Leveraging the IIOR: An Insurer’s guide to the 2026 Insurance Investment Outsourcing Report 

The Insurance Investment Outsourcing Report contains far more than the listings readers initially seek out. The 2026 edition profiles 96 asset managers and 12 insurance-focused consultants, together representing approximately $5.5 trillion in reported unaffiliated general account AUM.

While many readers begin with the goal of identifying managers for specific mandates, the same profiles and analyses also provide a broader view of how the outsourced insurance investment market is structured and how it is evolving. They highlight the capabilities that distinguish insurance-focused managers and the continued shift toward private markets, which remains a defining feature of both industry composition and manager evaluation.

Beyond its use as a reference for manager selection, the report also offers a lens into the changing shape of insurance investment management.

Insurance Investment Management Is Different

Insurance portfolios answer to a set of constraints that general institutional mandates do not, and those constraints shape every decision a manager makes on an insurer’s behalf.

Balance sheet assets must service claims and consume risk capital while still contributing to profitability, and they do so within statutory accounting, state code limitations, regulatory capital rules, and an investment-grade fixed-income orientation that together make income generation matter more than market appreciation. A strategy designed for a pension or an endowment, however well-constructed, rarely transfers cleanly into an insurer’s general account.

Implementation preferences have remained consistent over many years. Insurers favor separate account mandates to retain control and align with regulatory and accounting treatment, though private structured credit, often in the form of rated note structures, has taken hold precisely because it addresses many of those same constraints. Fund structures remain relevant where a separate account is impractical, particularly in private equity and other LP and LLC strategies. The managers represented in the IIOR have built for these conditions directly, which is why the IIOR treats insurance capability as a discipline rather than a corner of institutional asset management.

Manager Capabilities

Many asset managers have developed meaningful capability to serve insurers, and those capabilities are often expressed less through any single strategy than through the broader infrastructure that supports the portfolio. This includes insurance-specific reporting tailored to each client, book income analysis and projections that inform risk decisions, and the accounting and regulatory support required for an insurance mandate.

Many firms also provide peer analytics, strategic asset allocation support, industry trend analysis, and ESG perspectives that help insurers place their portfolios in a wider market context. These elements often surface as important differentiators when reviewing profiles.

The profiles are designed to surface these dimensions in a consistent way. Service breadth, client base, and experience within the insurance sector each add context for understanding a firm’s capabilities. Read together, these fields help bring structure to a market where approaches and operating models can vary significantly.

An Introduction to the IIOR

The IIOR is a compendium of insurance-focused investment managers and consultants, open to any firm with capabilities and services for insurers and offered without charge to the insurance investment community. Each edition pairs a full-page profile of every participant with a set of summary analyses, so that a reader can move from a single firm to the field as a whole, drawing on detailed AUM data by asset category, the general account assets a firm manages for insurers, its total firm assets and the insurance services it provides.

It is built as a directory rather than a strict league table, and that design shapes how the data should be read. The aggregate tables center on third-party general account assets, meaning the general account money managed for insurers that the manager itself does not own, while affiliated and separate account assets appear within the individual profiles.

The Insurance Asset Management Industry

Read as a whole, the report also serves as an annual account of the state of insurance asset management, and the 2026 edition continues a long trajectory of growth. Reported AUM increased 23% year over year, an increase of roughly $1 trillion. Over the 12 years the report has been produced, participation has expanded from 40 managers and consultants to 108, and total reported AUM has grown by approximately 400%.

This growth reflects both underlying market expansion and changes in the composition of the report. It was not uniform across regions. Europe and the UK led in absolute terms, increasing by approximately $500 billion, or 32%, supported in part by the inclusion of additional seasoned managers. North America grew by $200 billion, or 12%, while APAC and offshore regions expanded more quickly on a percentage basis.

New entrants also play a meaningful role in the overall trend. A portion of the increase reflects expanded participation, including large global managers extending their insurance capabilities, alongside private market firms and specialist boutiques appearing in the report for the first time.

Leveraging the IIOR

The IIOR helps you evaluate managers, not simply identify them. For any given asset class, a profile shows how much a firm manages for insurers and across its broader client base, the regions in which it operates, the number and type of insurance clients it serves, and the insurance-specific services it provides. Taken together, these data points help distinguish firms that may appear similar.

One of the most valuable comparisons is the relationship between a firm’s total assets and its insurance assets. This ratio indicates how significant the insurance business is to the firm and, by extension, how much it is likely to invest in insurance-specific capabilities. A large generalist with a small insurance practice operates under different incentives than a firm whose business is more deeply rooted in the insurance market.

Insurance client counts and client types provide additional insight into the depth and breadth of a firm’s experience. Reviewing these distinctions before developing a shortlist can help narrow a broad field of candidates into a smaller group of firms that are genuinely suited to a specific mandate.

Because previous editions of the IIOR remain available, firms of interest can also be tracked over time. Comparing profiles across multiple years provides a view of how a manager’s insurance business has evolved, offering additional context beyond a single year’s data.

A Tour of the IIOR

The IIOR moves from a high-level view of the insurance investment management industry to detailed profiles of each participating manager and consultant. These profiles include AUM data, insurance-specific services, and contact information. Leader tables rank firms by reported general account assets, with regional breakouts for additional context.

Each profile separates external general account assets, affiliated general account assets, separate account assets, other assets, and total firm AUM. This structure helps readers assess both a firm’s overall scale and the depth of its insurance business. Profiles also include insurance-focused services and client breakdowns by insurer type and size.

Asset allocations are detailed across public fixed income, private fixed income, public equities, and alternatives, with additional subcategory data where available. One important distinction is that client size reflects the insurer’s assets, not the amount managed by the investment manager.

Rankings should be interpreted carefully. A firm’s position reflects the assets it chose to report, not necessarily the full scope of its capabilities. Some of the industry’s most specialized insurance managers appear well below the largest firms in the rankings. While the market remains concentrated, with seven of the 96 participating managers accounting for roughly half of reported AUM, the lower quartiles often reveal more meaningful trends, including greater allocations to private assets and private fixed income and less exposure to public fixed income.

Missing data reflects what firms elected to disclose, not the limits of their capabilities.

The Insights by Category section aggregates data across participating firms to examine broader industry trends. It explores asset class expertise, the balance between public and private fixed income, the share of insurance assets within each firm’s total book, and the regional distribution of insurance assets. Together, these analyses provide a deeper understanding of not only who manages insurance assets, but also how the industry is allocating capital.

Private Markets and Private Credit

Of everything the report records this year, the clearest movement is the continued shift into private markets, and private credit sits at the center of it.

Private credit now accounts for 16% of reported AUM, up from 10% five years ago, a 2.4x increase that grew by a further 20% over the past year alone. Exposure varies rather than uniform, with traditional private placements remaining the largest component while the opportunity set has widened into middle market lending, structured credit, infrastructure debt, and other forms of private debt.

Real estate has become meaningful, with growth across both commercial and residential mortgage exposure, and a good deal of this private credit capability is concentrated within a particular group of managers. A growing share of it comes through rated note structures rather than direct lending alone, which alters the accounting and capital profile an insurer takes on. Recent commentary has pointed to emerging pressures in parts of the private credit market, though industry feedback suggests that insurers have approached manager selection and structural protection with discipline, and the extent to which that holds will become clearer over a longer credit cycle.

Download the full 2026 Insurance Investment Outsourcing Report to explore detailed benchmarks, market shifts and how your strategy measures up.