Parametric insurance news

Climate change has returned to the top of a global ranking of perceived risks, according to risk management experts and public opinion, but in some regions of the world the pandemic remains the major concern, according to insurance and reinsurance company AXA in a new report.

A new risk transfer product for urban landslides in the Manizales area of Colombia has been developed by Global Parametrics alongside Latin American catastrophe risk modeler ERN and Ingeniar, a private advisor on risk management to the local government of Manizales.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has today launched the Insurance and Risk Finance Facility (IRFF), a new initiative that aims to build financial resilience and bridge a $1.4 trillion global health, mortality, and disaster protection gap, with support from the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market expected in future.

Analysis from S&P Global Ratings suggests that reinsurance firms may be underestimating their natural catastrophe exposures by anywhere from 33% to as much as 50%, as they grapple with incorporating climate change into their decision-making process.

The potential impact from climate change on natural catastrophe P&C insurance and reinsurance claims is the biggest fear of investors in the sector polled by equity analysts at Bank of America.

The direct to consumer parametric earthquake insurance product offered by Super Seguros Inc. in the Latin American market was triggered by the recent M7.0 quake that struck the Acapulco region of Mexico, its founder told Artemis.

Research from Ceres, the non-profit focused on sustainability challenges such as global climate change and water scarcity and their implications, has found that major US banks have more than $250 billion of exposure to physical climate risks annually sitting in their loan portfolios.

In a positive move to accelerate and widen the roll-out of important parametric insurance products to protect against climate and disaster risks, the Government of Fiji has exempted them from value added tax (VAT).

Global Parametrics has collaborated on a new climate risk transfer product that integrates parametric risk transfer with the provision of debt financing to microfinance organisations and initiatives.

Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, the large commercial risk specialist unit of the global reinsurance firm, has already settled one parametric insurance claim, after a clients parametric trigger was breached by hurricane Ida’s wind speeds.