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Velina Peneva

lines on the record: 88
first: 2025-06-27
most recent: 2025-06-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Which means that the cost that we have for holding certain high volatility asset classes is very high, such as equities or high yield. And that means that we maximize return on a risk-adjusted basis. So it's maximizing risk-adjusted return per unit of capital.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, we have a decent sense of future liabilities, but we also need to make sure we have a portfolio that's resilient across cycles. Second pillar is asset liability management, right? So because we have a view on our liability profile, we need to make sure we match our assets on a currency duration and liquidity basis. So the strategy is very intricately linked with what's happening on the other side of the balance sheet. And then the third pillar is capital efficiency and diversification. I think that is one of the big differences with other institutional investors. We are regulated and we have a risk-based capital regime.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The answer will make a lot more sense with that in mind. So, if you think about insurance asset management, the optimizing function that we have is in three pillars. First is long-term value creation. We focus on stable, sustainable returns and cash flows. And our liabilities, if you think about especially the life business, are super long term.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So maybe before I answer this question for your listeners, I want to give a very quick primer of what insurance asset management Is and how it's different from asset management for other institutional investors because I think the”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asset liability management. So it was, if you think about insurance asset management, we have, you know, we obviously serve the group, but we have business units. and legal entities in each of these business units and legal entities have their own strategic asset allocations. So, my role was to manage those business unit and legal entity asset allocations.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the 2019 promotion was head of co-head of client solutions and analytics. And I was focused more on the ALM side of the business.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a little bit of all, but it's mostly investing in private equity funds. So I would say about 70, 80% of the allocation is in funds. Then the rest is in co investments alongside the funds that we have invested in.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why sadly? Well, because I had just said the mandate up, right? It was a lot of effort to get the relationships back with private equity funds, to build the team, to build the operations, to build the systems. And just when things were running and were looking like you could cruise for a while. You know, opportunity knocked, and I had to jump into a completely new and unknown area to me at the time.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was also responsible for deciding that. And ultimately, the decision was to focus more on developed markets. So we really emphasize US, Europe. Developed Asia.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, I had a P&L. So the mandate that I had to set up was selecting private equity funds, co-investments, secondaries to put into Swiss Reese portfolio, and then to make sure that we beat the private equity benchmark. or the equity benchmark with that selection.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think if you ask many people who were in consulting, that's always the complaint that they have is, yes, I follow through. You obviously keep in touch with your client. You have multi-year clients, but you have a huge sense of ownership for the solution you have created. You have a huge sense of responsibility. Then you don't have control, you don't have control over the outcome.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's lack of agency. I think it's lack of opportunity to follow through, right? I mean, consultants are expensive. So, if you're a company and you want to hire a consultants, you want to focus them on getting you the answer that's hard, right? Consultants often ask the question, why is the client's problem so hard? And if you can't really answer that question, then it's Why are you then add the client in the first place if the problem is not hard? And that's why companies focus their resources on consulting, on really solving the hardest piece of the problem. But companies run big operations and the implementation is typically something that takes a long time. And even if you were to bring a consultant in to help you with implementation, the cost benefit is just not there.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Barry, as we spoke, consulting is exciting because you get to work on your clients' most challenging problems. It is super intellectually stimulating and rewarding. However, you lack ownership in the solution that you bring. So for me, that was always the one piece missing in my consulting job. You can come up with the best framework, with the best answer, but then you hand it over and how it gets implemented and whether it succeeds. You don't get to follow the whole journey. So, the opportunity for me to come to Swiss 3 and actually invest and implement a strategy was extremely exciting.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the third is decision making, right? So decision making, I'm an analytical person, and in consulting you focus on the data, on the model, but also observing behavior and stakeholder management. So understanding How the data and how the analytics drives the decision, but then also how the biases of different stakeholders drive the decisions.