Andrew Putwain: You work closely with insurance companies on their strategic asset allocation. What shifts are you seeing in how insurers are thinking about private markets today?
Joe Pursley: We help insurance companies allocate net new capital coming into their portfolios, and over the past few years we've observed some meaningful shifts in how they consider private market investments.
The first is definitional. Private fixed income is no longer confined to the alternative credit bucket – it now sits alongside investment grade and below investment grade allocations as well as both core and alternative strategies. That's a fundamental change in how insurance companies categorise and think about this space.
The second shift is at the portfolio level. We're starting to see a natural upper bound emerge for where insurance companies – particularly life insurers – are comfortable with their private markets exposure. Nuveen’s 2026 EQuilibrium institutional investor survey supports this: North American insurers told us they expect private markets allocations to settle in the 11-30% range of their overall portfolios, reflecting natural constraints around liquidity and asset-liability management.
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