Retrocession news

PartnerRe, the Bermuda headquartered and EXOR owned reinsurance company, has significantly grown its third-party capital assets under management, lifting them above $1 billion around the January 2021 renewals.

Catastrophe risk modeller AIR Worldwide has warned that recent winter storm Uri and associated severe winter weather could result in an insurance and reinsurance industry loss that is “well in excess” of $10 billion.

Global reinsurance player Munich Re had some positive words for the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market, suggesting that alternative capital sources in reinsurance are presenting “disciplined” competition at this time.

Palomar Insurance Holdings, the speciality California-headquartered insurer that provides largely catastrophe exposed property products, has said that it expects its reinsurance program to respond to the losses it will face from winter storm Uri’s impacts in Texas.

Global insurance and reinsurance group AXA has reduced its exposure to peak U.S. natural catastrophe events at the January 2021 renewals, lowering its retention for major hurricanes and earthquakes by one-third and its aggregate tower retention as well.

Property and casualty insurers in the United States are facing record levels of first-quarter catastrophe losses due to the severe winter weather associated with winter storm Uri, rating agency Fitch has said.

The reinsurance market is not in a hard market and in fact rate increases seen at the January 2021 renewal season are only seen as adequate by Moody’s, who believe that reinsurance prices must keep rising for adequate risk-adjusted returns to be achievable.

Winter storm Uri is destined to become a record insurance and reinsurance market loss for a winter weather event in the United States and while the impacts may be in the double-digit billions of dollars, the ILS market may be protected from too significant a share.

The ongoing renegotiation and fine tuning of terms and conditions related to insurance-linked securities (ILS) capital deployment continued at the key January reinsurance renewals, with ILS fund managers gaining some more ground.

The Australian Reinsurance Pool Corporation, which administers Australia’s terrorism insurance scheme, has renewed its retrocessional reinsurance program with $3.475 billion of coverage, with limit secured slightly up on the prior year as it reduced its retention by $25 million.