The ILS & Reinsurance Desk 8 stories this week · 85 total

Morningstar DBRS says the island's life and annuity sidecar liabilities have quadrupled in four years, with no known recaptures; the collateral question now sets the terms for growth.

AM Best sees property-cat rates as adequate but falling; its method for under-collateralized casualty sidecars answers where the next adverse development lands: on the sponsor.

Near-certain El Niño persistence through February 2027 puts the warmest-year baseline on the renewal calendar.

A $30 million class 2 insurer starts by covering AFC's own loans and caps outside capacity at 20 per cent.

The insurtech is becoming a principal risk-taker just as the cycle's battle shifts from rate to structure; the firm's first renewal will show whether its underwriting edge survives its own balance sheet.

In Monte Carlo this week, renewal conversations turn from price to program design as clients ask what their protection actually delivered.

Moody's puts half-year ILS outstanding at $144.5B, with money moving into the secondary-peril tail the next loss will test.

Capital followed the book's underwriting results; quota-share stability is now the product for a softening market.

The mid-July convective storm loss lands in a renewal cycle where capital, not catastrophe, is setting the terms.

Record capital and a property market past its hard peak turn the next renewal into a terms test.

Gallagher Re's H1 composite return flatters a book where premiums are shrinking and capital is stacking higher.

The BMA's decade tally quantifies traditional carriers' payouts, leaving the sidecars and cat bonds sharing the island without an equivalent record of their own.

The island's capital grew more than three times faster than premiums, giving the biggest balance sheets room to give back terms.

AM Best's composite shows a fifth straight year of underwriting profit even as premium growth falls sharply — the classic pre-softening sequence.

The Bermuda life reinsurer's white paper makes the case for offshore structures just as US reserves ceded offshore close in on onshore levels; the collateral behind those reserves remains the test.

A record $144.5 billion in alternative capital and a 50% jump in sidecar capital make the foundational case; the casualty build-out is where it gets tested.

The scientists Carrier Management quotes call the next catastrophe a question of when, not if — and a softening market that gives back terms before it reprices the tail has the renewal season wrong.

Four island groups wrote $44.9 billion in 2025 premiums, and the next renewal will test how much of that margin they give back in terms.

The new charter's capitalization is less telling than its patience will be.

Mangrove's cat bond and sidecar show how reinsurance capital is returning to Florida, and the cost question that remains.

AM Best's composite reversed a prior-year revenue decline even as competition heats up and rates ease, more evidence that the softening is selective rather than uniform.

AM Best's stable rating endorses the parent's capital support. Whether the asset-intensive deals it will bid on still price profitably through the softening cycle is the open question.

The rating agency says 2026 renewals stayed within Swiss Re, Munich Re, Hannover Re and SCOR's restructured property cat appetites, attaching higher.

A faster update cycle would move the risk pricing that underlies cat bonds and collateralized reinsurance.

AM Best sees a record $705 billion in capital and declining risk budgets shaping 2026 renewals.

Aon and Gallagher Re estimate the August derecho's insured losses in the single-digit billions, pushing 2026 US severe storm losses past $35 billion and concentrating claims in Illinois's homeowners market.

The reinsurance segment's first-half net premiums jumped to $249 million from $31 million, though mortgage reinsurance still drives the economics.

Cascading structures and third-event tranches are back in cat bonds while first-quarter spreads firmed.

Currency swings, not underwriting, put Munich Re back atop AM Best's list of the world's largest IFRS-17 reinsurers.

A July list of licences shows steady demand for Bermuda vehicles that connect insurance risk to capital markets.

Quicker annuity bookings will test Assured Guaranty's capital flexibility and its appetite for share buybacks.

Cat bonds are no longer a sideline for Bermuda reinsurers. The record-setting second quarter proved it.

Alirt counts $1.1 trillion of US life and annuity reserves with Bermudian reinsurers, and says sidecars are taking a growing share.

Tornadoes are touching down in more populated country, and severity is climbing even as national claim counts fall.

Three-quarters of EU catastrophe losses are uninsured. That bill increasingly lands on governments—and may turn them into buyers of catastrophe bonds and parametric cover.

A new report asks whether reinsurers can keep underwriting discipline while record capital sits inside existing firms and casualty decisions made today won't be judged for a decade.