Nephila Capital, one of the longest-standing and largest insurance-linked securities (ILS) managers, has been approved in principle to launch Lloyd’s Syndicate 2359, its third syndicate and its first in the market to have a pure property catastrophe risk and returns focus for specialised Lloyd’s investors and capital allocators, Artemis can report.Speaking with Artemis today in Monte Carlo at the annual Rendez-vous event, Nephila Capital CEO Jessica Laird revealed exclusively to us that the in principle approval was actually received in May and the firm is now readying the new Syndicate 2359 for launch later this year, to begin allocating capital from January 1st 2026.“We were approved in principle back in May to launch a new syndicate.The target is $150 million of premium and it will be launching from January of next year,” Laird told us.

Expanding on that to say, “It’s a new dedicated catastrophe syndicate, but it’s still leveraging all of the core underwriting and portfolio management of our Bermuda team.It’s just allowing Lloyd’s capital and Lloyd’s investors to have access to the Nephila cat platform and portfolios.” Laird continued to explain, “It will be numbered Syndicate 2359.The capital raise is ongoing, but we do have anchor investors committed and confirmed, those are in place.

“It creates a new avenue of access to our existing cat investment platform, to allow those that have their own corporate member or an existing Lloyd’s platform to get the efficiencies of operating within that market through diversification.” Nephila has an established Lloyd’s platform with two syndicates in operation already.Syndicate 2357 which provides a Lloyd’s based access point for originating risks for the Nephila ILS fund strategies, as well as the newer Syndicate 2358 speciality lines focused syndicate.Laird commented that, “We’re excited to have quite a bit of interest and attention on our 2357 and 2358 syndicates.

So it felt like we were responding to investor demand and a natural evolution of continuing to build out our Lloyd’s platform.“It’s a different investor base to our Bermuda funds and for the actual underlying Lloyd’s investor they could experience better leverage.It has the potential to be more efficient for them depending on their other activities, because cat can be diversifying to the other risks they access in the Lloyd’s market.” Laird further explained, “Syndicate 2357 is a great way for us to write business and access it, and we do bring much of it back to our Bermuda funds.

I don’t view them as being in competition to each other.In fact, they will share many contracts in common.“I view this new Syndicate 2359 as akin to another fund that gets constructed and allocated positions alongside all of our other funds.

The actual portfolio construction risk strategy will mimic the way we approach all our other portfolios.” The Nephila Lloyd’s platform also includes its own managing agency, so the company has an efficient way to stand-up a new syndicate, while it is already well-known by capital providers that focus on the marketplace.“Our managing agency, Nephila Syndicate Management (NSM) will manage this new Syndicate 2359 at Lloyd’s, and then it leverages the same portfolio and lead underwriting expertise that we have in Bermuda,” Laird said.She added that, “It’s really just another way to bring capital to our platform, akin to us launching another fund, where we have synergies and there’s scalability in the platform to be writing risk and constructing a new portfolio for Lloyd’s capital providers.” With the capital raise underway for the new property catastrophe reinsurance focused syndicate, Nephila is seeing good demand.

Laird said, “We’ll see how the capital raise goes, there’s been quite a bit of interest, but even if we didn’t quite get to that number we will still proceed.” Summing up she said, “It’s really about trying to take advantage of the fact that, if you’re in Lloyd’s and you’ve established a platform for yourself as a way to access Lloyd’s business, this is going to be another source of risk and return that gets the benefit of the capital model within Lloyd’s.”.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.