investor

Independent asset management group GAM Holdings announced its first-half results today, reporting net new money inflows of approx $1.43 billion and 5% growth in assets over the period, with its catastrophe bond fund strategies contributing strongly.

As we wrote last Friday in this article on the subject, Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance plans to increase its spending on private market reinsurance and risk transfer in 2013, upping the amount of cover it will look to acquire by almost 17%. It has been expected that Citizens would look to the capital markets again […]

Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance, the property insurer of last resort in the hurricane prone sunshine state, is to increase its spending on private market reinsurance and risk transfer in 2013, upping the amount of cover it will look to acquire by almost 17%. 2012 was a landmark year for Citizens and the Florida insurance market […]

Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance, the property insurer of last resort in the sunshine state, has been on a mission to reduce its exposures to ensure its claims paying ability is retained. This has involved a lot of discussion on the potential ‘depopulation’ of Citizens, or offloading of policies and customers to private insurers, and now […]

2012 was a unique year in the insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bond issuance market, with near record issuance, the market reaching a record size, new sponsors coming to market and repeat sponsors continuing to demonstrate their comfort with and commitment to ILS and cat bonds for risk transfer. As well as a healthy issuance side […]

The Lakeside Re III Ltd. catastrophe bond which completed in December brought benefits to sponsoring insurance group Zurich beyond purely transferring risk to the capital markets. The $270m U.S. and Canada earthquake cat bond provides Zurich with a multi-year source of collateralized reinsurance indemnification on an annual aggregate basis. It is Zurich’s third cat bond in […]

The investor landscape within the insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bond market has changed over the relatively short period that the market has been in operation. These days it’s the dedicated ILS and cat bond specialist investment managers and their funds which dominate the space, accounting for almost 60% of investor capacity now, compared to as […]

From a sponsors perspective, be that an insurer, reinsurer or perhaps even a corporate sponsor, there are many beneficial features to the catastrophe bond. They can be structured to closely complement existing sources of reinsurance or retrocessional cover, they can provide capacity where it perhaps was not available through the traditional reinsurance markets and they […]

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 […]

Investment manager GAM have announced that they are going to be operating a waiting list on new subscriptions to their GAM Star Cat Bond fund due to capacity constraints in the sector. The UCITS-compliant fund which launched in Q4 last year has apparently been seeing strong investor demand and it seems that this demand has […]