Bermuda will be sending a delegation to meet with key industry participants in New York next month to discuss the creation and listing of Insurance Linked Securities (ILS).

The Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSX), representatives from the Ministry of Finance, law firm Appleby and advisors Horseshoe Group have announced they will be visiting the Big Apple to continue to position the Island as a leading jurisdiction for the setting up of ILS.

At the end of 2009, the Bermuda Monetary Authority introduced legislation that made it easier to form and list ILS in Bermuda and ever since the jurisdiction has been seeking to attract ILS such as catastrophe bonds.

In July 2010, the BSX announced that its cat bond listings were valued at more than $1 billion.

"Since the new insurance legislation was introduced at the end of 2009, we have actively been marketing Bermuda as the jurisdiction of choice for setting up and listing of ILS structures such as cat bonds," said Greg Wojciechowski, president and CEO of the BSX. "Our goal is to ensure that Bermuda is the first choice jurisdiction for the creation, listing and potentially secondary market trading of insurance linked security structures."

A report last month by Aon Benfield said new issues of insurance cat bonds should rapidly rebound to pre-financial crisis highs as securities markets stabilise - and Bermuda is capitalising on the interest.

Investors have been showing sustained interest in cat bonds, which enable insurance companies to raise capital through the transfer of insurable risk for events such as hurricane or earthquake damage to financial market investors, while their prices have also remained attractive for sponsors of the bonds. "Bermuda is the world's third largest reinsurance market and is already home to 1400 insurance companies with total assets of $442 billion," said Finance Minister Paula Cox, "and many of its reinsurance companies have issued cat bonds or set up special purpose vehicles such as sidecars. We are very pleased that the legislation has been working in Bermuda's favour."

David Lines, partner and member of the insurance team at Appleby, said: "Bermuda is obviously keen to promote itself in this space and has specifically created a legal vehicle to enable the participants in the market to quickly and easily create a special purpose insurer while at the same time benefitting from Bermuda's international reputation and reinsurance market."

Andre Perez, chief executive of the Horseshoe Group, an independent insurance management services company with operations in Cayman and Bermuda, said: "There has been a great deal of interest in risk-linked securities in 2010. Some market watchers are predicting cat bonds to grow to the peak levels that were seen in 2007."

The BSX has listed 10 cat bonds with a combined value of $1.174 billion to date. Three of these have been listed since the end of 2009 - State Farm's Merna Re II ($350 million), Flagstone Reinsurance Holdings SA's Montana Re transaction ($175 million) and an issuance from Chartis, Lodestone Re, worth $425 million.

Growing numbers of institutional investors have made preliminary enquiries about setting up cat bonds on the Island.

Mr. Wojciechowski continued: "The publicity following this year's listings had pushed the BSX forward in the eyes of the capital markets and raised the profile of the jurisdiction and the Exchange. We have come far in a very short space of time."

There have been 20 new catastrophe bond issues totaling $4.6 billion in the 12 months to June 30, according to Aon Benfield's report, compared to 11 issues totalling $1.7 billion in the previous period.