Tremor, the programmatic insurance and reinsurance risk transfer marketplace, has helped W. R. Berkley to price and place the renewal of its 2020 Property Catastrophe Program, securing $600 million of capacity from more than 50 reinsurers.
The marketplace process enabled reinsurers to log in and submit blind sealed bids over a quoting window of several days, while utilising Tremor’s new quoting capabilities.
After the quoting window closed, final results were reported to all sides of the marketplace within a few hours. The final clearing price per layer and each reinsurer’s allocation were also reported and lines were ready to sign.
“Completing our first renewal on Tremor really emphasized the benefits of the platform,” said Melissa Emmendorfer, Senior Vice President, Insurance Risk Management at W. R. Berkley Corporation.
“This year, with less time spent on the education process, the timing efficiency gains were more obvious, highlighted by the fact that the entire program was priced and allocated before Thanksgiving,” she explained.
“Tremor’s enhanced technology, which included additional features as suggested by reinsurers during our placement process last year, performed well and we are pleased with our outcome- both in terms of cost as well as the broader distribution of reinsurance partners that received a share of our placement.”
Sean Bourgeois, CEO of Tremor, also commented: “After successfully executing Berkley’s property catastrophe placement last year, it was really exciting to price and place the program this year as Tremor’s first major renewal.”
“We are thrilled with the results,” he went on. “We saw more reinsurers participate, more capacity made available and more capacity authorized with almost no support questions during the quoting process.”
“Our advanced quoting features were utilized and despite a hardening market, we were able to find competitive market clearing prices and compute limit allocations in a matter of hours that met everyone’s expectations.”
Tremor has now exceeded more than $2 billion in reinsurer quotes and now counts more than 100 reinsurers, Lloyd’s syndicates and ILS funds as members of its marketplace.
The company has a range of auctions planned this month and a further $1 billion of limit committed from traditional treaty and facultative reinsurance programs, ILW placements and parametric transactions. It also expects to triple its volume in 2020.
For the Berkley renewal, a diverse panel of reinsurers participated, including a large number of London market participants, insurance-linked securities (ILS) funds, and smaller reinsurance companies.
“We like the approach to quoting on Tremor for certain transactions and find the process extremely efficient,” noted Hilary Paul, Partner at LGT ILS Partners, on behalf of Lumen Re (Bermuda).
