Artemis turned 26 years old this month and we wanted to highlight that we’ve now tracked over $192 billion in catastrophe bonds and related insurance-linked securities (ILS) within our extensive , alongside the hundreds of billions in assets we’ve tracked flowing into other insurance and reinsurance linked opportunities over the years.On the 12th of May 1999, Artemis was formally launched to an audience of reinsurance and capital market focused executives at an event held in Bermuda.Having since the market’s inception, the launch of Artemis formalised our attempts at the time to provide a meaningful online home to the nascent insurance-linked securities (ILS) market.Back then, we had a goal to service the roughly 200 hundred professionals and investors around the globe that mattered in the ILS market at the time.

Now, 26 years on, we’ve had months where over 130,000 visitors from across the globe access Artemis and now average around 70,000 users every single month, who together view hundreds of thousands of pages across the website per-month.Having started with a roughly 200 user per-month goal back when Artemis was largely a source of market data and information, it was 2008 when we began to regularly publish news and analysis about the catastrophe bond, ILS and alternative reinsurance capital markets.Since then, we’ve published almost 22,000 articles about catastrophe bonds, ILS, the use of alternative reinsurance capital, weather risk management, parametric risk transfer and more generally about the use of efficient capital market techniques within insurance risk markets.

Back in 2008, our weekly email newsletters were being sent to a list of just a few hundred people, which grew to around 1,000 by late 2009.Today, we’ve barely missed a send (maybe one or two) of our regular Wednesday morning newsletter since and it now goes out to a list of more than 15,000 subscribers, while we also send our Monday morning “Best of”, end of week “Recap” on Friday, and a few email alerts each week as well..

With truly global readership representation, we have the largest cat bond and ILS focused audience on any platform or medium, in every single city in the world.Importantly, if you’re an investor looking at the asset class you no doubt ended up on Artemis during your hunt for education on what the ILS asset class can offer and we hope you find our services helpful to gaining an understanding of this diversifying and growing investment category.At the heart of Artemis has always been the , which in the last year has been used by more than 50,000 individuals, many of them on a very regular basis as they glean insights and analyse trends that support their work in the reinsurance, investments and insurance-linked securities (ILS) space.

The was born as a listing of the very earliest catastrophe bonds on a website called the Risk Information & Services Exchange (RSX) back in 1996, then finding its home on Artemis in 1999.As always, I owe a debt of gratitude to Rowan Douglas, my employer at the time of Artemis’ launch and now CEO, Climate Risk & Resilience at Howden, for putting his trust in me back in the mid-90’s and encouraging my passion for the convergence of insurance risk and capital markets.The potential for matching insurance risk more directly with institutional capital using financial market infrastructure and securitisation captured our attention in the mid-90’s, stimulated originally by the advent of catastrophe options, weather derivatives and then the very first catastrophe bonds.

With Artemis, we wanted to create an online home for the emerging catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities (ILS) sector, providing timely, relevant, accurate and thoughtful information flow for ILS, investment and reinsurance professionals, to support their work and operations in the market.We also wanted to provide an educational resource for investors interested in the ILS asset class and for cedants and sponsors that might find ILS a viable alternative source of risk capital and risk transfer.Education still remains critical to encouraging market adoption and growth of cat bonds and ILS techniques.

In addition, we’ve always wanted to stimulate ideas and innovation, through a focus on exploring why capital efficiency is a critical lever for global insurance and reinsurance markets, and how institutional capital can facilitate that through the use of sophisticated securitisation techniques and intelligent structuring.Ultimately, cat bonds and ILS lean on the best of reinsurance risk analysis and risk sharing techniques, alongside financial market infrastructure, securitisation and syndication.26 years on, Artemis’ goal hasn’t changed, but the market is now a very meaningful contributor to global insurance risk capital, far more institutional in its nature, has cemented its position as a key provider of efficient capacity and as an attractive asset class.

I remain fascinated by the industry and convinced of its potential to continue evolving into an increasingly liquid and tradable securitised catastrophe risk market, cementing its role as a key reinsurance risk capital source, while continuing to make inroads into other classes of insurance business as well.I am proud to call many of our readers good friends.It has been a real privilege to get to know and spend time with so many smart, innovative and insightful people over the years and I thank them all for their generosity in sharing their insights and expertise over the 26 years Artemis has now existed.

Equally, the team here are incredibly proud that Artemis has become so deeply embedded within the information provision framework for the ILS market and become a valuable input to decision-making for the ILS marketplace and its constituents.Our remains central to Artemis and is the most widely used insurance-linked securities data source available today on any medium.Since Georgetown Re in late 1996, .

Cumulatively, the Artemis Deal Directory has now tracked over $192 billion in .With another and yet to price and settle at this time, the total cumulative issuance we’ve tracked will rise above $193 billion in just a couple of weeks.These resources are wonderful ways to track the ILS market’s development over time, as are .

Of course, the $192 billion of catastrophe bonds and related ILS deals are not all the arrangements we’ve tracked, with many billions in arrangements, the many billions in flows to ILS fund managers over that time, almost $23 billion in mortgage insurance-linked securities, and of course other instruments such as that are also tracked by Artemis.Looking to the future, the observant among you will have noticed a constant stream of enhancements to Artemis over recent months, with new interactive charts added, our helpful most-read feature, a new clearer navigation, , and a raft of other technical enhancements that you hopefully haven’t noticed as well.We continue to strive to serve the market we find so engaging! I’d like to take this opportunity to say a personal thank you to all of our readers, contributors, sponsors, advertisers, partners, conference attendees and good friends from the industry and further afield.

A further thank you to the hard-working team here at Artemis and of course also .The relationships that have been created over the 26 years Artemis has existed are truly valued by me and the team.We look forward to continuing to work closely with the industry, supporting its development and growth, while making new connections and deepening relationships.

Best wishes and I hope you continue to enjoy Artemis! Steve Evans Owner & Editor, Artemis.bm.Remember, we also have the largest reinsurance focused audience in the world.Our sister publication is a leading source of news and insight for those in reinsurance and those interested in it, with a readership that peaks at in excess of 350,000 readers in a single month.

, here are a few reminders of the evolution of Artemis since its launch in 1999.A special prize, my utmost admiration for your staying power in the industry, to those who remember the very first iteration.The first image below shows how Artemis looked around its launch on 12th May 1999, taken from an original press release about the launch event.

The fact that the top headline covered the potential for growth in corporate cat bond issuance is particularly interesting, given that is a topic that continues to be discussed today.This image below shows Artemis in late 2000, around 18 months after its launch.Not much had changed, but deal-flow was accelerating and things were starting to get interesting in the emerging ILS world.

This image below shows how Artemis looked in 2004.From 2008 to late 2018 Artemis looked similar to this, but during that time our readership grew from just 1,000 readers per month to more than 50,000, over that decade.While the look and functionality of Artemis is now different again, not least our much newer , we remain open and accessible to everyone, with a singular goal to drive quality information about the ILS asset class to anyone wanting to learn more about it and track the market’s deal flow.

Stay tuned, there are more Artemis developments in our pipeline and we look forward to continuing to serve our readers for years to come!.All of our Artemis Live insurance-linked securities (ILS), catastrophe bonds and reinsurance can be accessed online.Our can be subscribed to using the typical podcast services providers, including Apple, Google, Spotify and more.