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, and maybe there are two more things that I would say Carry When we talk about investing, we really focus a lot on macro, right? But at the end of the day, good investing is a good balance between macro thinking, so what's happening with the global economy, what's happening with interest rates, what is the Fed going to do, and micro, right? And understanding how different segments of the economy, how different businesses. make money, make profit, not everything is correlated to GDP growth. And I think that balance, I brought that balance from my consulting days. A lot of the colleagues in the investment organization think first macro and then micro. And I think both in private equity and in consulting, it is more of that balance.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if you think about what you learn as a consultant, first of all, you observe a lot of management teams, right? So ultimately, it's all about the team and the quality of the team and the people. That's both with clients and also within Bain. And I think that's also very true about how you set up an investment organization. You can have the frameworks, you can have the processes, but at the end of the day, it's about the quality of the team, the trust between team members and the culture you create. And I think you may be surprised to hear that's the first thing I start with, but I truly believe that quality investment requires just a very strong team behind it.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that nobody took it personally. I think if you consistently say no to a co investment from a particular client, it may raise questions. But generally, the quality of those proposals was very high.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the clients understand that when you're thinking about portfolio construction, you can have only so much allocation to a given geography, to a different industry.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, you need to be willing to say no to colleagues and friends. Who then have to deal with the repercussions of saying to the private equity fund, well, we think it's a good deal, but our investment committee decided to pass.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the investment committee was a small group of global partners that had to decide which ideas that came from the teams we would put into the Bainco Investment Fund.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely Well, it helps with kind of the broader relationship. And it's an attractive opportunity for the employees of Bain who invest in those co-invest vehicles because You're able to do that co investment without fee and carry And as you know, well, those fi and carries are a”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'll give a bit of background on what this investment committee is. So, Bain does a lot of due diligence for private equity clients. And as part of that relationship, we as a partnership were Allowed by the private equity fund to co invest in transactions that we had diligent. And”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that had been on the back of my mind for a long time. I mean, obviously when you work with investors, you're always quite vested in the decisions being made. You're advising on setting up of a new mandate or executing an investment strategy. And that's super intellectually challenging. But the issue is that at some point you need to hand it over, right? Here is the plan. Here's how you should go about in this deal or in this new asset class. But then it's up to the client to implement it. And what Swiss re provided me with was the platform to actually do the investing and to take the strategy that I had helped them develop and implement it.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's where I could develop also business lines and service areas that were not so established across Bain. So supporting institutional investors. We had worked a lot with private equity funds, but we had not done as much work with sovereign wealth funds, pension funds. And the problems that those institutional investors face when investing in private markets are well served by the knowledge that Bain had in the space. So that's where I found the niche, and that's where I focused when I moved to Zurich.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We call it a global financial crisis. So business was difficult across the globe. Europe was in a difficult situation. I mean, I was in Zurich, but I was serving a lot of the European clients. And it was hard. But what was different about Zurich compared to San Francisco is Zurich at that time was a very small office with very few partners on a growth trajectory. So it felt like going from A well established company to a startup.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got in the way. And I had already told Bain, I had told Bain, listen, I've been here for a long time. It had been 10 years by then. I need to look at something else. I need to do something else. And they told me, listen, instead of leaving, why don't you do a six-month transfer in Europe? Why don't you go to Zurich, for example? It's a small office, there's interesting clients, there's quite a lot of US partners there. Why don't you see how you like another office? And then you can come back in six months and we can think about whether you want to still leave or pick up and go down the partner track.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I spent in total 19 years at Bain, if you add the time I spend in business school. And I was first in Boston. I actually spent six months in Australia as well. And then I moved to San Francisco after business school and was again quite focused on the private equity space. Right before 2009, I felt I was ready to do something else. And that's something else was renewable infrastructure, private equity. So that was an emerging space back then.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you look at who was going to private equity, it was the best from the consulting teams. It was the best from the investment banking teams. And I think the value proposition was just very compelling, right? I mean, the returns at those times were easily. In the mid to upper 20s.