With about €42.5bn ($51.1bn) in fixed income institutional accounts, including for insurers, DWS is a well established player in the fixed income space, and its ability to ensure portfolios delivered appropriate protection as well as return in the turbulence of 2020 has won it Insurance Asset Risk's insurance fixed income manager of the year award.

Nils Thewes, DWS's head of fixed income solutions, EMEA, acknowledges 2020 was a year with very particular challenges.

He speaks of "market-bid liquidity breaking apart" in Q1, and liquidity planning "becoming a big challenge", then "a very large downgrade wave in corporate bonds with several bonds even falling below investment-grade", with potential knock-on effects for underwriters' capital requirements.

If the unprecedented stimulus measures that followed stabilised economies, they also strengthened the company's view of the "decade of lowest euro interest rates", Thewes adds.

It was a situation akin to 2009 after Lehman Brothers went under, where it is paramount to safeguard liquidity and actively identifying investment risk first – but then identify opportunities arising from the market dislocation and [which] led to strong performance numbers thereafter.

A judge praised DWS "responding to rapidly-changing and never-before-seen market dynamics [which] was key to performance in 2020 for fixed income portfolios".

Casting forward, Thewes says: "The challenge we see going forward is how will the next irrational move look, and in particular, when will this be seen by the broader investor base, who should then be keen to 'take some chips of the table' and move to the sidelines within fixed income."