Reinsurance purchasing is a huge black box for management teams. There is no way of knowing the market clearing price for protection. Instead, reinsurance purchasers determine pricing with individual negotiations, incomplete data and educated guesses. So executives spend millions of dollars on protection without complete market information. This is just one of the five key mistakes made by reinsurance buyers. Tremor Technologies helps reinsurance buyers avoid mistakes like this by leveraging our “smart market” platform to price and clear transactions competitively.

As Hurricane Laura moved towards landfall, Tremor was busy offering hedging capacity to the marketplace. We started receiving calls early that morning from buyers looking for hedging tools and sellers wanting to supply capacity. We saw the market need and acted, scheduling auctions for that afternoon. The $10B, $20B and $50B named storm ILW auctions were scheduled at 3, 5 and 7pm ET on Wednesday. “With Laura’s rapid evolution, the buyers and sellers contacting us were trying to get a pulse on the market and see if there was appetite to drive live cat trading – the current market is really opaque, and participants were grasping for signs of life before taking action themselves,” explained Chris Wilkens, Chief Product Officer at Tremor.

Market Summary Tremor’s weekly ILW (industry loss warranty) market is growing. In its first six weeks, Tremor has seen an average of more than USD 60M capacity offered and USD 30M of protection requested. Spreads have fluctuated, with the best buy and sell prices converging to produce a successful transaction for US wind and earthquake risk. Spreads are narrowing, and activity is expected to increase going into June and July.

As Tremor closes the books on 2019, we pause to take a look back at the performance our marketplace achieved for cedents. We publicly announced top-line statistics back in December – more than 100 clients signed up on both sides of the market and more than $2 billion in priced capacity. The graph below highlights the experience of cedents who placed their treaties through Tremor, compressing the pricing and placement into a short auction that completes in less than 5 days.

Short placements tell us about the additional price margin reinsurers build into their authorizations. Last time, we used oversubscription to measure inefficiency, but we know what many of you who read our analysis were thinking – my broker does a great job and my program always starts as a short placement, particularly in the current hardening market. If this is you, on the surface it sounds like you are getting a great deal.

Oversubscription happens in a reinsurance program when the capacity needs of the buyer – the cedent – are exceeded by the capacity offered by the sellers – the reinsurers. It is a basic economic phenomenon that if a product sold-out while there were still more parties willing to buy it, then alternatively the product’s price could have been raised to the point where it sold-out at the exact moment when all buyers had purchased their fill.