Our latest podcast episode provides a review of the record levels of catastrophe bond and related insurance-linked securities (ILS) market issuance from the fourth-quarter and the full-year 2020.

The catastrophe bond market broke records in 2020, with issuance reaching a new high of $11bn of property cat bonds, or $16.4bn if you include other classes of business and mortgage insurance-linked securities (ILS).

Artemis tracked very one of the transactions and in this episode we explain some of the important details of Q4 and full-year 2020 catastrophe bond issuance, highlight some landmark deals and look ahead to 2021 for the ILS market.

Market conditions look strong and the return potential from portfolios of cat bonds has risen for investors, as it has across the reinsurance linked investments space.

Underscoring issuance records, were a number of new sponsors and interesting highlights, such as the first catastrophe bond from a tech-giant as Google parent Alphabet Inc. came to market twice.

Alongside that, another first saw an asset manager using a cat bond to hedge earthquake risk from its portfolio, something we believe could herald further interest from asset owners and holders to leverage the ILS market to carve out and transfer climate, weather and catastrophe risks from their portfolios.