May 6 (Reuters) - Insurance giant Kuvare has worked closely with regulators and ratings agencies recently to help them understand its exposure to private credit, Kuvare CEO Dhiren Jhaveri said on Wednesday at the 2026 Milken Institute Conference in Beverly Hills, California. 

Speaking on a panel about the state of private markets on Wednesday, Jhaveri and other executives discussed the opportunities and challenges facing private credit amid the ongoing Middle East conflict and retail investors' concerns about direct lenders' exposure to software companies being disrupted by artificial intelligence.

Jhaveri said his firm welcomes recent scrutiny from regulators and ratings agencies into Kuvare's balance sheet and the rationale for deploying policyholder dollars into private credit investments.

"This is the power of having a strong, long-duration, long-term balance sheet," Jhaveri said. "We have the benefit and curse of trying to figure out how to invest $6 billion of policyholder premiums every year."

Kuvare was among a group of firms that purchased a $1.4 billion loan portfolio from private credit lender Blue Owl in February in order to address investor redemption requests at its funds. Jhaveri highlighted the returns made by Kuvare on the purchase.

Speaking on a second panel about the recent private credit stress, DoubleLine CEO Jeffrey Gundlach highlighted the risks linked to lenders' growing use of payment-in-kind, wherein a borrower adds unpaid interest to a loan's principal. He also said lenders have been overvaluing many of these loans in their marks. 

"They're not performing, but they're on the books as performing," Gundlach said. "You should be marking that loan down very significantly," he later added.

Kristofer Kraus, global co-head of asset-based finance at PIMCO, said a looming wall of maturing private credit loans to software and other businesses also poses risks to lender portfolios.

"I think in '28 and '29 is when you really begin to have some pretty material sizes that need to work their way through the system," Kraus said. "So I think that that's going to be part of that opportunity set that, I think, has become a lot more interesting as we look at direct lending and how some of these names are, frankly, going to have to be refinanced." 

DoubleLine and PIMCO did not immediately respond to requests for comment.