has completed its redomestication to Ireland and the change of its name to XL Group plc. XL remains registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and its shares will continue to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol XL.

Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs faced the heightened scrutiny of a Congressional panel on Thursday and was forced to defend the deals with AIG through which it insured  holdings of mortgage-backed securities and brought AIG to the brink of collapse. Many questions from the bi-partisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission centred on valuations of mortgage assets that Goldman made amid the height of the mortgage crisis. Goldman increasingly marked down the value of mortgage securities that it insured through AIG and others, while AIG was betting on a continued strong housing market by insuring those securities. Commission chairman Phil Angelides asked whether  Goldman had affected the market by betting against the housing market and lowering it marks on its mortgage assets. "Look, you guys are net short, and you're driving down prices", said Mr Angelides. "Are you guys creating a self-fulfilling prophecy?" Goldman chief financial officer David Viniar said that "for illiquid assets like this, it's not a science, there is judgement involved. We used our best estimate at all times of what the market was". Mr Angelides said in a television interview that Goldman had "built a bomb" with its packages mortgage-backed securities and in turn "built a bomb shelter" by wagering that the mortgage market would fall. "The question is, did they light the fuse" by lowering valuations on the underlying securities, Mr Angelides said. Andrew Forster, chief financial officer at the time for AIG Financial Products, told the commission that the company questioned Goldman's valuations, but that "we didn't have an internal pricing system" to counter the valuations. "Our marks were based on actionable prices, informed by market information from comparable transactions", Goldman managing director David Lehman told the panel.

Belgium-based insurer Ageas, the former Fortis Insurance, has signed a deal with PAI Partners to buy intermediary Kwik-Fit Insurance Services (KFIS) for £215m ($320m). KFIS includes the brands The Green Insurance Co and Express Insurance. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of this year. Ageas, the third-largest motor insurer in the UK in terms of premiums written, said that the move would consolidate its position as the fourth-largest personal lines intermediary distributor in the UK. Its collective retail customer base will now number 1.6m, with combined pro forma 2009 revenues of £189m. Fortis UK CEO Barry Smith said that the acquisition "is part of Ageas's strategy in the UK to increase the breadth and depth of our product offering through a multi-channel distribution approach". KFIS, the insurance broking arm of motor repair operation Kwik-Fit Holdings, was launched in 1995. Its call-centre-based operation now employs about 1,000 staff. KFIS reported revenue of £89m last year. Kwik-Fit hired Crédit Suisse in February to carry out a review for the sale of its insurance arm, after France-based owners PAI sought to reduce Kwik-Fit's debt following the payment of a special dividend in 2007. PAI paid CVC £800m for the total business in 2005. Meanwhile, Fortis said that the conversion of the brand to Ageas in the UK was progressing, and was likely to be completed by the first quarter of next year.

Lloyd's is spending £50mn per year on preparations for Solvency II with the go-live date still two-and-a-half years away, the Society's director of performance management Tom Bolt has revealed.
Bolt disclosed the all-syndicate planning and compliance estimate while speaking at Standard & Poor's UK Insurance Symposium yesterday (29 June).
The audience heard: "Lloyd's is spending £51mn a year on Solvency II - and that's a lot of money for a new scorecard."
He cited an unnamed syndicate with a Bermudian parent as an example of a relatively small Lloyd's member being asked to assign three members of staff to the project full-time for three years.
Bolt, responding to a question on potential M&A activity in the London market, said that Solvency II would encourage some of the smaller insurers to question whether they had sufficient scale.
"Solvency II has to be a huge driver [for M&A activity]," Bolt said.
He then flagged up compliance and capital issues for smaller and monoline insurers, before saying: "These factors could pressure people to look at where consolidation might take place."
Earlier this year, The Insurance Insider revealed that, compliance headaches notwithstanding, Lloyd's was "not overly concerned" about potential changes to its capital requirements.
The Society's finance and risk director, Luke Savage, told The Insurance Insider that the amount of capital it held under Solvency II was unlikely to have to increase by more than 5 or 10 percent - equivalent to £1bn-£2bn.

Major losses fail to turn reinsurance market at mid-year renewals

The unprecedented level of first quarter catastrophe losses was not sufficient to drive a general reinsurance market turn, as the trend of price declines amid fierce competition continued at the 1 June and 1 July renewals, according to Willis Re.
In its latest market bulletin, the reinsurance arm of broker Willis said only a handful of loss-driven classes and territories showed any pricing stability or upwards pressure.
Chile-specific renewals saw rate increases of between 40 to 70 percent, driven entirely by losses from February's earthquake disaster.
Meanwhile, in casualty, US employers' liability experienced rate hikes of between 5 and 20 percent in risk-exposed excess of loss programmes running worse than expected.
And in the specialty field, global political risk reinsurance saw rate hikes of between 10 and 20 percent in loss hit lines.
But in many other lines of business and territories competition remains fierce, with substantial capacity chasing premium volume.
This is particularly true in areas of perceived diversifying risk, such as the Middle East.
Here, casualty pricing remains generally soft and rates continue to decline in general, with some territorial variability.
Willis Re CEO Peter Hearn said the earthquake in Chile, together with Australia storm losses and other catastrophe hits, are likely to have been "sufficient to erode the entire 2010 catastrophe excess of loss premium base outside the US". But despite this there has been no general upwards pricing trend.
Significant reductions were noted in Florida property catastrophe excess of loss renewals, with rate cuts as high as 25 percent recorded. Here, reinsurance markets treated the better capitalised and more geographically diversified accounts to substantial rate reductions, Hearn explained.
Elsewhere in the US, the property catastrophe market reinsured through London saw catastrophe pricing drop 10 to 15 percent on a risk-adjusted basis in Florida, but nationwide the reductions were less as capacity is tight. Risk pricing moved down by between 5 and 10 percent.
The report states that three forms of downward pressure are keeping the cycle soft - excess capital, stable investment returns and limited growth prospects. Without a major industry loss event wiping out excess capital, it is likely that the global reinsurance market will continue in the soft phase.
"There is a growing nervousness that the longer the wait for any upturn, the more abrupt it will be when it eventually arrives," Hearn warned, adding: "While not wishing to tempt fate, looking at the current projections of the number and intensity of third and fourth quarter 2010 North Atlantic hurricanes from a wide spectrum of academic and meteorological organisations, the market upturn may arrive sooner than expected."