We opened the insurance panel at the RiskSpan Summit earlier this month with an interesting statistic: according to Moody’s, almost a third of the $6 trillion in cash and invested assets held by US life insurers is now allocated across private credit sub-asset classes. Nancy Mueller Handal of Bayview confirmed it tracks with consideration to private placements, commercial mortgages, and infrastructure debt alongside direct lending. Bill Moretti of Equitable added a useful caveat: the industry still doesn’t have a settled definition of “private credit,” and ABF has only recently been pulled under that umbrella. However you count it, the scale is real and it’s happened fast.
I was joined by Nancy, Bill, and Larry Yang of Global Atlantic / KKR — three practitioners operating through fundamentally different models. What made the conversation worth having was exactly that diversity of structure. Here’s what stuck with me.
You may not know you’re in a bad vintage while you’re living through it.
This was the sharpest exchange of the panel. The group flagged the current non-QM environment specifically: massive appetite, compressed spreads, and layered risk that has never been tested in a declining home price environment. Non-QM has existed entirely within a rising housing market. There was even speculation that we may be experiencing a vintage risk event in data centers right now – and the industry won’t know for years. The most uncomfortable version of vintage risk isn’t the one you can see. It’s the one you’re inside.
The data problem is harder than the analytics problem.
One panelist observed that in structured finance, “you could get to a point where you don’t know what you own.” Larry described building proprietary end-to-end infrastructure — including custom waterfall models — because off-the-shelf systems aren’t granular enough. Nancy’s observation was the most memorable: her research team has grown as capabilities have improved, not shrunk. More tools enable more questions. The data was always there. The limiting factor has always been the ability to extract, manage, and act on it in real time.
AI is a co-pilot, not a substitute.
The panel’s most grounded take: “Seasoned people know what questions to ask — and know when the answer is wrong.” Junior analysts prompting a model without that judgment aren’t getting the same output. The firms making real progress are the ones embedding AI into durable processes, not just re-prompting the same task each month.
And on why they’re still leaning in: Nancy called it “the most exciting market out there.” Larry cited the breadth: in ABF, you’re always encountering asset classes you’ve never seen before. The undisputed line of the day: “Insurance companies are now sexy.”
Hard to argue with that.
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The RiskSpan Summit 2026 brought together practitioners across insurance, asset management, and structured finance.
