Aon’s CEO Greg Case said today that he is hopeful the catastrophe bond his firm worked on for Jamaica will help the country in its recovery after hurricane Melissa. Case also discussed the opportunity to provide risk solutions to the massive hyperscaler data centre build-out, highlighting alternative capital as relevant here as well.
Aon Securities was one of the main players that assisted in getting Jamaica’s World Bank facilitated catastrophe bond to market, acting as joint structuring agent, joint bookrunner and also joint manager for the issuance of insurance-linked securities (ILS), alongside Swiss Re Capital Markets.
Highlighting the devastating impacts of the hurricane Jamaica has just faced, Case begin his opening remarks during today’s call by saying, “We want to recognise the great trauma and suffering resulting from Hurricane Melissa.
“We’re thinking about everyone affected by this terrible catastrophe, and we feel very, very humble and hopeful that the work Aon undertook with the World Bank to arrange a cat bond for the government of Jamaica will help accelerate and support recovery.”
As we reported this morning, the calculation agent process for the cat bond is already well-underway and it is hoped a determination on any payout will be made soon.
During Aon’s earnings call today, executives discussed a range of topics of interest to the market’s we cover.
Firstly, on reinsurance market conditions, Edmund Reese, CFO commented, “While July one treaty property renewal rates were softer, this was balanced by higher limits and ongoing strength in international facultative markets, underscoring our platform’s increasing importance in supporting clients as they navigate volatility and match capital to risk.”
Reese later also acknowledged the rising demand and activity in aggregate or frequency reinsurance protections, saying, “Clearly, we’re seeing pressure in the property side of it. The demand is high, clients are buying more sideways coverage to cover perils.”
CEO Case went into more detail on supply and demand factors in reinsurance, explaining, “Think about overall demand and supply. When you think of what’s going on in the world these days, greater and greater risk, there is absolute pressure on a unit price basis particularly on the property side and you’re seeing that really across the board.
“But, think about how we react. We react on a client level, and we’re essentially helping clients understand how to mitigate risk on a much broader scale.
“So this isn’t just traditional treaty and facultative, think about insurance-linked securities. I started off with the obvious tragedy and the catastrophe in Jamaica, and then talked about how we brought capital in to try to do something about that.
“We’re going to do well over, you know, close to 150 or greater cat bonds and parametric instruments for companies in addition to insurers. So this is really the opportunity to bring more capital in to support an environment which is demanding it.”
One theme running throughout the Aon earnings call was the topic of hyperscaler data centres and the significant investments being made to accelerate their construction and build-out.
With hundreds of billions of dollars being spent in building out data centres for artificial intelligence (AI) and other data processing or computing needs, Aon sees bringing its risk capital expertise to bear in solving client problems here as a meaningful opportunity.
Case explained, “I would say we’re just at the start line. Maybe the most powerful message that Edmund and I are highlighting here is the work we’re doing on what’s next, and an engineering driven approach, which really starts fundamentally with how and where you where you build these, and how you start to maintain them. Then asking the question around the analytics on what really is the potential volatility to be covered here and the risk to be covered here.”
Then Case referenced alternative capital in relation to the hyperscaler data centre opportunity, suggesting the Aon CEO expects the depth of risk capital required to support this build-out may see a capital markets opportunity emerge.
“With our reinsurance and alternative capital hats on and our core insurance hats on, how do you create the capacity?” Case asked, adding, “Because the capacity here we’re describing has never been seen before.”
He further stated, “All these things are coming together, and we think put us in a unique position to both attract capital into this game on behalf of the hyperscalers, but also help the hyperscalers understand that beyond the technology, there are ways to conduct business with one of these data centres that actually might reduce cost over time and certainly could reduce volatility.
“So this isn’t the core technology, but it’s everything around it that makes it more attractive. And so for us, this is just the beginning.”
The accelerating investment and pace of data centre development is going to require innovative risk transfer and risk capital solutions and may require a level of scale, in limit terms, that makes the capital market a viable option for transferring some of the property risks associated with the global build-out.
Aon is moving to help meet the demand for risk solutions to support technology hyperscaler ambition, with the size and complexity of these facilities needing unique and innovative responses from the global insurance and reinsurance markets.
While multi-line solutions are going to be key, the amount of property exposure in the data centre world is growing exponentially and this could be where alternative capital sources can play one role.
