Artemis.bm: The Brighton-Based News and Data Service for Catastrophe Bonds and Insurance-Linked Securities
Artemis.bm is a UK-based news and data service devoted to catastrophe bonds, insurance-linked securities and the convergence of reinsurance with the capital markets. Launched on 12 May 1999, it is one of the longest-running specialist publications on the internet in its field, and for many participants it functions as the market's trade paper and reference library combined. From its base in Brighton, under owner and editor Steve Evans, Artemis publishes daily reinsurance and risk-transfer news, maintains a Deal Directory recording catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities transactions, and produces quarterly market reports that are cited across the global insurance press. Its domain name nods to Bermuda, the domicile most associated with catastrophe reinsurance, but the operation is British — a reminder that some of the most influential niche financial media are produced far from the markets they chronicle.
Launched in May 1999
Artemis launched on 12 May 1999, in the first wave of specialist financial websites. Evans built the first version of the site in late 1998 while working for an internet company whose projects served the insurance industry; the same environment produced experiments including a weather derivatives trading platform and an early claims-prediction tool, work Evans has described as insurtech long before the term existed. The new site's purpose was to cover an emerging idea: that insurance risk, especially catastrophe risk, could be packaged into securities and sold to capital-markets investors. Fittingly, its launch-day headline discussed the potential growth of corporate catastrophe bonds, a subject still debated today. Insurance-linked securities had emerged in the mid-1990s after major hurricane losses strained reinsurance capacity, and Artemis arrived early enough to document essentially the whole development of the market it covers.
Steve Evans: Owner, Editor and Market Chronicler
Steve Evans is the owner and editor of Artemis.bm and the central figure in its history. He originally built the site for his employer; after that company was sold, he took ownership of Artemis himself when he left the acquiring business. The site then lay dormant for a period while Evans worked on large e-commerce projects in travel and retail. Its revival has become part of the publication's folklore: he rebuilt Artemis during a month-long journey through Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express while travelling on a sabbatical. Since its relaunch, Evans has written and edited the bulk of its coverage, developing a personal authority in the market that profiles in the financial press regularly acknowledge — he is quoted as an expert on catastrophe bonds by publications serving financial advisers and institutional investors, and he also provides consultancy on risk transfer and alternative reinsurance. Artemis is, in structure, close to a founder-led knowledge business, in which editorial output, data products and industry relationships reinforce one another.
What Artemis Covers: Cat Bonds, ILS and Alternative Capital
The subject matter requires a brief explanation. A catastrophe bond is a security through which an insurer or reinsurer transfers the risk of a defined disaster — a Florida hurricane, a Japanese earthquake — to investors, who earn an enhanced return if no qualifying event occurs and can lose principal if one does. Insurance-linked securities, or ILS, is the broader family of instruments through which capital-markets money takes insurance risk, including collateralised reinsurance arranged privately for fund managers. Artemis covers new issuance, pricing, losses and recoveries, the ILS fund sector, collateralised reinsurance, weather risk and the growing influence of third-party capital on traditional reinsurance pricing. Its daily news, published online and by email, reports transactions and market movements as they happen, serving reinsurers, brokers, ILS fund managers, investors such as pension funds, lawyers and service providers who structure the deals.
The Artemis Deal Directory
The publication's most durable asset may be its Deal Directory, a structured record of catastrophe bond and ILS transactions built up since the market's early years. By the site's twenty-first anniversary in 2020, Artemis had recorded almost $125 billion of catastrophe bond and ILS issuance. The directory's value lies in continuity: because the same source has logged deals consistently over decades, its totals provide the market's standard historical series. When Artemis reported that issuance reached a record $8.8 billion in 2014, lifting the outstanding market above $25 billion for the first time, trade publications including Hedgeweek reported those figures as the authoritative account of the year. Every new transaction is added with its sponsor, size, peril and pricing information where available, so the directory serves simultaneously as news archive, due-diligence starting point and statistical foundation for the quarterly reports described below.
