The Wall Street Journal documented this week that affiliated investments

The Wall Street Journal documented this week that affiliated investments held by US life and annuity insurers reached $413 billion in 2025, twice the 2020 total. At the six private-equity-linked carriers the Journal tracked, the share of total assets classified as affiliated ran between 10% and 30%. Industry-wide it's 7%.

The story behind the headline figure is structural. At PE-linked carriers, 56% of affiliated assets sit in the bond category rather than in the stock and alternative side categories where traditional insurer affiliated holdings live. 98% of those bonds are private placements. Half carry private letter ratings. 90% of all PLR-rated affiliated bonds in the life industry now sit on PE-linked balance sheets.
For advisors evaluating these carriers, the diligence work has changed.

The percentage of affiliated exposure can be pulled from the rating summary or the carrier's statutory filings. That is the starting point. The work begins beneath it.

The advisor doing real diligence reads the underlying material. Schedule D affiliations to identify which holdings are related-party at the security level. The ratio of affiliated bonds to capital and surplus, since AM Best assesses an additional 25% risk charge on affiliated bonds beyond the baseline. The share of recent additions traceable to the parent's origination, which the Iowa Insurance Division identified this week as the actual driver of affiliated growth at PE-linked carriers. Single-counterparty concentrations among affiliated holdings. Whether the carrier's affiliated valuations rely on private letter ratings or third-party agency ratings.

These questions live in the filings themselves, not in the rating distillation or the surplus number. Most institutional summaries do not surface them.

This is the work that has shifted to the advisor. Rating agencies don't perform it in real time, trade organizations haven't produced standardized disclosure frameworks for it, and the institutional layer above the advisor hasn't yet signaled that the diligence floor has moved.

CreditSights' Josh Esterov, in this week's Wall Street Journal, framed the underlying test directly: the insurer needs "some amount of ability to say 'No, we don't need that.'" That is the structural question. Whether the advisor's diligence surfaces it is the practical one.

In this week's Our View of Things, we walk through the data behind the question and what conventional carrier diligence does not yet ask.