Life insurers and annuity writers are among the largest institutional credit investors in the world — across the US, Europe, the UK, South Africa and Asia. Their balance sheets concentrate in long-dated, illiquid, privately negotiated credit — private debt, infrastructure, commercial real estate and structured credit — to back annuity and savings liabilities. Under risk-based capital regimes worldwide — Solvency II in the EU, Solvency UK in the UK, the NAIC’s risk-based capital (RBC) framework in the US, Bermuda’s BSCR, South Africa’s SAM and the risk-based regimes across Asia — the limited agency coverage of those assets carries a direct capital cost: unrated exposures typically attract materially higher capital than rated equivalents. And when credit deterioration comes, it tends to show up in bank-internal views well before public ratings catch up.

Credit Benchmark addresses both problems with one dataset: independent consensus ratings on the unrated names that drive capital drag, refreshed weekly to surface deterioration earlier.

How life insurers use Credit Benchmark

• Capital efficiency on unrated investments — apply independent Credit Consensus Ratings to private debt, infrastructure and commercial real estate for more capital-efficient treatment under Solvency II/UK, the US NAIC framework and other capital regimes.
• Annuity and pension risk transfer pricing — bring independent ratings on illiquid assets into bulk annuity and PRT pricing and portfolio construction, supporting more competitive bids.
• Forward-looking deterioration signals — Opinion Change Indicators, Credit Risk Indices and dispersion analytics flag credit weakening on infrastructure, utility and corporate exposures months before public ratings move.
• Asset-liability management — incorporate consensus PD trends, transition matrices and sector indices into long-dated ALM scenarios and reinvestment assumptions.
• Counterparty oversight — independent ratings on the reinsurers, banks, custodians and derivatives counterparties behind annuity and asset-intensive structures.
• Capital relief and SRT investing — assess long-dated, floating-rate exposure to bank-originated credit risk that complements long-tail liability profiles (see Reinsurance and Asset Management for the full investor workflow).
• Independent validation for regulators and internal models — reinforce the credit assumptions behind internal models, regulatory capital and stress-test submissions with an anonymized, aggregate bank consensus.

Outcomes

More capital-efficient treatment of unrated holdings under your regulatory capital regime, sharper annuity and PRT pricing, earlier deterioration signals on long-dated exposures, and defensible internal-model and regulatory inputs — all from one independent, externally sourced dataset.

Credit, trade credit, surety and political risk underwriters underwrite credit risk directly, on obligors that traditional rating agencies have rarely covered — surety in particular is a large, distinct line for US clients, where bonded obligations carry their own credit and regulatory considerations. These underwriters face the same pressure as every credit decision-maker in the industry — more submissions, faster turnaround — but with even less to go on: most trade credit obligors and many specialty credit risks have no agency rating, and where one exists, its annual cadence lags the underlying credit reality.

Credit Benchmark provides underwriters with an independent consensus view on the same obligors — drawn from the credit views of regulated bank lenders that already have direct exposure to those names — refreshed weekly, to support faster, better-evidenced underwriting decisions.

How credit, trade credit, surety and political risk underwriters use Credit Benchmark

• Faster, more confident underwriting decisions — bring an independent consensus credit view onto the desk so underwriters can say yes (or no) faster on obligors that would otherwise sit in the ‘unrated and unfamiliar’ bucket.
• Obligor mapping at scale — independent ratings on tens of thousands of corporates, financials and funds that fall outside traditional agency coverage, enabling broader portfolio onboarding and benchmarking.
• Post-bind portfolio monitoring — weekly-refreshed consensus surfaces deterioration earlier than annual reviews or agency rating actions once a risk is on the books.
• Concentration, accumulation and exposure management — sector indices and correlation matrices help identify accumulation across counterparties, sectors and geographies, supporting limit frameworks and risk appetite calibration.
• Reinsurance dialogue and treaty support — present an independent, externally sourced view of the underwriting portfolio’s credit profile to reinsurers and capital providers.
• Regulatory and audit defensibility — evidence the data and process behind underwriting decisions with a peer-sourced benchmark recognized across the credit industry.

In their words

Case study in brief: Global specialty insurer

The Credit & Portfolio Risk Management team at a leading global specialty insurer integrated Credit Benchmark via API to fill public rating gaps, create comparables for unrated obligors, and accelerate underwriting decisions across the portfolio.

Read the full case study

Built for the underwriting workflow

Credit Benchmark integrates into the underwriting environment without a system lift: through the Credit Benchmark web app for desk-level lookup and monitoring, via Excel and API for in-house pricing models and portfolio tools, through Bloomberg for desktop integration, and through AWS Marketplace for cloud-native deployments.

Outcomes

Faster underwriting on a broader obligor universe, broader coverage of otherwise-unrated obligors, earlier visibility on post-bind credit deterioration, and a defensible, independent credit reference behind every underwriting decision.

Reinsurers sit on both sides of the credit equation. They assume risk from cedants — including credit, surety and political-risk treaties whose performance depends on underlying obligors — they carry counterparty exposure to cedants, fronting partners and retrocessionaires over long-tail contracts, and they run large investment portfolios of their own. Across all three, the names that matter are dominated by the unrated universe that traditional agencies do not reach.

Credit Benchmark provides independent Credit Consensus Ratings across that full network, drawn from the internal credit views of the world’s leading banks.

How reinsurers use Credit Benchmark

• Cedant and retrocession counterparty oversight — monitor the consensus credit view on cedants, fronting partners and retrocessionaires over the life of long-tail contracts; surface deterioration earlier than agency action.
• Assumed-risk and treaty assessment — bring an independent view of the credit profile of the underlying portfolios behind credit, surety and political-risk treaties, supporting risk selection and pricing of assumed business.
• Accumulation across treaties — sector indices and correlation matrices reveal credit-driven accumulation across the assumed book, supporting limit frameworks and exposure management.
• Investment portfolio capital efficiency — apply consensus ratings to private debt, infrastructure and commercial real estate in the reinsurer’s own investment book for more capital-efficient treatment and earlier deterioration signals.
• Capital relief and SRT investing — assess long-dated exposure to bank-originated credit risk as part of the investment strategy.
• Independent validation and rating dialogue — reinforce internal models, ORSA submissions and rating-agency dialogue with an anonymized, aggregate bank consensus.

Outcomes

Independent oversight across cedants, retrocession and assumed-risk treaties, capital-efficient treatment and earlier signals on the investment book, and a defensible peer benchmark for the credit assumptions behind both sides of the reinsurer’s balance sheet.