Report
Insurance leaders are being asked to make choices that barely existed a decade ago. Which investment capabilities should they own, which should they access through partners, and which should sit within an affiliated asset manager? How should decision rights work across those boundaries? And as insurers move further into private markets, who has the expertise to assess, monitor and ultimately govern the risks they are taking?
These are no longer simply investment questions. They are questions about how the insurance enterprise itself should be led and organized.
As insurance and asset management converge, the strategic choices available to insurers are multiplying. Some are building investment capabilities internally. Others are partnering with alternative asset managers or acquiring capabilities outright. For many, the answer will be a combination of all three. But each choice creates new dependencies across investment, product, distribution, risk, technology and capital management – and places different demands on the leaders responsible for connecting them.
Against that backdrop, one finding from RRA's Global Leadership Monitor stands out. In H1 2023, 90% of insurance leaders identified the availability of key talent and skills as one of the top five factors most likely to affect the health of their organizations. Three years later, just 45% say the same – a 45 percentage-point decline, among the sharpest shifts we see across financial services. (Figure 1)
Figure 1: Share of leaders who identify the availability of key talent and skills as one of the top five factors most likely to affect the health of their organizations
Source: Russell Reynolds Associates Global Leadership Monitor, H1 2023 and H1 2026
That does not necessarily mean talent matters less. Conversations with industry leaders suggest something more nuanced: talent is increasingly embedded within broader strategic questions about where capabilities should sit, how increasingly complex partnerships should be governed and how decisions should be made across organizational boundaries.
The leadership challenge is therefore changing. It is becoming less about talent availability alone and more about whether insurers have the right capabilities, in the right roles, working together in the right way.
Insurers have spent the past several years transforming how they deploy capital. Leadership models now need to evolve with them.
As insurance and asset management converge, firms are taking different routes to integrate investment capabilities into their business models.
Some have built integrated insurance and asset management platforms. Others have partnered with alternative managers while retaining balance sheet ownership. Still others have embedded insurance capital through acquisitions or ownership structures. The models vary, but the strategic direction is the same: investment capability has become a source of competitive advantage alongside underwriting expertise.
The scale of this transformation is significant. Assets held by private-capital-backed insurers reached nearly $1.5 trillion in 2025, reflecting the growing integration of insurance liabilities and alternative investment capabilities.
While convergence has been most pronounced in life insurance and annuities, where long-duration liabilities provide an attractive source of investable capital, alternative asset managers are increasingly exploring opportunities in property and casualty insurance. The latter presents different challenges, particularly around liquidity and liability duration, reinforcing that convergence will not follow a single model across the industry.
Importantly, convergence is also taking multiple structural forms. Beyond outright acquisitions, reinsurance arrangements, strategic partnerships and minority investments are creating alternative routes for insurers and asset managers to connect capital and investment capabilities. Recent transactions illustrate the range of approaches being pursued across the industry (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Selected Insurance and Asset Management Partnerships and Acquisitions, January 2025 – June 2026
Source: Company Press Releases
These evolving structures create new leadership challenges. As investment capabilities increasingly extend beyond traditional organizational boundaries, insurers must determine not only which capabilities to own or access externally, but how accountability, decision-making and oversight should operate across increasingly interconnected businesses.
Drawing on conversations with CEOs, CHROs and industry leaders, we see five roles where the implications for hiring, development and succession are becoming most significant, along with key questions insurers should consider as they approach each.
The traditional boundary between investment and product leadership is beginning to dissolve.
Product leaders increasingly need investment fluency to understand how portfolio capabilities create commercial opportunities, while investment leaders need a stronger understanding of product economics, distribution and customer needs.
Few organizations deliberately develop leaders across both domains, creating one of the industry’s most difficult capability gaps.
Q: Are we developing leaders who understand both sides of the balance sheet, or continuing to build specialists for increasingly interconnected roles?
As portfolios become more complex, risk leadership is becoming considerably more strategic.
Chief Risk Officers and their teams must do more than oversee controls. They need to challenge investment decisions, evaluate unfamiliar asset classes and act as strategic counterparts to investment leadership.
Traditional pathways into risk leadership do not always produce this combination of capabilities, making succession increasingly challenging.
Q: Does our risk leadership reflect the complexity of the portfolio we are building, or the one we managed a decade ago?
Operational leadership has become a strategic enabler of investment strategy.
Scaling private markets requires leaders who can build the technology, infrastructure and operating capabilities needed to support increasingly complex portfolios.
For many firms, operational capability, not investment opportunity, may increasingly become the constraint on growth.
Q: Are we investing as deliberately in the operating capabilities behind our investment strategy as we are in the strategy itself?
As partnerships with asset managers become more strategic, insurers need leaders capable of managing these relationships as drivers of enterprise value rather than traditional commercial arrangements.
That requires sufficient investment expertise to evaluate performance, challenge partners and ensure external capabilities remain connected to the insurer’s broader strategy.
Few organizations have deliberately developed this capability despite its growing importance.
Q: Do we have the leadership capability to shape our most strategic investment relationships, or are we relying on our partners to define success for us?
As insurance and investment models become more interconnected, leaders have access to more data than ever across liabilities, investments, distribution and operations.
The challenge is not simply generating more insight. It is ensuring leaders can interpret that information, challenge assumptions and make effective decisions quickly in increasingly complex environments.
AI can strengthen those capabilities, but realizing its value ultimately depends on leaders with the judgment to turn insight into action.
Q: Are our leaders using data to improve the speed and quality of decisions, or simply adding more information to an already complex system?
Taken together, these shifts point to a broader challenge. Across these roles, three gaps are emerging between what traditional insurance leadership models were designed to produce and what increasingly converged business models now require.
Assess whether the leadership team collectively has the breadth to connect decisions across functions rather than optimize within individual silos.
Create cross-functional experiences earlier, assess successors against future-state capabilities and maintain greater optionality around critical roles.
Encourage constructive challenge, clarify decision rights and reinforce the behaviors needed for timely, enterprise-wide trade-offs.
The convergence of insurance and asset management has already reshaped how insurers think about capital, investment and growth. The next challenge is ensuring leadership evolves with the business model.
For CEOs, CHROs and boards, this requires looking beyond whether individual leaders are ready for today's roles. The more important question is whether the leadership team collectively has the capabilities, range and adaptability to operate across increasingly interconnected businesses – and whether succession pipelines are building those capabilities for the future.
This requires a broader view of leadership readiness. RRA's Leadership Portrait looks beyond experience alone to consider both the capabilities leaders bring today and their capacity to adapt as strategic demands change.
Ultimately, convergence will not create a single leadership model any more than it has created a single capital model. Each insurer will need to determine the capabilities, roles and leadership configuration that best fit its strategy.
Capital strategies have moved. The next competitive advantage will be having the leadership to match them.
Ashley Wallace Joll leads Russell Reynolds Associates’ Global Insurance practice. She is based in Hong Kong.
Emani Fenton is a senior member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Financial Services sector. He is based in New York.
Elizabeth Lang is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Financial Services Commercial Strategy & Insights team. She is based in New York.
Trinity Sokan is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Financial Services Commercial Strategy & Insights team. She is based in London.
The authors would like to thank their colleague Heather Blonkenfeld for her contributions to this paper.
ja-JP
ログイン
