Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending February 16th 2025, covering catastrophe bonds, ILS, reinsurance capital and related risk transfer topics.To ensure you never miss a thing or get our email alerts for every article we publish.Resurgent investor interest in ILS and an expanding opportunity set: ILS NYC 2025 On Friday February 7th, around 415 attendees enjoyed a day of engaging, inspirational talks and valuable networking at our Artemis ILS NYC 2025 conference, hearing from our expert speakers that investor interest in catastrophe bonds and insurance-linked securities (ILS) is resurgent, while the ILS investment opportunity set is expanding.

Mereo gets $700m+ balance-sheet rated, deploys $250m ILS fund capacity at 1/1 Mereo Insurance finalised a $700m+ capital raise for its equity balance-sheet, gaining an ‘A-‘ rating from AM Best, while the company also deployed around $250m in capacity from its insurance-linked securities (ILS) fund at the January reinsurance renewals.Twelve Securis merger completes, creating one of the largest ILS managers with $8.5bn Twelve Securis has been established with $8.5 billion of assets under management (AUM) making the newly branded and combined ILS manager one of the largest in the sector, after the merger of Twelve Capital and Securis Investment Partners has now completed.Catastrophe bond market already on-track for record Q1 issuance in 2025 The catastrophe bond market is already on-track for record first-quarter issuance in 2025, with almost $2.44 billion of new cat bonds settled so far this year and $1.93 billion of deals in the market pipeline that are scheduled to settle by end of March, according to Artemis’ extensive data on the sector.

Potential $200bn catastrophe loss year in 2025 could recalibrate entire industry: Zaffino, AIG With the recent California wildfires seen as likely to drive the second most costly first-quarter on record for the global insurance and reinsurance industry, AIG CEO Peter Zaffino has warned that a $200 billion annual catastrophe loss year in 2025 could “recalibrate the entire industry.” NFIP hurricane Helene loss estimate range stretched higher to top-end of $7.4bn The U.S.Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) has updated its estimate for National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) losses from hurricane Helene, stretching the top-end of the range to now as much as $7.4 billion.Flood Re targets debut £100m Vision 2039 UK flood catastrophe bond Flood Re, the state-backed flood reinsurance pool in the United Kingdom, has entered the catastrophe bond market in search of £100 million in fully-collateralized UK flood retrocessional reinsurance, with a London Bridge 2 PCC Limited (Vision 2039 – 2025-1) transaction.

Mercury pegs wildfire losses at $1.6bn to $2bn, says parametric reinsurance won’t respond Mercury, an insurer with a meaningful exposure to claims from the Los Angeles, California wildfires, said it estimates gross losses of $1.6 billion to $2 billion, but while significant reinsurance recoveries will be made the company noted that a parametric reinsurance arrangement is not expected to pay out.Cat bond outlook positive, despite distortion seen in index deals: Man Group Investment manager Man Group’s outlook for the catastrophe bond and related insurance-linked securities (ILS) market remains positive as the industry begins 2025, despite there being some distortion seen in industry index deals following strong investor interest.AIG improves aggregate cover, expects fee income from new sidecar syndicate: CEO Zaffino At the January 2025 reinsurance renewals, AIG improved the terms of its aggregate catastrophe reinsurance protection, lowering the deductible in North America, CEO Peter Zaffino has said, while he also explained that the recent third-party capitalised syndicate launch is expected to drive fee income for the company.

This is not every article published on Artemis during the last week, just the most popular among our readers over the last seven days..To ensure you always stay up to date with Artemis and never miss a story .

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