Opinion

Every New Year the (re)insurance industry looks back at how much natural disasters cost it in the last 12 months – but the 2019 statistics undercut the value of this exercise.

The reinsurance market has scrambled its way through the January renewal season in typical festively messy fashion – but in the sober light of New Year it will be mulling over several key issues that will set the trend for the rest of 2020, with change far from complete.

The reinsurance market has scrambled its way through the January renewal season in typical festively messy fashion – but in the sober light of New Year it will be mulling over several key issues that will set the trend for the rest of 2020, with change far from complete.

The 2010s are about to end and over the past decade the ILS market has gone through an adolescent growth spurt – heading into 2020 as a far bigger and more complex entity than it was.

Most people describing the ILS manager world might break the peer group into three broad categories: reinsurer-affiliated platforms, independent owner-operated firms and asset manager-backed vehicles. Does the market need another category?

We have written a bit about how certain (re)insurance business lines, such as retro, are struggling for capacity right now, but another noteworthy development is that some types of structures are also requiring major efforts to shore them up.

It used to be called “diworsification” – a phrase coined by Dowling analysts that took hold and became the industry's standard jargon for low-priced international catastrophe risk back around 2011.

We've been talking about the reinsurance market being the “squeezed middle” caught in between accelerating primary and retro markets for some time, but could Neon be the first casualty of collateral damage from this phenomenon?

The retro renewals are still in the calm-before-the storm phase but it seems that capacity limitations are set to open up more of a role for opportunistic players.

Currently, most people trying to describe the ILS manager world might break the peer group into three broad categories: reinsurer-affiliated platforms, independent owner-operated firms and asset manager-backed vehicles.

Amid the information overload of results season, “man-made catastrophes” appear to be the main emerging theme – albeit manifesting in two very different ways.

Benjamin Franklin apparently once said that ‘nothing in life is certain except death and taxes’ – and it seems like the adage resonated with the risk modellers of the (re)insurance industry.