Investment solutions and OCIO for insurance firms

National and international regulations are complex and make it difficult to construct compliant investment portfolios while properly optimizing risk and return. If you operate in multiple jurisdictions, it’s even more challenging to balance the different requirements within a central investment strategy. We work across all major domiciles and have extensive experience working with multi-national insurance companies.

Economic cycles are becoming shorter and more extreme, with inflation being a primary concern for insurers today. Insurers must position their investment portfolios for a range of outcomes in a volatile market environment. We believe diversification of asset classes is important and requires broad coverage of managers and asset classes that can generate risk-adjusted returns across the market cycle.

Sustainable investment and ESG are a set of issues increasingly driven by regulators and rating agencies across the globe. The appropriate integration of these measures and the need to develop robust reporting for internal and external stakeholders is critical in today’s environment. Our dedicated sustainable investment team can help you stay ahead of these challenges. 

Alternative investments provide a potential opportunity to guard against the volatility of equities, hedge against inflation, and seek better returns through illiquidity. Investing in alternatives and private markets requires deep expertise, research, strong relationships with managers and access to opportunities. Our private market specialists can help you build exposure to these asset classes.

As insurance investment portfolios become more complex, pressure on internal resources increases. Finding the right partners and solutions to leverage your internal capabilities while maintaining strategic control of key decisions requires a customized approach for each client. Leveraging our breadth of resources and scale can help focus your team on the most impactful things.

Every investment program has its own unique set of objectives and often requires internal and external resources to manage it. We flex our services to suit your requirements, creating a customized approach that works for you, no matter the size of your team. Depending on your needs, you may choose one or a combination of the following:

• Digital: Do it yourself by accessing our digital manager research platform, MercerInsight^®.
• Advisory: Get help, with our comprehensive investment consulting services.
• Delegated: Have us implement and manage your investment strategy.

When you engage us, we operate as an extension of your team. We can guide you on your strategy and allocation, help you source new ideas and innovation through alternative markets and help you integrate ESG, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and impact investing considerations to target sustainably. We can also manage the implementation for you, based on your desired direction. You will always maintain control of key decisions.

We use an open-architecture platform, not affiliated with any one asset manager, giving us a true independent perspective. This allows you to customize solutions to match your specific requirements regarding returns, liabilities or liquidity. The platform also helps you execute your strategy, through your in-house team, external managers, or a combination of both.

Alternative asset classes, including private markets, can offer insurers many benefits — returns that are less correlated to public markets, important sources of diversification, and ways to invest in and support the real economy. However, accessing and maintaining these strategies is not straightforward. There are layers of complexity and cost through origination, due diligence, legal work and relationship building — all before any investment has been made.

We can help you navigate these challenges in a way that suits your strategy and requirements.

• Advice: You keep control of your investment strategy and implementation, while we provide research, operational, legal and due diligence support.
• Directed implementation: This approach lets you keep control of investment decisions and manager selection, deploying and implementing strategies through our platform.
• Delegated implementation: Our specialists work with you to create a bespoke investment strategy and approach, implemented through our platform using segregated mandates or pooled funds.

Our investment specialists around the world place importance on integrating sustainable investment considerations when defining strategies, monitoring and selecting managers, and implementing selected strategies. 

We have been at the forefront of sustainable investment strategies for more than a decade. Our large team of specialists across the globe can advise you on all aspects of ESG investing, DEI investing and impact investing. Our aim is to help you construct a complete strategy and portfolio designed to protect your company against risks and capture long-term opportunities. We also aim to help protect your company’s reputation.

We are committed to embedding a focus on sustainability across our advice and implementation work. To that end, we are a signatory to the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Investment and our ESG beliefs and Sustainable Investment Policy, both of which are freely available to help you understand how we operate in this field.

We have also published detailed research modeling the path to a net-zero economy and its implications for investors’ portfolios.