In line with recent business and academic pursuits within the alternative risk transfer area, the paper aims to analyse the link between the activities of several E.U. based (re)insurance companies in the catastrophe bonds market and their overall corporate financial performance. In order to account for the interdependences between the companies’ involvement in the insurance-linked securities market and corporate performance, the analysis uses the volume of the issued catastrophe bonds to represent the participation of (re)insurance companies in the cat bond market and the return on assets (ROA) and the return on equity (ROE) as overall financial performance measures. The relationship is explored through a quantitative analysis by employing vector-autoregressive models, impulse response, variance decomposition, and Granger-causality analyses while covering quarterly data for the 2005Q4-2014Q2 period. The results suggest that the activity on the catastrophe bonds market Granger causes the overall corporate performance, with both negative and positive short-term responses attributable to a shock in the size of the cat bonds deals. The main contribution of the paper consists in broadening the empirical studies regarding the effects of the cat bonds on the performance of the cedent companies at European level.