Winning for private credit manager of the year, Blackstone's global head of insurance Phil Sherrill talks about how the firm benefited last year from bringing together its credit and insurance businesses.

By Pete Carvill, Insurance Asset Risk

Insurance Asset Risk (IAR): Congrats on the win. What do you think has set Blackstone apart this year?

Phil Sherrill (PS): Thank you! This is an amazing recognition for the firm and our people. Today, Blackstone is one of the largest third-party managers of assets for insurance companies. As of year-end, we were responsible for more than $270bn on behalf of 34 clients, and those numbers are growing. That excludes another 220+ clients who are invested as LPs in our funds. In 2025, we originated $68bn in credit assets. What distinguishes the firm from our competitors, in my opinion, is our unwavering focus on results for our clients.

IAR: How is this specific to the insurance market?

PS: In the insurance business, that translates into a business model that is different from some of our competitors'. We don't own an insurance company. We don't manage a large balance sheet. We don't compete with our clients for assets, for liabilities, or for capital. As a result, 100% of our focus is on originating, underwriting, and managing assets that fit what our clients need. Each of our relationships around the world is customised to the client we serve. Each client receives differentiated resourcing, investment objectives tailored for them, support for those objectives across a range of functions on the Blackstone side, and an operating cadence that fits the client's business.

IAR: Are there any common themes that you've seen across your client relationships?

PS: What's common across all of our relationships is that our clients are relying on us to originate very high quality, performing credit at scale, and for us to do so in a way that is fit-for-purpose to them—the cash flows, tenors, ratings, the regulatory and capital treatment that they need, and the risk selection they want—all delivered with insurance-specific technology, reporting and analytics, regulatory, and other support. At the end of the day, our business is to connect borrowers across the economy with investors, eliminating intermediaries, and ultimately driving better returns with lower risk for investors. We want to make it easy for our clients to capture that benefit, but we know that insurance companies have specialised requirements. If we are doing our job well, the platform we've built allows insurance companies to take advantage of Blackstone's business model in a way that they may not otherwise be able to do as easily given their unique position relative to other types of investors.

IAR: Can you tell us a little more about your approach to insurance across the world. You use what is known as a 'capital-light model'. Maybe you could explain a little to our readers what this means and how you apply it to your business?

PS: As I mentioned, we have made a deliberate choice to operate as a pure asset manager, following a capital-light model—meaning we do not own an insurance company on our balance sheet. This approach is central to our strategy. We don't want to compete with our clients, and we want to focus on the things that we think we can do better than anyone else in the world. We want our teams to be completely invested in delivering for our clients. We don't want a part of their brains to be dedicated to managing a special Blackstone account. That's without even considering the brainpower we'd have to dedicate to managing policyholder liabilities or running a call centre. We don't want distractions. We also don't want our clients to worry about allocations. All of our clients participate equally—they sit 'shoulder to shoulder', as we say—in every asset we originate that matches their investment objectives. We don't play favourites. With our model, we can be fully committed to understanding what our clients need, finding the right solutions, providing all the support they require, and working to achieve the best outcomes possible.

IAR: It's been widely reported about how you brought together your credit and insurance businesses. What benefits have you found from there, both for you and for your customers?

PS: We want our clients to benefit from the best that Blackstone has to offer. Our insurance clients are active across a range of Blackstone investment strategies, but, in general, they are the most active in our credit and lending businesses. So bringing insurance even closer to credit was a natural step. Bringing together all of the credit and lending business themselves has been about harnessing the benefit of our market position. We are the largest player in a number of adjacent market and we believe that gives us an information advantage, and we want to use that information to help our clients as seamlessly as possible. We want to surface trends from each investment professional's area of responsibility so that we can assess the implications for each other area. We also want to be able to offer relative value judgments to our clients between different parts of the credit universe, up and down the capital structure. The more we can bring down barriers between segments, the better. It also helps our borrowers to know that they are accessing all of Blackstone's diverse pools of capital to meet their various needs. Finally, we want to ensure clients benefit from a consistent investment process. Our clients are getting underwriting of the highest discipline whether they are an investor with us in corporate assets, in asset-backed assets, in infrastructure credit—whether more liquid or less liquid strategies—or, as many of investors are, in multi-asset mandates that span our business.

