- RGA Sees U.K. Mortality Headwinds, GLP-1 Gains in Revised Outlook
RGA highlighted revised mortality assumptions shaped by U.K. headwinds and GLP-1 optimism, alongside planned mid-2026 full deployment of its Ruby Re sidecar.
- Analysts Press Everest on Capital Strategy, Casualty Clean-Up and Cat Pricing
With a $1.2 billion adverse development cover locking in legacy casualty reserves and a full exit from retail insurance via AIG, analysts pressed management on how soon that capital will be redeployed.
- Wall Street Zeroes In on Carlyle's $87B Insurance Play as Fortitude Re Deals Accelerate
Incoming CFO Justin Plouffe highlighted Fortitude Re's $4 billion Unum transaction and projected $20 billion in new AUM as evidence the strategy is delivering.
- Berkshire Reaps Gains From a Quiet Catastrophe Year While Protecting the Float
A mild catastrophe year and restrained underwriting expenses allowed Berkshire’s to extend its record of profitable risk absorption.
- Verisk Says AI Data Will Fuel Growth While Record-Low Catastrophes Depress Claims Transactions
Verisk's AI-powered subscription businesses surged 8.7% as the insurance data giant pivots away from weather-dependent claims transactions, which collapsed in the quietest U.S. catastrophe quarter since 2017.
Risk Market Brief: Modeling and Financing the Rise of Sequential Catastrophe Risk
When Hurricane Melissa struck Jamaica in late October, it did more than devastate homes and crops; it tested the confidence that binds catastrophe models, capital markets, and national recovery.
Estimated losses could reach 30% of Jamaica’s GDP, making Melissa one of the costliest natural disasters in the island’s history and a direct hit to a country still rebuilding from Hurricane Beryl just 15 months earlier.
A new Risk Market Briefing brings together three perspectives — Sridhar Manyem /AM Best, Josh Hacker/Jupiter Intelligence, and Paula Jarzabkowski/University of Queensland — (pictured above) to explore how modeling, liquidity mechanisms, and capital discipline are evolving in the face of compounding risk.
Confidence in the Model = Confidence in the Capital
AM Best’s Manyem says Melissa underscores how model performance drives market trust.
“For reinsurers and investors, the first question isn’t how big was the storm? It’s how well did the model perform?”
He argues that weak exposure data, particularly in the Caribbean, still creates uncertainty that investors rationally price in through spreads and allocations. “Better data and transparency narrow the confidence gap,” he adds. “Modeling remains the bridge between risk and capital.”
Modeling the World We Live In — Not the One We Had
Jupiter Intelligence’s Hacker warns that today’s catastrophe models are still built for an outdated climate baseline.
“We’re not modeling the world we live in. We’re modeling the world we used to have.”
Back-to-back storms like Beryl and Melissa, he says, reveal that models assuming independence between seasons no longer reflect physical reality. The next generation of models will need physics-based frameworks and real-time data assimilation to capture clustering, sequence, and compounding losses.
Liquidity Is Not Resilience
Professor Jarzabkowski points out that protection-gap entities such as CCRIF (the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility) perform as designed — but within narrow limits.
“CCRIF isn’t meant to rebuild economies; it’s meant to buy time. Liquidity is not resilience.”
