Insurance-linked investments

Records continue to be broken in the catastrophe bond market in 2024 and it’s now clear that May is set to become the biggest single month of new catastrophe bond issuance on-record, with a chance of becoming the first time any month has surpassed $4 billion of newly issued cat bonds.

The catastrophe bond market underwent a further phase of spread widening in the last week, with industry-loss index trigger cat bonds leading the way again and now, the wider spreads are being cited as an opportunity for investors to enter the market by Icosa Investments.

Fermat Capital Management, one of the largest specialist investment managers of catastrophe bonds and insurance-linked securities (ILS) assets, launched a new UCITS cat bond fund strategy earlier this year in February, which we’ve learned has already grown above $530 million in assets.

This video features an expert panel discussing cyber catastrophe bond market trends at our Artemis ILS NYC 2024 conference, which was held in New York on February 9th 2024.

Having only launched its business at the beginning of this year, Icosa Investments, the Swiss catastrophe bond focused investment manager launched by co-founders the former Twelve Capital executive Florian Steiger and Swiss financial services and capital markets specialist Jordan Nickerson, has already surpassed $100 million in assets.

Despite the slowdown in the collateralised reinsurance marketplace in recent years, global reinsurer Hannover Re continues to place more limit on behalf of investor and ILS fund partners, growing this segment of its business again in full-year 2023.

With catastrophe reinsurance pricing expected to be largely flat to slightly down at the upcoming June 1st reinsurance renewals and little change expected to terms and attachments, analysts from KBW said the industry can expect “slightly less-excellent” returns ahead, implying still-strong expected underwriting profitability.

Nascent Group, an insurance management and reinsurance transformer company launched by Andre Perez to reimagine the insurance-linked securities (ILS) servicing space, has made two key hires, bringing former Horseshoe and Artex expertise back together, with Yulanda Francis and Shehan Ranasinghe joining the firm.

When global reinsurance firm Swiss Re announced its first-quarter results last week, the company also notified shareholders and markets that it intends to withdraw from its iptiQ business, a tech-focused initiative that effectively brought the giant balance-sheet of the reinsurer much closer to the risk.

We are delighted to announce four more expert speakers who will join us and share their insights with attendees at our upcoming catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities (ILS) market conference in Singapore, ILS Asia 2024, which takes place on July 11th at the Suntec Convention Centre.