institutional investor

Participation in the insurance-linked security (ILS) and catastrophe bond markets is on the increase from a segment of the investment world which rating agency A.M. Best terms ‘non-specialist investors’. These large, institutional and capital market investors, include entities such as pension funds and mutual funds and they have been steadily increasing allocations to the ILS […]

The increasing interest that pension funds around the world are showing in the catastrophe bond and insurance-linked security assets classes will be nothing new to our readers. It’s been widely accepted that much of the capital flowing into the insurance-linked and reinsurance-linked investment space (including catastrophe bonds) has been sourced from institutional pension fund investment […]

The recently published report on Insurance Linked Securities (ILS) by independent publisher Clear Path Analysis contains a roundtable interview which involves two representatives of pension funds who don’t currently invest in catastrophe bonds or insurance-linked securities and asks them what they think of the asset class. Their comments suggest that there is still a need […]

Hedge Fund Alert, one of the leading publications covering the hedge fund investment industry, have published an interesting article which discusses the results of their annual industry outlook survey. The article says that the consensus among 20 participants in their survey was that large institutional investors, such as pension funds, endowments and insurers, are becoming […]

Investment manager GAM has announced the launch of a UCITS version of their catastrophe bond fund today. GAM Star Cat Bond is a UCITS-compliant fund which aims to deliver stable and attractive returns from a diversified basket of underlying catastrophe bonds and insurance-linked securities. They are seeking to provide attractive returns which are not correlated […]

The options available to investors seeking to access non-correlated returns by investing in insurance and reinsurance linked asset classes which are correlated to catastrophe events and not to the wider financial markets are growing. As different types of reinsurance vehicles emerge and new ways to structure and trigger insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bonds are found, […]

Barclays Capital have today announced the launch of a program which aims to streamline issuance of catastrophe bonds and insurance-linked securities while also lowering transaction costs and barriers to entry for issuers. The platform, which is an extension of Barclays Capital’s event-linked swaps business will seek to efficiently and cost-effectively allow for transfer of natural […]

This morning we attended Standard & Poor’s London ILS event, the ‘5th Annual European Insurance-Linked Securities Conference’. This well attended, informative event featured a number of interesting panel discussions including one involving three well known ILS investment managers discussing the increasing trend for pension funds investing in ILS and catastrophe bonds.

Aon Benfield Securities recently published a very comprehensive report on the last twelve months in the insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bond market, which we wrote about here. As well as reviewing the market and transactions from the last year the report also looks at some interesting data points which we felt worth highlighting separately.

Standard & Poor’s have issued a report (available to Ratings Direct subscribers here) which discusses the role that the bond markets and capital markets in general have to play in financing countries response to and mitigation efforts for climate change. The report identifies that there are issues to overcome before institutional investors will allow their […]