Catastrophe bond news

As expected Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance is returning to the catastrophe bond market for the third time with a new SPI vehicle to sponsor a $100m or greater Pelican III Re Ltd. (Series 2015-1) indemnity bond.

The United Kingdom government will seek to develop a corporate and tax structure that allows for insurance-linked securities (ILS) such as catastrophe bonds to be domiciled locally. The measure was announced in the 2015 Budget today.

The World Bank Group is actively working on the development of a concept for a pandemic risk financing facility that will be designed to enable rapid payouts of funds to countries in need of financial support when pandemics hit.

Global reinsurance firm Swiss Re said that, in the face of pricing pressure from alternative capital, traditional reinsurers capital management activities will help to decrease sector capital and stabilise natural catastrophe and other reinsurance pricing.

The world’s largest reinsurance firm Munich Re is returning to the catastrophe bond market, trying again to issue a $100m Queen Street X Re Limited (2015) catastrophe bond to provide it with retrocessional protection for U.S. hurricane and Australian cyclone risks.

Pressure from “cyclical softness” in the global reinsurance market will increase as alternative or third-party sources of reinsurance capital expand their horizons, but evidence suggests they’re not behaving recklessly according to analysts at KBW.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) aims to implement the ASEAN Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance Programme, as access to risk capital and immediate liquidity post-disaster is recognised as increasingly important to the region’s growth.

Florida takeout insurance company Heritage Property and Casualty Insurance Co. is returning to the capital markets as it seeks out low-cost reinsurance capital with its third catastrophe bond issue, a currently $150m Citrus Re Ltd. (Series 2015-1) transaction.

A substantial number of the 100 most vulnerable cities in the world to the perils of natural disasters are situated in the Philippines, China, Japan and Bangladesh, according to recent findings from Verisk Maplecroft, a Verisk Analytics division.

Top insurance and reinsurance organisations have called on governments of the world to increase efforts to raise resilience against natural disasters, highlighting the gap between economic and insured losses as an area that the industry can support resilience goals.