October 2011/5

It may have been a relatively quiet hurricane season for (re)insurers but the initial stages of the third quarter reporting season has already drawn out costly loss creep claims for some in the industry.

(Re)insurers may be settling in for a long period of low investment returns and after a particularly volatile quarter on the markets there were few stellar investment results among the early Q3 reporters.

Lloyd's syndicates that rely on reinsurance to build up its regulatory capital requirements should steel themselves for more bruising negotiations than normal.

Lloyd's syndicates are looking to increase their exposure to peak US risks for 2012 as they trade diversifying business for premium income growth.

Lloyd's has a reduced pipeline of potential new entrants to the market and will maintain a cautious stance ahead of Solvency II implementation, according to its performance management director Tom Bolt.

Brit Insurance's part private equity owner CVC Capital Partners has tabled a potential bid of around £4bn for the insurance arm of state-owned UK bank RBS, according to reports.

The long-running Transatlantic Re takeover saga must be resolved in the coming weeks if the US reinsurer is not to be hampered at the crucial 1 January renewal by "perception" issues over its future, senior broking sources warned last week.

Lloyd's syndicates are part of an increasing pattern amongst specialty/cat (re)insurers for seeking quota-share catastrophe capacity from US insurance carriers, The Insurance Insider can reveal.

IAG has continued to stand by the ground-up A$1.9bn loss estimate it made in May for the second New Zealand earthquake in February, despite widespread evidence of loss creep elsewhere.

Mark Byrne has said that he will look to use M&A and new lines of business to take Omega's Lloyd's stamp from a current £280mn to £400mn, as the (re)insurer is currently "sub-scale".

The industry's largest property cat cedant Zenkyoren will formally disclose to its 80+ reinsurers early next month that its loss notification from the Great Tohoku quake is rising from 635bn yen ($8.4bn) to 790bn yen ($10.4bn), The Insurance Insider understands.

Rising reinsurance prices have prompted California-based workers' comp and specialty insurer SeaBright to scale back its excess of loss protection.