As global tensions and regulatory changes drive tightening margins across the sector, insurers are looking to more diverse investments for fresh growth opportunities, increasingly leveraging the opening-up of growth markets, and sharpening their focus on sustainable investing.

Bloomberg gives insurance companies a competitive edge with critical market intelligence and a powerful suite of solutions for investment management, asset liability management, group risk and compliance. All from one source.

The most successful insurance companies are the ones with the insight and tools to deploy capital efficiently. But in volatile and fast-moving markets, it’s not always easy to balance portfolio and risk. In a low-yield environment, clients choose insurers who can seize the opportunities and manage the pitfalls of new investment territory. That’s where the Bloomberg Terminal can give you the edge, with comprehensive market intelligence on everything from sustainable investing and China’s fixed-income market to alternatives like private equity, hedge funds and derivatives.

To make informed investment decisions, insurers need a powerful, cross-asset solution to monitor, assess and manage risk.

Managing market risk
Bloomberg’s comprehensive suite of risk management tools delivers consistent, consolidated results across your entire firm. Powered by Bloomberg’s world-class pricing library, market data and mortgage cash flow engine, our Multi-Asset Risk System (MARS) enables front office, risk and collateral professionals to analyze their trading and investment portfolios, manage and mitigate their exposure, and ready themselves for any turn of events.

Actively monitor liquidity risks
Clear understanding of market liquidity is a key component of a robust enterprise risk management framework. Bloomberg’s award-winning liquidity solution, Liquidity Assessment (LQA), makes it easy to assess transaction execution metrics, including estimated liquidation cost, liquidation horizon, and market depth, which can be queried under both normal and stressed market conditions. A fully customizable model provides the flexibility to ensure LQA output is appropriate to each use case, allowing overrides at both security and transaction level for calculation of user-specific scenarios.

Bloomberg’s approach is entirely data driven, utilizing large pools of transaction data and leveraging machine-learning techniques to provide accurate estimates based upon prevailing market conditions. This unique approach allows liquidity estimation even for instruments with limited trading activity. Robust back-testing ensures the model remains calibrated to changing market conditions.

Liability management
With Bloomberg’s portfolio and risk management solutions, insurers have the capability to analyze risk across internally and externally managed portfolios relative to asset liability benchmarks.

Easily upload future cashflows into multi-asset risk management tools and access reports on projections. Streamline your workflow with a vast range of global data feeds for price, yield, spread and risk analysis, as well as Bloomberg’s state-of-the-art pricing models.

A complex and dynamic regulatory environment requires an integrated, up-to-the-minute approach to compliance. With global regulators demanding ever more detailed disclosures and stricter risk measurement, meaningful transparency is critical in order to understand your risks and what regulators expect.

New international accounting standards
IFRS 9 — introduced after the financial crisis of 2008-2009 — profoundly changes how financial instruments are accounted for because of its broad reach and technical requirements. The IFRS 9 model is a fundamental shift from traditional methods to a more predictive model-based approach. IFRS 9 seeks to better represent an entity’s risk management activities in their financial statements.

Bloomberg offers these solutions to help clients navigate the IFRS9 maze:

• General hedge accounting – Perform hedge effectiveness tests on derivatives to manage the quantitative and qualitative requirements for compliance with hedge accounting standards. Bloomberg Hedge Accounting (HEFF) offers an integrated, automated solution that helps to align hedge accounting with hedging policies and ensures ease of compliance with IFRS 9 requirements. Our solution is developed to reflect Big 4 audit firm interpretations and standard market practice.
• Solely Payments of Principal and Interest (SPPI) – Determine whether and why financial securities pass or fail the SPPI test, with accurate and consistent assessment to eliminate the need for subjective interpretation or recruiting additional resources.

Current EU review regulations
Solvency II, an EU regulation more than 10 years in the making, standardizes reporting and valuation of assets and liabilities and implements minimum capital requirements for insurers that take market risk and liability management into consideration. Bloomberg provides high-quality reference and pricing data to help firms meet key requirements.

The Solvency II data package provides the mandatory Complimentary Identification Codes (CIC) and European Statistical Classifications of Economic Activities (NACE) codes required in Solvency II’s Quantitative Reporting Templates (QRT), and also includes the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), ultimate parent, security IDs, duration, ratings and security types.

Fair and defensible valuation
Bloomberg Evaluated Pricing Service (BVAL) is an independent valuation source that draws on a wealth of high-quality market data, sophisticated analytics and industry-leading models to deliver transparent and highly defensible prices for fixed income securities, OTC derivatives and structured notes.

When yields are down, insurance companies need to prioritize maintaining growth and efficiency. Firms seizing M&A opportunities can adopt technology that integrates systems across their disparate businesses, while those looking to cut costs and enhance agility can seek greater visibility of their outsourced investments — or even bring their asset management entirely in-house for greater control. Whatever their needs, insurers can rely on Bloomberg’s range of enterprise solutions to help them grow assets on existing investments and streamline expansion into new classes, markets and investment styles.

Innovation, accuracy and infrastructure
Bloomberg Asset and Investment Manager (AIM) is a global, multi-asset order management solution for portfolio management, trading, compliance and operations. Analytics, centralized data and efficient operating models are at the heart of Bloomberg AIM, helping organizations to scale for growth and complexity.

Optimizing enterprise data
Consistent and robust data can have an important impact on your bottom line, enabling lower total cost of ownership as well as creating an advantage in the marketplace. Bloomberg data is scrubbed, verified and continually updated as the markets, instruments and entities evolve, helping companies meet these challenges and effectively manage data on a global scale.

External asset management
Insurers can understand their outsourced investments and their total portfolios via Bloomberg’s portfolio and risk analytics tool (PORT). They can track performance, characteristics, risk and more with a series of powerful, integrated equity and fixed income tools that deliver consistent insight. Insurers can better evaluate their asset managers with more visibility of their performance.

In-house asset management
For companies that prefer to manage their assets themselves, Bloomberg offers a hosted-platform order management solution that eliminates the need for dedicated on-premises workstations or servers — and helps to lower total cost of ownership. As markets, instruments and technologies change, Bloomberg helps firms keep pace with infrastructure build-outs, version upgrades, data sourcing, continual tuning and system maintenance.

Industry-leading benchmarks
Bloomberg offers a fresh perspective on the traditional world of indexing, providing independent and unbiased indices that are broadly available. With expertise in capital markets, technology, data, pricing, analytics, distribution and research, Bloomberg Indices provide the global investment community with comprehensive solutions to fulfill their benchmarking needs.