Catastrophe bond news

For years we’ve written that insurance companies increasingly look to alternative sources of reinsurance capacity, from insurance-linked securities (ILS) players and the capital markets. But now, according to Marsh, insurance buyers are looking at alternatives too.

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending 30th November 2014, 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.

Executives speaking on the sidelines of the 2014 S&P PwC Bermuda Reinsurance Conference and the ILS Bermuda Convergence 2014 events earlier this month, stressed that innovation is vital to transition through the current reinsurance market challenges.

Zenkyoren, as the largest single buyer of catastrophe reinsurance protection globally is known, is back with a new Japanese earthquake catastrophe bond, Nakama Re Ltd. (Series 2014-2), seeing the insurer looking for as much as five years of protection.

If there were three key features of reinsurance or retrocessional protection which have come to the fore in 2014 they would have to be capital efficiency, the overall flexibility of coverage being offered and the effectiveness of reinsurance coverage to meet a buyers needs.

U.S. insured catastrophe losses from winter storms in 2014 are likely to reach $2.5 billion plus by year’s end, which would be the fourth costliest year for winter storm losses on record, so could trouble some reinsurance contracts, but not cat bonds yet.

Damage from the magnitude 6.2 earthquake which struck the Nagano region of central Japan on Saturday is not thought to be sufficiently severe to worry any of the exposed Japanese earthquake catastrophe bond transactions, according to the market.

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending 23rd November 2014, 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.

In a testimony delivered to the United States House of Representatives, NAMIC suggested that the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program would benefit from transferring risk to the private sector through reinsurance and catastrophe bonds.

A significant number of pension funds show an increased appetite for investment risk and alternative asset classes, according to State Street, which could result in more allocations to insurance-linked securities (ILS) or reinsurance linked investments,