Investment Allocation
- 01:46
Understand how life insurance business allocates its assets to manage risk
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Glossary
Asset Allocation Life Insurance BusinessTranscript
The investment allocation for a life insurance company is really important when we're determining investment returns. So we pay close attention to the asset allocation by asset class. Now, this slide shows the investment allocation for an Italian insurance company, Generali, in 2018. Now, Generali has a large life insurance business and a smaller general insurance business. Now, typically, a life insurance company has highly predictable benefit payments, but which are very long in duration. Therefore, a key focus is to match the profile of the investments with those of the actual liabilities. So typically, life insurance companies tend to invest more heavily in fixed-income investments, and you can really see that here where the fixed-income instruments are the largest portion of the asset allocation. Now, if we drill into this a little bit further, you can see how these fixed-income instruments are spread across different sectors, and you can really see that the largest allocation is for government bonds. And the reason for this is that government bonds are typically much longer in duration, but also because they are low in credit risk, and therefore, they help manage the overall exposure of the investment portfolio to credit risk. Now, turning our attentions back to the main asset allocation, you can see that actually, after fixed-income instruments, the next largest slice of the pie is the investments used to back unit and index-lined policies. Now remember, that the investment risk on these policies is actually borne by the policyholder so we don't care too much about what they're actually invested in here. Now the remaining asset allocation is spread across equities, cash, and real estate. Now, the cash and equities allocation, although small, is really important because it ensures that there's adequate liquidity for meeting benefit payments as they fall due.