Catastrophe bond news

Florida takeout insurer Heritage Property and Casualty Insurance Co’s Citrus Re Ltd. (Series 2015-1) catastrophe bond will complete at $277.5m in size, while pricing looks mixed as it settled towards the upper end on the largest tranche.

Damage from wind storm Niklas, which struck northern European countries, particularly Germany, over the last day or so is not expected to amount to insurance or reinsurance industry losses that would come near troubling catastrophe bonds.

PERILS AG has released the 2015 update of its industry exposure database, which now includes property sums insured for Austria Wind, and shows that European windstorm insured exposures are up 3.0% on a constant FX rate basis.

This morning we published our latest quarterly report on the catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities (ILS) market. The report titled ‘Q1 2015 Catastrophe Bond & ILS Market Report – The biggest first-quarter ever‘ shows that at $2.062 billion of new risk capital issued, this Q1 was a record quarter.

Global reinsurance giant Munich Re has announced the completion of its latest catastrophe bond transaction, Queen Street X Re Limited (2015), which remained at its $100m launch size and was well received by investors, the reinsurer said.

A study undertaken by Conning alongside the American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI) found that life insurance companies could look to invest in alternative asset classes such as ILS as a way to add diversification, while reducing sensitivity to interest rates.

The amount of alternative reinsurance capital in the global reinsurance market rose by 28% again in 2014, finishing the year with $64 billion of alternative or ILS capital deployed and outpacing the growth rate of traditional reinsurance capital significantly.

Allstate’s latest catastrophe bond issuance is not going as smoothly as its previous attempts to tap the capital markets, as investors showed an unwillingness to meet the insurers pricing ambitions leading to the book building “outside of guidance.”

Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corporation hopes to see ‘relatively better pricing’ in its risk transfer programme for 2015, including in a new catastrophe bond expected to come to market via a new issuing vehicle, Everglades Re II Ltd.

The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) is collaborating with HWind Scientific, LLC, a provider of real-time, objective, observation-based hurricane data, in order to better understand how hurricane winds affect building structures.