For more than a decade of low interest rates, insurance companies faced a persistent challenge: how to generate the level of investment income their liabilities demanded when public fixed income markets simply weren’t delivering. The answer, increasingly, has been private assets. 

That shift has become one of the defining stories in institutional investing. Insurance capital now represents roughly 30% of the world’s invested assets, approaching $40 trillion, and a growing share of that capital is flowing into private credit, asset-based finance, equipment finance, and other non-public opportunities. 

To help chief investment officers navigate this rapidly evolving landscape, InsuranceAUMTM will host its 2026 Insurers’ Private Credit Forum on November 12–13 in Austin, Texas. The event is designed exclusively for the insurance investment community, with an agenda shaped by the LPs themselves. 

“What I’m really looking forward to is seeing the InsuranceAUM community come together in Austin,” said Wesley Carroccio, Executive Director of InsuranceAUM.  

“This will be my first Insurers’ Private Credit Forum, but what already stands out to me is how intentionally the event is built around what insurance investors want and need. This Forum gives insurance investors an opportunity to look beyond the headlines, hear different perspectives, exchange ideas with their peers, and come away with practical insights they can bring back to their organizations. As the new Executive Director, I’m especially looking forward to hearing directly from our attendees about what matters most to them and how InsuranceAUM can continue to evolve to serve this community.” 

Michel Léonard, Ph.D.,CBE, Chief Economist and Data Scientist for the Insurance Information Institute, will deliver the keynote address at the Forum. 

He’ll speak to investors on how to position private credit within the broader portfolio, alongside equities, fixed income, and other private strategies competing for the same capital. Against a backdrop of geopolitical volatility, Iran-driven oil shocks, rate uncertainty, and equity swings, he’ll lay out how disciplined investors can turn that uncertainty into an allocation edge rather than a reason to pull back. 

He’ll also characterize this year’s private credit headlines, the regulatory scrutiny, the correction, the agency concern, separating genuine structural shifts in the asset class from cyclical noise, and translate that distinction into concrete guidance on how investors should size and structure their allocations now. 

“The insurance industry has changed more in the last five years than it has in the last fifty,” said Stewart Foley, CFA, Founder and Senior Advisor of InsuranceAUM. But that doesn’t mean that chief investment officers at insurance companies will be overwhelmed by the change. 

“At InsuranceAUM, we trademarked the phrase ‘Home of the World’s Smartest Money™,’ because these investors are exceptionally sophisticated,” Foley added. 

Part One: The Megatrend Reshaping Insurance Portfolios 

Private assets, as Foley explains, are simply assets that don’t trade in a public market. Unlike a share of Apple stock or a U.S. Treasury, they carry no CUSIP and require deep analytical work to underwrite. 

“Typically, a private asset has less liquidity than a public asset. That’s not 100% true, but it is overwhelmingly correct,” Foley said. “Consequently, the yield or expected interest income is higher on private assets than public, often considerably higher.” 

The trend accelerated after the Great Financial Crisis, when regulatory changes made it harder for banks to hold certain loans on their balance sheets. Private credit managers stepped in to fill the void, and today many banks and private credit firms collaborate, with one handling origination while the other holds the loan. 

The shift among insurance investors has been so dramatic that public assets didn’t make the agenda at InsuranceAUM’s annual event in either 2025 or 2026. “Everyone is focused on private credit or private assets,” Foley said. 

Asset-based finance (ABF) has emerged and is having a moment. Foley pointed to equipment finance as a clear illustration: warehouse operators leasing forklifts, airlines leasing aircraft, railcar and shipping container operators tapping capital markets rather than tying up balance sheets. 

“American Airlines, for example, doesn’t own its planes; they lease them,” Foley said. “If you’re an insurer with substantial capital that needs to be put to work, it’s an excellent match.” 

Unlike a bank, which can face a run, as Silicon Valley Bank demonstrated, an insurer’s liability structure makes such an event essentially impossible, making insurance capital a natural fit for these longer-dated, less liquid assets. 

