France-headquartered global reinsurance company SCOR is aiming to upsize its latest catastrophe bond issuance, with its target for the Atlas Capital DAC (Series 2025-1) issuance now set at between $200 million and as much as $240 million in fully-collateralized retrocession, Artemis has learned.
At the same time, we understand from sources that the price guidance has fallen for the tranche of notes being offered for this Atlas Capital 2025-1 cat bond deal.
This new Atlas Capital DAC (Series 2025-1) catastrophe bond will be the nineteenth from SCOR to use the Atlas name and the twentieth cat bond from the company since the year 2000, including its Horizon securitization of credit liabilities back in 2001.
The French reinsurer has been sponsoring catastrophe bonds since the year 2000 and you can read about all of them by filtering our Deal Directory by sponsor.
SCOR returned to the cat bond market in March, initially looking to secure $200 million of capital markets backed multi-peril and international retrocessional protection from this Atlas Capital DAC 2025-1 cat bond.
Now, we’re told the reinsurer’s appetite has increased, with SCOR now said to be targeting between $200 million and $240 million of protection from this Atlas Capital 2025-1 issuance.
As we previously reported, SCOR has a $240 million Atlas Capital Reinsurance 2022 DAC (Series 2022-1) cat bond that is scheduled to mature this June and covered U.S. named storm, US & Canada earthquake, European windstorm, so this appears set to potentially replace that coverage while also adding Caribbean named storm cover to the protection.
For this Atlas Capital 2025 cat bond, SCOR is again using its Ireland-based designated activity company named Atlas Capital DAC.
This Atlas Capital DAC 2025-1 catastrophe bond will benefit SCOR by providing the reinsurer a roughly three-year source of annual aggregate, weighted industry loss trigger based retro reinsurance protection, running through to the end of May 2028.
The covered perils and regions for this cat bond will be named storms in the US and Caribbean (including DC, Puerto Rico & Virgin Islands), as well as earthquakes in the US (including DC, Puerto Rico & Virgin Islands) and Canada, and windstorms in Europe too.
The single tranche of Series 2025-1 cat bond notes that Atlas Capital DAC will issue, which have an initial attachment probability of 4.08%, and an initial base expected loss of 3.29%, are now targeted to provide between $200 million and $240 million of multi-peril and international retrocessional protection.
They were first offered to cat bond investors with price guidance in a range from 7.5% to 8%, but we’re now told the guidance has fallen to between 6.75% to 7.5%.
It’s encouraging to see SCOR looking to expand on its ambitions for its twentieth catastrophe bond. We’ll update you when the final size and pricing for this Atlas Capital DAC 2025-1 catastrophe bond is available.
As a reminder, you can read all about this Atlas Capital DAC (Series 2025-1) catastrophe bond from SCOR and every other cat bond transaction in the Artemis Deal Directory.
