 billion industry loss from the Los Angeles, California wildfires, while also reporting that the Swiss Re Cat Bond Total Return Index fell -0.27% for the last week.

According to the latest official data from California fire authorities, the wildfires in the Los Angeles region have damaged or destroyed 17,027 structures so far, while the early insurance industry loss estimates from risk modellers average $32.5 billion.

A new catastrophe bond is being marketed to source broad, first and second event US named storm reinsurance protection for underwriting entities linked to coastal property managing general underwriter SageSure, with an initial $410 million target for this Gateway Re Ltd. (Series 2025-1) issuance.

Moody’s RMS Event Response has estimated that private market and FAIR Plan insured losses to-date from the Los Angeles, California wildfires will likely fall in a range between $20 billion and $30 billion.

The Lloyd’s insurance and reinsurance market has reported that its London Bridge risk transformation and insurance-linked securities (ILS) platform has now seen $1.92 billion of capital deployed through its cells, with $2.55 billion of capital committed.

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending January 19th 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.