A new reinsurance company has launched in Bermuda with the aim of expanding the reach of insurance-linked securities (ILS).

Sequant Re Holdings Ltd announced today that its new Class 3 Bermuda reinsurer had completed its financing.

The company said Sequant Re “combines ILS and Bermuda’s unique segregated account structure to offer a flexible and highly efficient platform for the transfer and securitisation of insurance risks”.

The founding principals are chief executive officer Guy Cloutier, formerly of American Safety Re, and chief risk and underwriting officer David Lalonde, a former senior vice-president at AIR Worldwide who spent 19 years with the catastrophe modelling team.

The new company’s directors include Peter Hughes, founder and chairman of Apex Fund Services, a Bermuda start-up which has become one of the world’s largest independent fund and private-equity administration companies with $30 billion in assets under management.

Andrew Cooke, former treasurer at Lumbermen Mutual casualty Company where he managed a $2.5 billion investment portfolio, is also a director.

“Sequant Re’s goal is to lower barriers for investors and expand the reach of risk transfer and securitisation solutions in the reinsurance market,” Sequant Re said in its statement.

“Sequant Re will allow investors of any size to participate in the risk transfer business with as few limitations as possible, whether the commitment is short term and opportunistic or long term and strategic.”

Mr Cloutier, a qualified actuary, has spent 14 of his 35 years in the insurance industry working in the Bermuda market.

He began his career in Canada and after working for several companies in senior executive positions, he founded Canadian Insurance Direct, an operation he grew to 200 staff and more than 100,000 customers in the space of four years.

After running a consulting firm in Bermuda for four years, he built a reinsurance operation called American Safety Re, which wrote third-party reinsurance in the US and London markets from Bermuda.

“Innovation in platforms and products is the biggest opportunity in ILS,” said Mr Cloutier. “Our goal is to lower barriers for investors and expand the reach of risk transfer and securitisation solutions. ILS make it possible for anyone to transfer risks to investors willing to accept them. Sequant Re provides an efficient platform for matching capital with risks.”

Mr Cloutier formed Sequant Holdings Ltd in 2012 to begin the development, licensing and financing of Sequant Re.

The firm said it had prepared for the launch by actively talking to brokerage firms with a view to establishing long-term partnerships for the sourcing of risks and development of products.

“They are excited to have an avenue to provide innovative and collateralised protection solutions for their clients for more than just peak peril risks,” Sequant Re stated. “We will continue to build and enhance the management team in the coming months.”

Mr Lalonde said: “I am thrilled to be joining Guy, who has been hard at work formulating these concepts for quite some time. We now have developed and refined a process and the tools necessary to make risk transfer and investing efficient and flexible all within one entity operating in the time-tested Bermuda regulatory regime.”

Sequant Re is licensed for all lines of insurance business, except life insurance.

The company will be based on the seventh floor of Cumberland House, in Victoria Street, Hamilton.