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was a very fast-paced environment. You do a due diligence in one, two, three weeks, and you need to basically keep pace with the private equity team to make sure that the assumptions they need for the model and the conviction for buying an asset could be backed by the analysis the Bain team was doing. So this is in the 1990s. Private equity was still relatively small back then. almost 30 years ago Did you have any sense As to how rapidly private equity would grow and how big it eventually became. It was, I would say, in its second. Back in the nineteen ninety eight. 97 98. It was attracting a lot of talent.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Bain Company is one of the biggest consultancies in the United States. What was it like working in Boston at Bain? What sort of projects were you working on? So Boston is the headquarters. Biggest office when I joined and was a huge variety of projects. So I did a project for MX looking at their credit card solicitation program, how they can be better competitive with other credit card companies. I worked for Motorola. And then I spent quite a bit of time in the emerging private equity practice. So Bain was the pioneer in consulting two private equity companies, focusing on strategic due diligence of M&A transactions.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How did you end up as a consultant in Boston at Bain? When did that start? So if the company had stayed in Boston, if Media One had stayed in Boston, I probably would have gone back after I graduated. I had an offer, but they decided to relocate to Denver. And I really wanted to stay on the East Coast. So given I had been doing strategy work and The fact that I wanted to learn as much about business as possible, I thought consulting would be the right next step. So it was similar enough to what I'd been doing, but consulting would allow me to broaden.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I was a junior in college, I tried to get an internship. And I was looking at the typical paths of consulting or banking. It is very difficult to get an internship in junior year. And I had a professor in economics who suggested that I look at this company called Media One in Boston that had recently been acquired by. No, it was, it used to be called Continental Cable Vision. It had been acquired by US West, a Denver-based company, and they had rebranded it as Media One. And there I worked in strategy. And the strategy focus was on rolling out high-speed data through COAX cable. So broadband before we really knew what broadband was? Absolutely. And the team actually that did all the technology in Media One ended up being the core technology team for Cisco. So it was really cutting edge at that point. Really interesting.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's when the lights went off because it was a very mathematical field in many ways, but also with a link to the real economy. I couldn't give up math and computer science, so I ended up finishing with two majors and a minor. But business and applying economic concepts and actually going into business was what I decided to do after the second year at Wellesley. That's really interesting. So at some point you spend time within the high-speed data division of a company that eventually became part of AT&T. That was in the 1990s. What was that experience like?”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“it was the early days of punch cards were you were you still in the punch cards no but i was i started coding in pascal okay so i think a lot of your listeners probably don't know right what that computer language is so it was pascal then centics class and”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I arrived at Wellesley with the plan to do pre med. And when I got there, I realized that pre-med meant that I study some generic biology and chemistry for four years. Then I have to apply to medical school. Then I have to go to residency. And during that whole time, I have to keep on accumulating debt. And at some point in my late 20s, I may be able to practice. Right. It's like a 12-year process. It's pretty intimidating. And yet all the medical schools seem to be filled up. Exactly. But for me, this was not an option. And what I decided to do is just experiment and see what else I could do. And I'm pretty mathematically oriented. I took a lot of math classes. I took a computer science class, which I found super fascinating. I mean, back then in 1994.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I was one of the first generations of Eastern Europeans after the wall came down who had the opportunity to come to the US. If I had not come to the US, my passion was to become a doctor. And in Bulgaria, where I came from, getting a medical degree meant that after high school you go to medical school for five years. No college, high school right now. No college. And then after five years, you can practice.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought this conversation was fascinating, and I think you will also, with no further ado, my discussion with Swiss Rees, Velina Panabut. Velina Peneva, welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you, Barry. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, it's a pleasure to have you. Let's start out with your background, bachelors in economics and a BS in computer science from Wellesley in Boston and then an MBA from Harvard Business School. What were the original career plans?”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the latest Masters in Business podcast, I have another extra special guest, Velena Peneva, is grouped chief investment officer for insurance giant Swiss Ray. She runs their private internal fund, about $108 billion that she manages primarily in fixed income, private credit, a variety of other assets. Really a fascinating conversation with someone who is uniquely situated in the investment world, Swiss Ray is a global, very well-known insurer and reinsurer. They cover just about everything that's out there. Not only are they the insurance company for insurance companies, but they have a variety of lines of business. She has a fascinating career. She helped develop the private equity group for Bain& Company in Zurich before heading over to Sweden.”
2025-06-27 · Masters in Business · Swiss Re's Velina Peneva on the Business of Reinsurance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source