Fontana Holdings

RenaissanceRe, the Bermuda based reinsurer and third-party ILS capital manager, has announced that Robin Lang is being named as permanent Group Chief Risk Officer, to succeed Ian Branagan in the role.

With more than two decades of experience in managing third-party reinsurance capital, and the recent creation of its casualty and specialty dedicated vehicle, Bermuda-based RenaissanceRe has become somewhat of a one-stop shop for ILS and reinsurance, according to Chris Parry, Global Head of Capital Partners.

Global insurance giant AIG is set to invest up to $500 million into third-party capital and joint-venture vehicles run by RenaissanceRe’s Capital Partners unit, as part of the arrangement that sees the company selling the Validus reinsurance and AlphaCat ILS arms to RenaissanceRe.

RenaissanceRe is intending to leverage its third-party reinsurance capital and insurance-linked securities (ILS) operations to extract greater efficiencies out of the Validus Re reinsurance book, as it assumes it after the recently announced acquisition, with more investor capital set to be raised to support these efforts.

As part of the recently announced arrangement that will see RenaissanceRe acquiring AIG’s Validus reinsurance units and its AlphaCat Managers ILS operation, AIG has also taken an option to make what is termed a “substantial” investment into two of the RenaissanceRe Capital Partners vehicles.

During the first-quarter of 2023, RenaissanceRe saw its third-party capital assets under management (AUM) dedicated to property and casualty reinsurance business rise by $400 million, with the total reaching a new high of $6.6 billion in assets managed, at March 31st.

The property catastrophe reinsurance market is “in a very attractive phase” and, for RenaissanceRe, reinsurance as a whole is currently seen as more attractive right now, with its CEO Kevin O’Donnell saying he expects this to be the case for the foreseeable future.

RenaissanceRe, the global reinsurance company and third-party capital manager, continued to have great success in raising funds from third-party investors for its range of joint-venture and insurance-linked securities (ILS) structures, adding just over $767 million so far in 2023, with its Medici catastrophe bond fund strategy taking more than half the inflows.

The fact RenaissanceRe continued to raise third-party investor funds for its Capital Partners business through 2022 and into 2023 demonstrates that this is a permanent part of the reinsurance firm’s capital base, CEO Kevin O’Donnell explained recently.

The “denominator effect” and investor rebalancing across asset classes has driven some of the biggest challenges for the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market in recent months, Chris Parry, Global Head of Capital Partners at RenaissanceRe, told us in our latest Artemis Live interview.