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

Asset-management fees are usually discussed from the perspective of the fund investor. Insurance company accounts offer another, much less explored view.

Managing a large general account generates several layers of cost: internal investment teams, affiliated managers, external mandates, investment funds, custody, transactions and specialist assets.

Some insurers disclose parts of this bill. Few disclose all of it in a directly comparable form.

That makes apparently simple comparisons difficult.

An insurer relying heavily on internal management may report costs differently from one using an affiliated asset manager. Fund expenses can sit within investment returns rather than operating expenses. Private assets introduce additional fee structures that are difficult to compare with directly held bonds.

Yet the scattered disclosures are potentially valuable.

At sufficient scale, they could provide a benchmark for what insurers actually spend to manage their assets — and how that cost changes with portfolio complexity.

The obstacle is not a complete absence of data.

It is that accounting boundaries were never designed to make investment-management costs comparable across insurers.