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May 23, 2023 at 10:56 AM
Investment firms managed more than $1.7 trillion in assets for North American life insurers’ own general accounts and for North American property and casualty insurers in 2022, according to the new 2023 Insurance Investment Outsourcing Report, which is based on a voluntary asset manager survey.
The investment managers’ insurance industry assets under management fell 5% between the end of 2021 and the end of 2022, but the AUM total held up better than overall industry assets. Total U.S. P&C and life general accounts held $11.9 trillion in assets at the end of 2022, down 8.1% from the total recorded a year earlier, according to the Federal Reserve Board.
DCS Financial Consulting and Clearwater Analytics based the asset data in the new report on survey responses from 67 asset managers, up from 58 for the report that covered 2021 assets.
For a look at the top 10 third-party managers of outsourced North American P&C and life general account assets, based on figures from the new report and last year’s report, see the gallery above.
Thanks to strong asset growth at BlackRock, those 10 top managers held the year-over-year AUM drop to 2.3%. They ended the year managing $1.4 trillion in North American P&C and life insurer general account assets.
What It Means
The DCS/Clearwater report covers firms that help insurers support all kinds of insurance policies and all kinds of annuity contracts. Insurers need to have highly liquid assets to deal with some sorts of risk, such as earthquake risk, and they can use long-term assets to support other types of products, such as lifetime income annuities.
Retail advisors could use the performance statistics in the report as investment benchmarks for clients who want to balance the need to maximize returns with the need to manage all kinds of risk.
DCS and Clearwater
Steve Doire, the editor of the report, is a strategic advisor at Clearwater and the owner of DCS Financial.
Clearwater has a keen interest in insurance company asset management because it provides systems that insurers use to track their portfolios. The firm estimates that its systems help insurers manage $6.4 trillion in assets.
Clearwater’s systems are getting extra attention now because of insurers’ need to comply with updates to the U.S. and international accounting standards. The updates require insurers to include more of the effects of projected changes in current and future asset values in current earnings, even when the changes lead to no current inflows or outflows of cash.
The Investment Outsourcing Report
The DCS/Clearwater report team covers the assets that insurers place with outside asset managers, rather than the assets insurers manage for themselves or the assets held in the clients’ own separate accounts.
The amount of assets held in separate accounts that life insurers manage fell 20% between the end of 2021 and the end of 2022, to $2.6 trillion, according to Fed figures.
The DCS/Clearwater report includes figures for the entire world, not just for North America. It shows, for example, that the participating managers have a total of $3.2 trillion P&C and life general account AUM, down from $3.3 trillion in 2021.
In addition to changes in the amount of cash flowing into reserves and changes in investment performance, some of the factors that affect the outsourced insurance AUM totals in the DCS/Clearwater report include changes in the percentage of assets that insurers choose to manage themselves; competition between the asset managers; and changes in the mix of asset managers that respond to the DCS/Clearwater survey.
The DCS/Clearwater figures for North America are not strictly comparable to the Fed U.S. figures, because the DCS/Clearwater figures include assets from insurers in Canada and Mexico as well as assets from insurers in the United States.
But the DCS/Clearwater totals do give users a sense of the scale of insurers’ holdings: The firms in the DCS/Clearwater report have North American P&C and life general account AUM that amount to 1.4% of all U.S. financial assets.
(Image: Malochka Mikalai/Shutterstock)
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