The Profile of the Modern Insurance CIO 

The sophistication required to invest in private assets has raised the bar for insurance investment professionals. Roughly 1,500 U.S. carriers exist, but the top 10% control more than 90% of the assets, and this “right tail” has largely driven the private credit boom. 

Access remains uneven. Roughly 1,200 carriers hold less than $1 billion in assets and often can’t meet the minimums required by large private credit managers. “Stewart Foley Incorporated cannot go out and be a private credit client of Ares. I don’t have enough money to meet the minimums,” Foley said. “A lot of insurance carriers are in that same boat.” 

That gap, he predicts, will narrow as new solutions emerge to give smaller carriers access to higher-returning private markets. 

For CIOs already active in this space, Foley outlined several best practices: 

Know what you own. “Understand what you’re buying and what backs it up. You also need to know what to ask a potential manager,” Foley said. 

Understand your liquidity needs. For property and casualty (P&C) carriers, Foley suggested using two times probable maximum loss (PML) as a liquidity threshold before determining illiquidity capacity. “It’s not that these assets have no liquidity, but if you need to raise money, there are better options. So, it’s about getting that balance right.” 

Match assets to liabilities. P&C carriers typically have shorter-dated liabilities, while life and annuity writers have much longer ones. “You may need an eight-duration asset or a two-duration asset. That will change the opportunity set depending on which part of the yield curve you need exposure to.” 

Get your asset manager’s insurance expertise. “If you don’t understand insurance and your claim to fame is simply that you’re a really good manager, I’d save your time and money and go raise capital somewhere else,” Foley said. Managers must understand statutory accounting, regulatory treatment, capital position, tax position, and domicile-specific considerations. 

Foley helped architect the Chartered Insurance Investment Manager designation, created by The Institutes®, to build that fundamental knowledge base among managers serving insurance clients. InsuranceAUM is an affiliate of The Institutes®. 

Triple-I’s Léonard offered additional advice, given the volatility that can affect economic activity. 

“Volatility exposes weak structures fast,” Léonard said. 

“Disciplined investors gain clarity now that others only discover after allocating. The real work is separating genuine structural shifts in the asset class from cyclical noise: this year’s regulatory scrutiny, the market correction, and the agency concern all deserve scrutiny, but not all signal the same underlying risk.  

Investors who do that work now can size and structure exposure with conviction, judged against the whole portfolio, equities, fixed income, everything competing for the same capital, rather than treating private credit based on individual return drivers alone,” he added.  

What Attendees Will Gain in Austin 

The 2026 Insurers’ Private Credit Forum is built around a simple recognition: insurance investment professionals are busy, and their time must be well spent. 

“What our LP community consistently tells us is that their number one source of value at these events is talking with each other,” Foley said. “So, while there are panels, the format is designed to foster deeper sessions.” 

Two LP co-chairs from EquiTrust, both from the life space, are setting the agenda to ensure the topics reflect what investors want to discuss, not manager pitches. Attendees will have access to top-tier managers through prearranged individual meetings they select themselves, along with substantial unstructured time built in for peer-to-peer conversations. 

That informal networking, Foley said, is often where the most valuable exchanges happen. He described how a CIO who invested in music royalties three years ago might sit down with a peer newly exploring the asset class and answer the questions that matter: “Who did you select? How did you get there? What did you ask them? How has the collateral performed? Have there been surprises?” 

“Chances are you know something that somebody else doesn’t, and chances are somebody else knows something that you don’t,” Foley said. “Two heads are better than one, and 25 heads is even better.” 

The event is intentionally compact, essentially lunch to lunch, so attendees can fly in the morning and depart the following afternoon. Zoom and Teams let both LPs and managers bring additional team members into key conversations. 

As an educational nonprofit, InsuranceAUM’s central mission is to educate the insurance investment community, with asset managers often serving as the source of that information because they work in these markets every day. 

“This is a significant trend,” Foley said. “I would argue that the insurance industry has been funding economic growth in the U.S. for some time, and I think that’s going to continue as we move forward.” 

To learn more about the Insurers’ Private Credit Forum, visit https://www.insuranceaum.com/events.