Reinsurance

Catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide (AIR) today announced that Sompo International, a global specialty provider of property and casualty insurance and reinsurance, is leveraging AIR's casualty analytics platform, Arium, to better understand and quantify its liability and loss potential across multiple commercial liability lines of business.

As the Trump administration stalls federal funding for projects intended to make states more resilient to climate change and private insurers decline to cover properties in high-risk zones, North Carolina just proved there’s another way to fund disaster preparedness: a $600 million catastrophe bond that rewards homeowners and their insurer for installing “super roofs.” Along North Carolina’s beaches, wind damage from hurricanes is such a threat that many private insurers have stopped offering coverage. Hundreds of thousands of homeowners have been forced to buy coverage from the North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association (NCIUA), the state-created insurer of last resort for coastal properties. Like other insurers, NCIUA has to buy its own risk mitigation so it can pay customers if a major event causes more damage than it has saved from collecting and investing premiums. One option is reinsurance and another is a catastrophe bond, which pays out a specific amount if damage reaches a particularly severe level. Cat bonds have become popular with institutional investors like hedge funds and endowments in recent years because they trigger rarely and otherwise deliver high returns. […] NCIUA says its financial analysis is that it will recoup $72 million over 10 years on the investment in roofs, some from avoided losses after storms but even more from having to purchase less reinsurance because their portfolio is less risky. With demand for roofs finally surging, Hardy wanted to make sure she had adequate capital for all the willing participants. She began looking beyond her own surplus to fund grants. Every year the association pays for a combination of reinsurance and cat bonds to cover portfolio risk. She had read about cat bonds with resilience features in academic literature and now wanted to make one a reality.