(Bloomberg) — Insurance regulators in Europe won't relax rules designed to protect customers from risks to investments in structures like wind parks and power grids, the head of the industry's watchdog said.
Gabriel Bernardino's comments will disappoint insurance companies, which say the rules will deprive them of a new area of investment that is helping them offset low returns on fixed income, the traditional repository for customer assets. European insurers manage about 8.4 trillion euros ($11.4 trillion).
"The problem with the calibration of the risks of infrastructure investments is that we don't have enough robust data on it yet," Bernardino, chairman of the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority, or Eiopa, said in an interview on June 11 in Frankfurt. "Maybe we can revisit this once we have better data and more standardized instruments."
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