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Chariot Re to launch in 2025 with more than $1 billion

equity

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MetLife ( MET ), General Atlantic to own 15% each in venture

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Chubb to be anchor investor alongside institutional

investors

By David French

NEW YORK, Dec 11 (Reuters) - MetLife ( MET ) and General

Atlantic are forming a reinsurance venture, the companies'

executives told Reuters on Wednesday, the latest in a growing

trend of insurers and alternative money managers teaming up to

boost returns from low-risk insurance assets.

The venture, called Chariot Reinsurance, will have an

initial equity contribution of more than $1 billion, with

MetLife ( MET ) and General Atlantic each holding around 15% ownership.

Chariot Re, which is due to launch in the first half of

2025, will be headed by Cynthia Smith, most recently the head of

MetLife's ( MET ) group benefits regional business, and be initially

seeded with $10 billion of existing MetLife ( MET ) policies.

Fellow insurer Chubb will also be an anchor investor

in the venture, with other institutional investors in the

process of committing funds, General Atlantic Chief Operating

Officer Graves Tompkins said.

"The high quality, long-duration liabilities that MetLife ( MET )

has been able to offer to Chariot Re aligns really well with our

investment strategy of creating value over the long term without

taking principal risk," he said.

The move highlights the increasing convergence between the

insurance and asset management industries.

Insurers want to free up capital to invest in new products

by moving existing policies off their balance sheets. At the

same time, alternative money managers are seeking the kind of

steady, low-cost cash which insurance policies provide to invest

into their strategies for higher returns.

Both MetLife ( MET ) - through its investment management arm - and

General Atlantic will manage the assets within Chariot Re, a

Bermuda-based life and annuity reinsurance company.

Future assets could also come from MetLife ( MET ), while there are

also significant opportunities to acquire assets from other

sources, in particular the pension risk transfer market, said

MetLife's ( MET ) Chief Financial Officer John McCallion, as large

corporations increasingly look to outsource the management of

their retirement plans to cut costs.

With such opportunities ahead, McCallion said that MetLife ( MET )

understood it could not finance all the potential growth on its

own, so getting outside capital was the most logical solution to

bridging the gap.

"This is coming from the growth opportunity that we see with

our business. It's just that we're not going to use our balance

sheet for all of it," he said.

(Reporting by David French in New York; Editing by Varun H K)