Morgan Stanley Investment Management's (MSIM) emerging markets (EM) team has grown from its initial roots to offer some of the most comprehensive debt coverage of EM solutions for insurers around the world, making it one of the fastest growing fixed income managers for insurance in Europe.

The asset manager has a dedicated insurance solutions group which works closely with the portfolio management teams, which have sought to bring value to the customer base, and helped grow its EM debt assets to €14bn across a variety of strategies.

Particular points of note are the breadth of MSIM's EM investment universe – the asset manager ranges across a much larger investible universe than traditional EM debt benchmarks and, it believes, much larger than the majority of its peer's universes.

That includes coverage of 100 developing countries, representing over $15trn in market capitalisation, taking in every EM country that has a foreign exchange, local interest rate, sovereign credit, and/or corporate credit market in the public or private markets that is permissible for investment by appropriate regulatory entities.

At the same time, the asset manager takes a longer investment time frame than many peers – at one to five years – often coinciding with a political cycle.

That allows it the ability to look past short-term market moves, with a greater focus on the convergence of fundamentals and valuations.

ESG also comes into the equation. The investment team engages with sovereign debt issuers on improving ESG factors, ranging across factors such as improving the rule of law, regulatory efficiency and market transparency. The investment team makes approximately 60 to 80 country visits per year, which offer opportunities for direct engagement with policy makers.