IAR: It has recently been reported that Blackstone's Q4 inflows hit a three-year high due to your department. What has been your strategy and why has it been so successful?

PS: Our approach at Blackstone is to customise what we do for each of our insurance clients. Our team of over 100 insurance professionals is positioned to work with our clients across asset allocation, asset liability management, regulatory capital and accounting, and other strategic needs. Our experienced insurance practitioners start by listening to our clients, understanding their businesses, and looking for places that Blackstone can help. Bringing those specialized resources to learn about our clients' business is a critical first step. A huge part of our success has been identifying ways that Blackstone can be additive to what our clients already do well—alongside their talented internal teams and their existing outside relationships. From there, we find that the best way to grow with a client is to make sure that our way of doing business is adapted to their way of doing business—the right ways of sharing information, the right analytics, the right people on the Blackstone side in a regular rhythm with the right people on the client side—as I mentioned earlier, making it easier for our clients to access Blackstone goes a long way.

IAR: Your origination platform is interesting. Can you tell us some more about it and what it brings for your customers?

PS: We think this is one of the main benefits of our scale. We've developed a deep network of commercial relationships across the entire real economy that help us to identify and originate credit assets for our clients. Blackstone's presence across our full range of investing businesses—credit, real estate, private equity, infrastructure, life sciences—and in all of the geographies in which Blackstone is active today—is a great advantage. Originating credit assets is still very much a people-oriented business. Where our scale is an advantage is that we have relationships, maintained by our teams, in every market in which we want to be active on behalf of clients. There's no substitute for having expert investors with deep, longstanding relationships.

IAR: Part of your success seems to come down to investing in digital and energy infrastructure. What has drawn you to these markets?

PS: Digital and energy infrastructure markets are two of our highest conviction themes. They are driven by large secular changes and generational capital needs, reflecting strong demand, especially amidst a reduction in traditional financing sources. Financing in these sectors can often provide our clients with long-term, contractual cash flows, generally with investment grade counterparties, offering strong risk-adjusted returns. Within insurance in the UK, we collaborate with clients to achieve MA-eligibility in these deals, which is possible in privately negotiated transactions in a way that is more difficult in 'public' or syndicated transactions. The enormous need for this financing can shift pricing and other terms in favour of lenders, which is a phenomenon on which we want to capitalise for our investors.

IAR: What are we likely to see in your sector next year? What are you keeping an eye on in the horizon?

PS: We are focused on bringing our insurance expertise to more European jurisdictions and clients. Markets differ significantly—currency factors, preferred products, and regulatory dynamics all vary, directly impacting insurance company CIOs' investment decisions. While the European private credit market has grown significantly over the past decade, it remains smaller than its US counterpart. We'd like to draw on our experience from other markets, such as the US, and now more and more the UK, to bring value to a wider range of clients. We're committed to growing our resources to better serve insurance clients in these markets. Private credit—including asset-based finance, infrastructure, and real estate credit—is still in its early stages in Europe for insurance.

IAR: What trends have we been seeing across the UK and Europe? How has Blackstone worked to address these? What sets your solutions apart from other firms?

PS: Many of the same dynamics that apply in the US—a need for capital as insurers grow to serve increased demand for insurance products, a need for assets that provide them with an appropriate return while maintaining very high credit quality—are at play in the UK and Europe, as well. Blackstone is highly committed to investing in Europe and recently celebrated 25 years in the region. We have said recently that there is an opportunity to invest in over $500bn of assets in the Europe in the next decade, across our entire platform—including £100bn of assets in the UK. Bringing Blackstone's capabilities to the UK Bulk Purchase Annuity market has been a major focus of ours, with an emphasis on addressing this market's bespoke needs under Solvency UK and the UK Matching Adjustment rules.

We've expanded our UK-based European Investment Grade Credit team to offer a wider range of MA-eligible transactions. We've also added local insurance experts with strong track records in designing and managing UK BPA portfolios, developing tailored MA analytics, and supporting UK insurance clients. Blackstone's Insurance Strategy and Solutions team works directly with UK MA clients to address key structural factors and requirements, which then inform our origination pipeline. Building strategic partnerships is central to our success all around the world. For example, our partnership with L&G, established in July 2025, leverages both firms' credit platforms to boost L&G's annuity competitiveness and strengthen its asset management across important regions and channels.