Clearwater Analytics (NYSE: CWAN) today released Credit Where It’s Due: The Persistent Rise of Private Credit, its first comprehensive study of how private credit has reshaped institutional portfolios.
The report draws on holdings and transactions data from the Clearwater platform, which spans $10 trillion in institutional assets across 60 asset classes. It documents private credit exposure, examines how the asset class has contributed to returns, and identifies where investment risks concentrate. The findings challenged a narrative centered on systemic contagion. Instead it found the systemic risks were idiosyncratic, concentrated on specific balance sheets that are largely hidden from investors without the right infrastructure.
“At Clearwater, we are no strangers to the rise of private credit. Assets on our platform have grown nearly 20% over the last two years alone,” said Kirat Singh, President of Risk and Alternative Assets at Clearwater Analytics. “This report was born from what we see every day in our data, and it aims to bring a grounded, differentiated perspective to a conversation that is too often driven by headlines rather than evidence.”
Benchmarking private credit has proven difficult. The asset class lacks the standardized reporting infrastructure of public markets, and long-term trend data on institutional allocations have been hard to come by. Clearwater’s platform reconciles holdings daily at the security level across a broad institutional base, making it possible to document how private credit is allocated across insurers, corporate treasurers, and private wealth investors, what it has contributed to returns at a subclass level, and where exposures concentrate.
The data shows how much ground private credit has gained. Median insurer allocations have grown 110% since 2021, reaching 9% of total portfolio assets. Corporate treasurers, who held little private credit a few years ago, have climbed to a median allocation of 2%. Liability structure, regulatory treatment, and access to origination all shape the allocation.
Private credit lacks the contagion mechanisms that made 2008 systemic, without the interconnected leverage and structured exposure that caused cascading failures. Instead, the risks are idiosyncratic, concentrated on individual balance sheets, often across multiple managers, vintage years, and fund vehicles, and largely invisible without the right infrastructure. The report coins a term for this pattern: cross-contamination risk.
Tracking those exposures requires infrastructure that most investors have had to piece together from multiple systems. Technology is closing that gap, providing the look-through visibility and daily reconciliation needed to make idiosyncratic risk manageable rather than invisible.
“Private credit has earned its place in institutional portfolios, and the performance data bears that out,” said Matthew Vegari, Head of Research at Clearwater Analytics. “What the market is still catching up to is the operational and analytical infrastructure needed to manage it. Investors who can see how their exposures interact across a full balance sheet will be better positioned to act on that information, and to manage risk as a source of competitive advantage rather than uncertainty.”
The full report, Credit Where It’s Due: The Persistent Rise of Private Credit, is available at cwan.com/Research-Desk.
About Clearwater Analytics
Clearwater Analytics is transforming investment management with the industry’s most comprehensive cloud-native platform for institutional investors across global public and private markets. While legacy systems create risk, inefficiency, and data fragmentation, Clearwater’s single-instance, multi-tenant architecture delivers real-time data and AI-driven insights throughout the investment lifecycle. The platform eliminates information silos by integrating portfolio management, trading, investment accounting, reconciliation, regulatory reporting, performance, compliance, and risk analytics in one unified system. Serving leading insurers, asset managers, hedge funds, banks, corporations, and governments, Clearwater supports over $10 trillion in assets globally. Learn more at www.cwan.com.
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