Italian insurance and financial services group Unipol is aiming to secure a new aggregate reinsurance cover this year, as the company becomes the latest to look to better protect its earnings against smaller, more frequent severe weather and catastrophe events.Aggregate reinsurance protection has become more available to buyers in 2025, with market conditions eased and risk capital providers now more open to deploying limit on an annual aggregate basis again.The reason for aggregate limit becoming more available is largely down to buyers accepting the tougher terms and conditions that aggregate protection now comes with, with event deductibles, higher attachments, peril exclusions and other restrictions widely enforced across the market.Aggregate is also an area expected to soften more slowly, than occurrence based excess-of-loss treaty reinsurance.

Hence buyers of aggregates are now being met with far more numerous willing markets than even a year ago, although it’s still not always possible to buy all the limit most buyers seek.Just in the last couple of weeks aggregate reinsurance purchases have come to light from and Bermuda-based reinsurance firm Conduit Re.While in the catastrophe bond market, we’ve seen this month, and Fidelis remains in the market seeking worldwide aggregate retrocession.

At the same time, we’ve also seen of late, but this isn’t deterring the market from continuing to support these deals, as the new terms and attachments that are in-force make the risk-reward more worthwhile, for those fund managers and investors with an appetite for aggregate (it’s still not for everyone).As a result, it’s not surprising to hear of another buyer in the market looking to secure aggregate reinsurance limit and this time it is Italian insurer Unipol.Unipol’s executive team revealed the desire to buy aggregate protection during the firm’s earnings call last week.

Speaking during the earnings, call General Manager of Insurance at Unipol, Enrico San Pietro, said that the company aims to add a new aggregate reinsurance arrangement this year.“We are going to sign, on top of our reinsurance programme, a new aggregate cover for property damages on nat cat,” San Pietro explained.He said the goal being to, “Protect us even better than the existing programme in a situation in which several medium sized events can occur.” San Pietro added, “This is something we are going to elaborate better in the next weeks, but in our opinion, it is something that makes even more reliable our target.” In recent years, Italian insurers including Unipol have faced challenging reinsurance renewals, as a number of severe weather, hail and flooding events have driven meaningful losses that have been shared with their reinsurers.

It’s also been especially difficult for Italian insurers to buy aggregate reinsurance for a number of years now, but clearly Unipol feels conditions have eased enough, or the product offered is useful enough, to make a purchase possible this year., with the majority of these providing it with earthquake reinsurance protection.Currently the insurer has a €100 million quake cat bond outstanding.

But, perhaps more relevant to this discussion is the cat bond from 2019, which provided Unipol with a source of annual aggregate protection, covering severe weather risks including hail and flood events.Given the series of weather related loss events that have impacted Italy in recent years, that Atmos Re cover could be appealing to Unipol again now and it will be interesting to see whether the insurer looks to the catastrophe bond market at all for a potential new version, under the current market terms..All of our Artemis Live insurance-linked securities (ILS), catastrophe bonds and reinsurance can be accessed online.

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