Insurance-linked investments

Due to the range of influences and factors affecting catastrophe bonds and insurance-linked securities (ILS) this year, Nelson Seo, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Fermat Capital Management, believes this could be the best ILS investment environment ever.

The outlook for the end of year reinsurance renewals may not be saved by a cavalry of ILS capital, coming in at the last minute to fill holes in programs this year, but our sources suggest pockets of successful capital raising from investors are being seen, allowing some to capitalise on the 1/1 rate opportunity.

Vantage Risk, the Bermuda headquartered insurance and reinsurance company, has put together close to $1 billion of capital for deployment into property catastrophe reinsurance opportunities around the 1/1 2023 renewals, using its AdVantage collateralized insurer class of company.

FG Financial Group, Inc., the company was formed out of 1347 Property Insurance Holdings, Inc., has announced that it is raising capital for its first collateralized reinsurance sidecar, to provide additional capacity to fund its expansion into the hard reinsurance marketplace.

Ark Insurance Holdings Limited, a property and casualty insurance and reinsurance subsidiary of the White Mountains Insurance Group, Ltd., has succesfully sponsored a $250 million collateralized reinsurance sidecar Outrigger Re Ltd.

Vesttoo, the insurance-linked securities (ILS) focused insurtech company, has made another key hire, bringing onboard former Aeolus Capital Management analyst James Anfossi as a Portfolio Manager based in Bermuda.

The recently enacted legislative reforms to Florida’s property insurance marketplace have the potential to alleviate some of the concerns of the insurance-linked securities (ILS) industry over prolonged trapping of capital, according to AM Best.

Netherlands-based pension investor PGGM had increased the size of its insurance-linked securities (ILS) market investments to roughly US $8.5 billion (EUR 8.2bn) as of the middle of the year, with this growth at a time of overall asset devaluation likely the trigger for its more recent downsizing in the asset class.

The lower-risk cohort of UCITS catastrophe bond funds has again seen the strongest gains in the last week of record to December 9th, according to the latest data from the Plenum CAT Bond UCITS Fund Indices, while overall the Index is now only down around 2.80% year-to-date.

Cyber risk analytics and quantification software specialist CyberCube has announced a successful raise of $50 million in capital to fund growth of the business, with reinsurance investment specialist Hudson Structured Capital Management (HSCM) participating again.