EIOPA Publishes 2025 Data on EEA Insurers' Home and Cross-Border Securities Holdings

Key Takeaways

• EIOPA's annual factsheet shows EEA insurers held EUR 7.9 trillion in government bonds, corporate bonds, and equities at year-end 2025, with notable home bias persisting in fixed income and growing unit-linked cross-border exposure.
• While not a binding regulatory requirement, the data provides compliance and risk teams with benchmarking insight into investment concentration, sovereign exposure, and diversification trends relevant to Solvency II prudent person principle assessments.

Deep Dive

This EIOPA factsheet is a statistical publication rather than a new rule or supervisory directive, but it carries meaningful implications for insurance compliance and risk functions operating under the Solvency II framework. The data, sourced from 2025 solo annual reporting, offers a cross-market benchmark for how EEA insurers allocate EUR 9.9 trillion in total investments, of which EUR 7.9 trillion is captured in government bonds, corporate bonds, and equities (directly and via investment funds, with look-through applied).

Key findings compliance teams should note include the persistent home bias in non-euro area countries, a marked difference between equity and fixed-income concentration patterns (e.g., Germany, Austria, France, and the Netherlands show stronger home bias in equities than bonds, while Scandinavian countries, Italy, and Spain show the reverse), and a rising share of unit-linked portfolios accompanying growing cross-border and US exposure since 2017. These trends are relevant to prudent person principle reviews, concentration risk assessments, and ALM governance, particularly for firms with significant unit-linked books where policyholder risk disclosures may need to reflect increasing US and cross-border exposure.

No specific deadlines or compliance obligations arise directly from this factsheet; however, it serves as a reference point for internal risk committees benchmarking investment portfolio composition against peer markets. Supervisors may also use this aggregated data to inform future thematic reviews or stress-testing scenarios focused on sovereign concentration risk or cross-border contagion channels, especially given the heavy EEA insurer holdings in German, French, and US government debt.

Recommended actions include incorporating this data into internal concentration risk dashboards, reviewing investment policy statements against observed market trends (especially regarding home bias and unit-linked diversification), and using the country-level breakdowns to stress-test sovereign and issuer concentration exposures. Risk and actuarial teams should also assess whether growing cross-border/US exposure in unit-linked products is adequately reflected in policyholder communications and risk appetite frameworks. While this factsheet imposes no new obligations, it is a useful early indicator of areas EIOPA may scrutinize in future supervisory convergence work or Solvency II review cycles.

Source: European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority