Europe’s insurers are getting bigger again

European insurers are managing larger investment portfolios again. After several years in which rising rates, falling bond prices and volatile markets complicated any reading of balance-sheet growth, the direction has become clearer.

But the headline number is less informative than it looks.

Part of the increase reflects markets. Part reflects new business. Unit-linked portfolios, where policyholders rather than insurers bear the investment risk, have also grown differently from general-account assets. Combining the two can therefore exaggerate the amount of additional capital that insurers themselves have had to invest.

The composition of the general account is more revealing. Higher interest rates have restored an economic attraction to fixed income that had largely disappeared during the negative-rate years. Yet the resulting change in headline allocations has so far been surprisingly modest.

Equities offer the opposite problem. Their value can increase even as insurers sell them, simply because markets have risen. An apparently stable allocation may therefore conceal substantial activity underneath.

This makes 2026 a useful point from which to reconsider the European insurance portfolio. The industry’s assets are growing again. Whether insurers are materially changing how they invest them is a different question.

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Dutch pension reform: three years on, what actually changed?

The numbers insurers publish — and the ones they don’t

Solvency II: Europe is rewriting the rules for long-term capital

What does it cost in 2026 to manage €100bn of insurance assets?