Catastrophe bond news

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending 15th February 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.

Two UCITS catastrophe bond investment funds have been cited as among the top performing UCITS credit strategies of 2014, at a time when investors searching for fixed income and credit allocation options have been struggling.

Global independent insurance and reinsurance manager Kane has announced the launch of a new ILS note program today, with an added feature, the addition of the EuroClear Settlement System which Kane says will facilitate secondary trading for cat bonds.

As we wrote back in December, the Board of Florida Citizens approved sponsoring another Everglades Re Ltd. catastrophe bond as part of its 2015 risk transfer program, which will seek around $4.05 billion of reinsurance protection for the insurer.

Last week saw the launch of a new comprehensive, high-resolution flood mapping system for emerging global markets, which aims to enhance insurance and reinsurance catastrophe risk management, by SSBN Flood Risk Solutions and ImageCat.

Insurance-linked securities (ILS) and alternative capital providers are not the enemy of the traditional reinsurance market, according to Hannover Re’s Head of ILS, Henning Ludolphs who was speaking in a recent press briefing.

U.S. primary insurance firm Allstate continues to explore ways it could replace some of its own capital base, using third-party reinsurance investors, “quite aggressively” according to its CEO, who said the firm is “spending a lot of time on it.”

In the latest in our series of interviews with figures from the risk transfer and insurance-linked securities markets, Artemis spoke with Tom Johansmeyer, assistant vice president – Reinsurance Services, ISO on new initiatives at the organisation.

Catlin, the global specialty property casualty insurance and reinsurance firm currently going through a merger with XL Group, has continued to grow its third-party reinsurance capital programme to almost $350m of investor capital for 2015.

Risk models are an important tool for evaluating risk and responding to impending events. Reinsurance, Insurance Linked Securities and catastrophe bonds are dependent on assessing risk in susceptible locations like Florida and the U. S. Gulf of Mexico coast.