AXIS Capital Appoints Dr. Edgar Bautista and Sandeep Ramachandran as Co-Heads of New Weather & Commodity Markets Initiative

AXIS Capital Holdings Limited (“AXIS Capital”) (NYSE: AXS) today announced that Dr. Edgar Bautista and Mr. Sandeep Ramachandran have been appointed as Senior Vice Presidents and co-heads of the new Weather & Commodity Markets initiative at AXIS Re. In their new roles, Dr. Bautista and Mr. Ramachandran will be responsible for establishing and managing AXIS Re’s global weather and energy business. Dr. Bautista and Mr. Ramachandran both join AXIS Capital from Morgan Stanley, where they established the weather and outage risk management team within the company’s Commodities business unit.

Commenting on the appointments, Jay Nichols, CEO of AXIS Re, said: “I am excited to welcome Edgar and Sandeep to the AXIS Re team. The global weather and commodity related risk markets have seen significant growth over the past decade. This new business is highly complementary to our current portfolio and further expands our product offering. Our product suite will include reinsurance, insurance and financial products offered on a global basis. We look forward to Edgar and Sandeep’s combined contributions to help position us to actively participate in these important markets.”

Dr. Bautista has nineteen years of experience in capital markets with emphasis in weather risk management, commodity markets and natural hazard modeling. Before joining Morgan Stanley, Dr. Bautista held the position of Director, Client Markets in the Weather and Energy unit of Swiss Re Corporate Solutions. Prior to his time at Swiss Re Group, he was a Senior Vice President at PartnerRe Ltd. where he successfully established its Weather Business Unit. Dr. Bautista has held senior underwriting, risk management and research positions at Aquila Energy, GE Capital, Applied Insurance Research (“AIR Worldwide”) and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Dr. Bautista holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Mechanics from Columbia University.

Mr. Ramachandran has 15 years of experience in the weather and energy risk management industry. Preceding his time at Morgan Stanley, Mr. Ramachandran was one of the individuals responsible for establishing the weather and outage business in the capital markets unit at Swiss Re and held the position of Director and Head of Weather and Electricity Outage Protection Products. Mr. Ramachandran was elected to the Board of Directors of the Weather Risk Management Association in 2007, and served as its Treasurer through August 2011. He holds an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and a Masters degree in Civil Engineering and Operations Research from Princeton University.

AXIS Capital is a Bermuda-based global provider of specialty lines insurance and treaty reinsurance with shareholders’ equity at March 31, 2013 of $5.9 billion and locations in Bermuda, the United States, Europe, Singapore, Canada, Australia and Latin America. Its operating subsidiaries have been assigned a rating of “A+” (“Strong”) by Standard & Poor’s and “A” (“Excellent”) with a positive outlook by A.M. Best.