And you think the insurer that bought out your pension scheme invests risk-free?
More worrying still are private credit funds.
More worrying still, UK pensions bought out by insurers who are investing in private credits. Insurers are being relied on to give retail clients a way out, the problem is that pensioners may be finding themselves right in it.
More like a disaster! Retail investors through their pension funds will have missed the boat and suffer the consequences!
Gordon Aitken, whose book “Breaking Down the Insurance Black Box: Clear, data-driven insights on UK life insurers and pensions” has recently been published, has featured on your pages in the past, Henry.
Aitken asserts that UK life insurers had their crisis in the early 2000s. That was the period, he says, when the sector was forced to confront what it means to promise long-dated guarantees without a genuinely robust risk framework.
By 2026, the industry has already spent two decades de-risking, professionalising asset/liability matching, and building capital models that explicitly test tail scenarios.
The UK’s solvency regime, and the stochastic modelling culture that came with it, means according to Aitken that when markets try to pin the next crisis on annuity writers, the sector here is already operating from a “we have lived through this” mindset.
He accepts that private credit has faced stress in some US pockets, especially where assumptions about recurring revenue and refinancing proved optimistic.
UK life insurers have been viewed as collateral damage; they are not, he insists.
Do others share his positive outlook?