September 2014/1

Former Swiss Re executives Stefano Sola and Richard Pennay have founded a new technology-focused catastrophe broking house, Rewire Holdings.

Aspen Re has promoted its chief risk officer Stephen Postlewhite to the CEO role after James Few stepped down to pursue other opportunities.

DaVinci investor raises stake; Lancashire targets $500mn for Kinesis; AlphaCat AuM reaches $1.49bn

Short-tail cat specialists came under pressure during the second quarter of 2014 as softening market conditions hit the peer group's results at multiple angles, according to analysis by The Insurance Insider's Data Room

A handful of reinsurer sidecars accrued average returns of 3.8 percent during the first four months of 2014, according to the latest results from mutual fund manager Stone Ridge

ILS fund managers may write as much as four times the amount of premium per employee as rated reinsurers, according to Trading Risk estimates

Golub Capital is deferring the launch of its reinsurance start-up, sister publication The Insurance Insider reported

Sweden's third national pension buffer fund AP3 continued to reduce its insurance-linked assets in the first half of 2014 after scaling back its exposure in 2013, according to interim results released in late August

RMS(one) platform delayed; BMS Capital Advisory; Steadfast Re launches; RMS puts Napa quake cost at $250mn...

Cat bond prices remained 1.16 percent below the peak recorded for 2014 by the end of August, after beginning their seasonal climb in mid-July

The regulator for securities firms operating in the US has begun to publish data on catastrophe bonds traded by its members in an attempt to make the Rule 144A bond market more transparent

A surge in reinsurance capacity for longevity risk has helped to compress risk transfer prices and resulted in a flood of deals in the third quarter, as pension funds and insurers hedged liabilities worth £28bn ($46.5bn) in total

ILS funds have been promised a busy pipeline of deals in Q4 following a quiet end to the third quarter, with just one deal in the market ahead of the Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous

Aviation rates are poised to rise after a year of heavy losses for the niche insurance market, with Brit Insurance CEO Mark Cloutier predicting rates could increase by up to 50 percent.

The Turkish Catastrophe Insurance Pool (TCIP) is set to issue a second Bosphorus Re earthquake catastrophe bond but is looking to switch from a parametric to an indemnity trigger, Trading Risk can reveal

Favourable rates pushed the California Earthquake Authority (CEA) to top up its traditional reinsurance cover in August after its $150mn 2011 Embarcadero Re cat bond lapsed at the end of July, sources said

Catastrophe bond investors and cedants typically have limited visibility of forthcoming transactions, due to now-repealed US securities law restrictions on general solicitation that have enforced radio silence on participants until a deal is formally launched.

One of the questions the reinsurance market has been grappling with over the past year is how to make a "strategic sidecar" work

Lloyd's insurers Amlin and Catlin both highlighted the strength of catastrophe rates in comparison to pre-2011 prices in their interim results, despite a significant drop in rates over the past two years.

Leadenhall Capital Partners CEO Luca Albertini said that the fund manager's allocation rates on 2014 reinsurance programmes doubled from the previous year's renewals.

Arch chairman, president and CEO Dinos Iordanou said that its investment in Watford Re will broaden its offering to brokers and clients, rather than cannibalise existing business.

London-based ILS fund manager Securis Investment Partners is launching a new fund that will target the Lloyd's market by providing capital to syndicates, Trading Risk can reveal

A number of reinsurers have highlighted new or improved retro purchases in 2014 as one of the ways they are combatting the soft market.

Munich Re is in the early stages of marketing a new sidecar to investors that it hopes will be a much larger replacement for the $63mn Eden Re vehicle, Trading Risk understands