CWAN research insight: Are “alternatives” still alternative?
Explore the evolution of the alternatives market for insurers, drawing on CWAN’s proprietary database to reveal real-time allocation trends.
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For today’s insurers, ‘alternatives’ are hardly a fringe strategy
By Matthew Vegari, Head of Research
The chart-busting growth of alternative assets over the past decade has prompted many asset managers to increase their allocations to a wide range of private credit, equity, real estate, and hedge fund strategies. Multiple surveys and reports, including our recent Rise of Alternatives analysis, have commented on this phenomenon. But few (if any) have had access to CWAN’s database of nearly 400 insurers representing $4.4 trillion in combined AUM (as of August 2025).
CWAN’s Research Desk recently published a detailed report underpinned by this data to 1) explore the alts universe at large 2) zoom in and quantify how alts have grown in insurers’ portfolios 3) chart the distribution of exposure to alts and 4) investigate which allocations are being downsized to make room in portfolios. Using this report, asset managers can benchmark their portfolios against their peers, review the current and historical make up of private assets, and decide whether, like the wider industry, alts are still an “alternative” strategy or have become a core part of their portfolios.
The growth of alternative assets
The term “alternatives” covers a broad range of assets and can mean different things to different investors. For this report, CWAN kept the definition reasonably broad to mean investments outside of publicly traded equity and fixed income securities (among a few other restrictions). Using CWAN’s anonymized data for our group of nearly 400 insurers, the Research Desk found that overall holdings at CWAN have grown from around $180 billion in 2018 to nearly $900 billion in 2025, as illustrated in the graph below. Private credit makes up more than 80% of these holdings, which can be further broken down into private- placed corporate bonds, mortgage loans, and limited partnerships.