Quarterly Market Reports and Industry Data
Artemis publishes a quarterly catastrophe bond and ILS market report, distributed free, which analyses issuance by quarter, sponsor type, peril and trigger structure, and tracks the size of the outstanding market. The reports translate the Deal Directory's raw records into the narrative the industry uses to describe itself — whether issuance set records, which perils dominated, how pricing moved and how much capital investors committed. The second-quarter 2026 report, for example, recorded June issuance from fifteen transactions approaching $2.5 billion, the second-largest June on record. Because the underlying data comes from a single long-running directory, the reports offer a consistency that ad hoc surveys cannot match. Rival publications, conference organisers and academic writers on alternative risk transfer cite Artemis data routinely, making the Brighton operation an unlikely but genuine statistical authority for a global financial niche.
Growth in Readership
The audience grew with the market. Artemis has described its readership rising from around one thousand readers a month to more than fifty thousand over the decade from 2008 to late 2018, and by its twenty-first anniversary readers were viewing well over three and a half million pages a year. Those numbers are modest beside consumer media but substantial for a publication whose entire addressable readership is a few thousand firms and funds worldwide; in a market this specialised, reaching the dealing desks matters more than reaching the general public. Growth tracked the institutionalisation of ILS itself, as pension funds and sovereign wealth investors, attracted by returns uncorrelated with mainstream assets, entered the sector and needed a common source of news and data. The anniversary retrospective in 2020, in which Evans thanked readers, contributors, sponsors and partners, also displayed screenshots of the site's designs from 1999, 2000 and 2004 onwards — a small archive of early financial web publishing in its own right.
Reinsurance News and the Sister Publication
Alongside Artemis, Evans runs Reinsurance News, a companion service covering the broader reinsurance sector's daily developments for a wider industry audience, delivered online and in a daily email. The pairing is logical: catastrophe bonds and ILS sit inside the reinsurance market, competing with and complementing traditional capacity, and readers of one title frequently need the other. Artemis remains the specialist instrument — transactions, data and the capital-markets interface — while Reinsurance News casts the wider net over company results, appointments, mergers and market commentary. Together they illustrate a common strategy in founder-led trade media: build one authoritative niche property, then extend the same editorial and technical infrastructure across adjacent coverage that shares its audience and advertisers.
Events, Community and Market Influence
Artemis's role extends beyond publishing into convening and educating its market. Its data and commentary underpin industry conferences on ILS in centres such as Bermuda, New York, Singapore and Zurich, and its twenty-five-year history of the sector has been drawn on by authors documenting the market's development — a 2022 volume celebrating twenty-five years of insurance-linked securitisation credited Evans and Artemis for keeping the ILS community informed. Advertising, sponsorship, content development and partnership opportunities are offered to firms seeking profile in the segment, which is the commercial engine of the operation. Influence in such markets is difficult to measure but easy to recognise: when a single publication's directory defines the statistics, its reports set the quarterly narrative and its editor is a first call for journalists elsewhere, it has become part of the market's infrastructure rather than merely an observer of it.
Why a Brighton Publication Became a Global Authority
Artemis's geography is part of its story. Evans is based in Brighton, on England's south coast, having spent part of his childhood in Ireland, and the business operates as Steve Evans Ltd. Nothing about catastrophe risk requires a Brighton office: the perils are American hurricanes and Japanese earthquakes, the domiciles are Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, and the investors are global. That a small British operation became the record-keeper for this market demonstrates how thoroughly digital publishing decoupled authority from location. What mattered was starting in 1999, before the sector had an established trade press, recording every deal consistently, and maintaining one knowledgeable editorial voice for more than two decades. Longevity itself became the moat: a competitor could build a better website, but not a twenty-five-year deal history compiled in real time.
Artemis Today and Its Significance
More than twenty-five years after launch, Artemis continues to publish daily news, maintain the Deal Directory and issue its quarterly market reports, covering a sector that has matured from an experiment into a recognised alternative asset class measured in the tens of billions of dollars. Its significance for media directories is threefold. It is a working news agency for a global financial niche, whose output is syndicated and cited internationally. It is a data business, whose transaction records constitute the market's memory. And it is an example of sustainable independent trade publishing, in which deep specialisation, a free daily product and paid commercial partnerships support a small team indefinitely. For readers encountering catastrophe bonds for the first time — usually after a hurricane makes headlines — Artemis.bm is very often where the world's financial press itself goes to check the numbers, which is about the clearest definition of an authoritative source that specialist media can offer.
