Intelligent Insurer News

Property/casualty insurer Travelers Companies has appointed Mojgan Lefebvre as executive vice president and chief information officer. She succeeds Madelyn Lankton, who will retire this month after 36 years with Travelers.

Liberty Mutual has launched a new global transaction solutions (GTS) unit to serve the growing market for mergers & acquisitions (M&A) insurance solutions.

Zurich Insurance has appointed Brandon Fick as new chief underwriting officer for Zurich North America.

Everest Insurance has expanded its Everest Specialty Underwriters (ESU) financial lines group with the addition of three new cyber liability team members.

Bermuda-based excess and surplus (E&S) lines carrier Colony Specialty, a member of Argo Group International Holdings, has appointed Jeff Canfield to serve as head of casualty.

Hurricane Florence is currently a category 4 hurricane and may intensify to a category 5 hurricane in the next 24 hours, according to data provider AIR.

Lloyd’s syndicates have just weeks to submit a business plan mapping a route to profits, and those that fail will be closed, Jon Hancock, performance management director of Lloyd’s, confirmed to Monte Carlo Today.

Swiss Re expects stable prices for the upcoming January renewals in the absence of any significant events, Moses Ojeisekhoba, head of reinsurance, told Monte Carlo Today.

Allianz is pleased with how its property-catastrophe reinsurance programme responded to the 2017 losses related to hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria (HIM) but it is still refining the way it covers manmade risks in its portfolio, Amer Ahmed, CEO of Allianz Re, which handles the insurer’s reinsurance buying programme, told Monte Carlo Today.

Getting the capital markets involved in the coverage of cyber risk would be helpful to cover this peril, Hannover Re CEO Ulrich Wallin said during a press conference during the Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous.

The reinsurance market must accept that buyers won’t pay a higher price and instead focus on increasing efficiencies in how business is transacted, Michael Papworth, head of Asia and property & casualty at Miller, told Monte Carlo Today.

Hannover Re expects the recent uptick in M&A activity to be followed by further deals, but also to result in higher reinsurance demand, Michael Pickel, Hannover Re executive board member, told Monte Carlo Today.

The property/casualty (P/C) insurance sector will one day be known as the property/casualty & cyber (P/C&C) sector, such will be the pervasive influence of this risk on the world and the growth of the market, Rupert Swallow, chief executive of Capsicum Re, told Monte Carlo Today.

Some insurance-linked securities (ILS) funds could find themselves in hot water because of how badly they miscalculated their losses in the aftermath of the 2017 catastrophes, John Warwick, managing director and partner, ILS Capital, told Monte Carlo Today.

The US casualty market is facing higher award levels and players are sifting through their portfolios to adapt prices to the new environment—but there is more room to go, Jason Richards, Swiss Re’s head of casualty underwriting reinsurance, told Monte Carlo Today.

Tom Johansmeyer, assistant vice president at PCS, has stressed that cyber attack re/insurance is important—but that it needs to be viewed in a proportional and subjective manner.

Automation in the commercial insurance space has taken longer to evolve than in personal lines because the data is less homogenous, but the pace is now accelerating and technology is set to transform the job of underwriters, as Intelligent Insurer finds out.

American International Group (AIG) has hired XL Catlin's Catherine Duffy to join the company’s general insurance business as country manager of Bermuda.

Global re/insurer MS Amlin and specialty cyber re/insurance analytics and underwriting firm Envelop Risk have unveiled a cyber reinsurance underwriting partnership at the reinsurance Rendez-Vous in Monte Carlo.

Commercial insurance prices in the US increased by nearly 3 percent year on year in the second quarter of 2018, according to Willis Towers Watson’s Commercial Lines Insurance Pricing Survey (CLIPS).