THE POWER OF PARTNERSHIP: LEVERAGING PRIVATE DATA AND AI TO ENHANCE PORTFOLIO TRANSPARENCY

The growth in private markets, particularly in private credit, is changing the rules of engagement for insurers. This adds tremendous complexity to the task of managing those assets in a whole portfolio framework.

As the proportion of private assets held in a portfolio grows, the performance of those assets needs to be seen and understood alongside public assets. This is both an operational and accounting challenge, as detailed in the BlackRock Global Insurance Report 2025.

Data is the root of that challenge, but also the key to the solution. The volume of data has exploded, with 181 zettabytes expected to be created, captured, copied, and consumed in 2025 nearly three times as much as in 2020. Harnessing and utilizing this data is critical for the challenges of today, such as investment selection, risk management, operations, and reporting but also essential to unlock the power of AI on these data sets.

Investors aim to see exposures to sectors and geographies, and model scenarios in real time across their whole portfolio. AI-powered technology has the potential to arm insurers with the tools and analytics they need to manage their portfolios, from pre- to post-investment, across myriad positions, funds, and fund managers, in public and private markets, and across different asset classes.

Compounding Complexity

The changing composition of insurers’ credit investments highlights the complexity. Public credit is well understood, supported by standardized data and widely accepted metrics. In contrast, private credit is expanding rapidly – BlackRock projects the private credit market will more than double to $4.5 trillion by 2030 but information flows are fragmented, lacking standardization, and span a proliferation of products, making analysis and comparison significantly more challenging.

Insurance companies have a long history of making direct credit investments with loans to specific borrowers. At the same time, they are increasingly investing indirectly through separately managed accounts and unlisted funds, which bring their own challenges across the full lifecycle. Some firms have investments in a large number of private credit funds managed by multiple GPs. Is there transparency around the data GPs are providing? How is the portfolio constructed? How are analytics and risk evaluated? And how can these investments be evaluated relative to the rest of the portfolio?

Manual work arounds are common when insurers begin investing in private credit, but scaling these investments requires robust infrastructure across operations, accounting, finance, and data management. Even the most sophisticated teams struggle to maintain control and transparency across their public and private holdings.

Toward a Single Solution

Insurers and their technology and data partners have developed solutions for these different challenges. Often, there is one set of systems for public markets and another for private markets. Integrating these is challenging, and often the results are not optimal. Further, these systems have to adapt to a changing set of requirements around liquidity, transparency, portfolio oversight, accounting, risk, compliance, and regulatory reporting.

The imperative to break free from this multi-system framework into something that brings it together in a scalable, integrated infrastructure platform is becoming increasingly urgent. We believe technology will power investment and operational success, allowing insurers to make better decisions more efficiently and more cost-effectively, a critical factor in today’s competitive landscape.

The Power of Partnership

We believe that insurers will need to pick the right partners on this journey. The partners needs to have the scale, capability, capital, and expertise to invest in tomorrow’s technology, drive change, and enable the investors to spend their time focusing on the core competencies that will drive their success. That promotes making better investments, constructing more efficient portfolios, and delivering superior outcomes for their end customers.