Catastrophe bond news

Catastrophe and hazard risk modelling company JBA Risk Management today launched its first catastrophe risk modelling platform, JCalf 15, featuring multi-peril probabilistic models and is relevant to both reinsurance and ILS users.

Despite rates in the global reinsurance market falling over the last couple of years, investors continue to show increased interest in reinsurance and insurance-linked securities (ILS) as a diversifying asset class, according to Towers Watson.

Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance achieved attractive savings at its reinsurance renewal thanks to strong investor support for its $100m Pelican III Re Ltd. (Series 2015-1), the insurers third catastrophe bond transaction.

Analysts from Goldman Sachs believe that reinsurance pricing could stabilise by the end of 2016, but warn that this could be at a structurally lower level from where they may not rise much again, even after future losses.

Premiums for earthquake insurance in Japan are set to rise again, with Nikkei reporting rises of between 20% and 30% are likely from 2016. The upwards pressure on primary insurance may help to slow or even stop the softening of reinsurance premiums in Japan.

Property Claim Services (PCS) is expanding internationally and has today announced the launch of PCS Turkey, to provide catastrophe loss aggregation services and industry loss estimates for events that occur throughout the country.

Floridian insurers are better protected with catastrophe reinsurance than in the early 1990’s pre-hurricane Andrew, thanks to the use of both vertical and sideways protection, according to financial analysis firm Demotech Inc.

In current form, the U.S. Treasury Internal Revenue Service’s proposed rules for Passive Foreign Investment Companies (PFICs) could impact a number of alternative risk, reinsurance and ILS structures and activities.

The London Market Group (LMG), an organisation established to look at London’s role in insurance and reinsurance, has now established a task force to look at progressing initiatives to make London a more attractive hub for catastrophe bonds and ILS.

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending 24th May 2015, 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.