Niklaus Hilti, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer of Credit Suisse Insurance Linked Strategies, kindly joined us to discuss the current status of the ILS investment space and reinsurance market trends. 

We began by discussing the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic in insurance-linked securities (ILS). Hilti explained that the Credit Suisse ILS team had been closely watching the situation develop since they were alerted to it back in January. 

"We run life and non-life on our platform. This was generally something where we expect a significant importance for our life business. On the non-life side we also expected that a pandemic is going to have a significant impact on the insurance industry and also on the financial markets," he explained. 

Adding that, "On the operational side it's really not a big impact, apart from travelling. On the business side, Covid-19 definitely has impacts." 

In terms of specifics, Hilti said, "In the life business you definitely have to prepare and you can. That means looking into liquidity and also whether you can still de-risk at this point in time. And also putting up some hedges, which we did for both life and non-life relatively early on in the process. 

"We had a lot of technology and models helping us on the pandemic side, but I would say so far, on the life side the impact, yes we see some mark-to-market movements, but at the moment we believe there will be very little to no loss of notional if the pandemic stays contained in developed countries, as we see it at the moment." 

"But it's far to early to say that this is over," Hilti cautioned. 

He added that, "On the non-life side, the catastrophe ILS side was as expected affected by the flight to liquidity of investors. For us that was more of an opportunity and not too dissimilar to what we saw in 2008." 

On the market for property insurance or reinsurance and business interruption, he added, "Insurance is definitely impacted. Reinsurance is somehow impacted. And then ILS is less impacted than these two segments of the overall market. But for the reinsurance industry it's a tough event."