London launches ILS working group

The UK Government has launched a working group aimed at investigating how to make the country more attractive to insurance-linked securities (ILS) business.

In March 2015, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, unveiled plans to change regulations to allow ILS to be domiciled in the country.

The London Market Group (LMG) was asked to provide practitioner input to the group which will look at proposals to change the UK’s tax and regulatory regimes.

Malcolm Newman, managing director of Scor UK and chairman of International Underwriting Association (IUA), is the LMG sponsor.

The group has only met once, so it’s too early to set any deadlines. A key determinant of the deadlines will be whether or not any identified work requires changes to primary legislation in the UK.

Barry Le Page, LMG secretariat, said: “We are interested in this work because London, as the centre of excellence for global specialty re/insurance business, should lead the world in terms of innovation of new products.

“ILS is very much at the innovative end of our industry and we are keen to ensure that the expertise that drives this is part of the London Market cluster. It builds on some of the findings in LMG’s report London Matters – the competitive position of the London Insurance Market which we published in November.”