Unlimited partnership

As major consumers of private credit and other asset-based finance instruments, insurers have leverage over how private credit vehicles work. We have seen several moves along the path to becoming a strategic design partner, and potentially more:

Tier 1: Book-yield reporting, statutory schedules, and look-through transparency
Tier 2: Separately managed accounts tailored to insurer ALM ladders with full loan portfolio visibility and control
Tier 3: Rated feeders or structured sleeves that carve out rated tranches for capital-efficient treatment
Tier 4: Co-investment sidecars that offer insurers the maximum level of fund governance and deal-level transparency

In addition, we are beginning to see true convergence in both directions. For example, Manulife has acquired private credit managers, effectively becoming an originator, at least under its corporate umbrella. In the other direction, examples such as Apollo’s acquisition of Athene ⁱⁱⁱ and KKR’s acquisition of Global Atlantic ^iv have helped private equity firms gain permanent capital at a time when traditional fundraising has weakened.

The role of technology and data

To serve insurers’ bespoke needs, many managers have needed to update their infrastructure. It is a question of building information symmetry. Insurers want continuous visibility, multi-basis accounting, reconciliation between IRR and statutory yield.

Meeting these needs pushes the edges of what reporting means. Private credit managers need to be able to unify loan-level data into portfolio-level analytics that can reconcile with insurance accounting. That explains why we see this as a pivot from the LP model. Instead of collecting LPs and putting them on the shelves, managers become data streamers, able to deliver metrics on demand.

Even with direct ownership ties, most partnerships still operate on separate systems and data architecture. Integration remains an ambitious goal. The firms get married on paper but live in separate houses. Each has its own systems, data definitions, and reporting cadence.

This situation is as inefficient as it would be between people. We think firms that treat operational data as the connective tissue between balance-sheet management and asset origination are better suited to get their house in order.

A unified data infrastructure allows for smoother solvency reporting, real-time exposure tracking, and scalable cross-asset ALM management. In a sense, the complexity of insurer requirements raises the bar to create an information advantage that compounds across portfolios and the private credit segment overall.

Future potential

The continued growth of private credit, by definition, creates more opportunities for insurers to take more active roles in their investments. While life has dominated, we already see parallel structural innovation for P&C insurers, although to continue, it must solve a different and shorter-term ALM equation. If insurers can construct full liability ladders from short consumer pools to long infrastructure within private credit.

Market growth will also spawn more secondary-market development and securitization transactions. BlackRock forecasts that total private credit AUM could reach $4.5 trillion by the end of this decade.^v The more investable instruments that private credit can create, the more insurers will see fixed-income-like liquidity and tradability.

Even those with smaller balance sheets will find opportunities to shift private credit from an opportunistic alternative allocation to a fundamental fixed income lever in their portfolios. They will be able to stream data from private credit managers, and, in some cases, directly from loan portfolios, to design structures, orchestrate exposures, and master their own yield.