China’s new asset-liability management rules for insurers: NFRA Measures 2026 explained
- The National Financial Regulatory Administration (NFRA) issued the Measures for the Asset-Liability Management of Insurance Companies (Order No. 4 of 2026, published 20 August 2026), a 46-article rule in six chapters that takes effect on 1 January 2027 and replaces the 2018 interim framework.
国家金融监督管理总局发布《保险公司资产负债管理办法》（2026年第4号令，2026年8月20日公布），共6章46条，自2027年1月1日起施行，取代2018年的暂行办法框架。
- The Measures set three management objectives — duration-structure matching, cost-yield matching and liquidity matching — and four principles: full coverage, reasonable matching, prudential soundness, and coordinated governance.
《办法》确立三大管理目标——期限结构匹配、成本收益匹配、流动性匹配，并确立全面覆盖、合理匹配、稳健审慎、统筹协调四项原则。
- Governance is formalised as a tiered structure: the board of directors bears ultimate responsibility, senior management leads directly, a designated department coordinates, functional departments cooperate, and internal audit supervises.
治理结构被规范化分层：董事会负最终责任、高级管理层直接领导、牵头部门统筹协调、职能部门相互协作、内部审计检查监督。
- New regulatory indicators with explicit thresholds and monitoring indicators with differentiated early-warning bands are introduced, aligned with the new accounting standards and solvency rules that took full effect in 2026.
《办法》结合2026年全面实施的新会计准则与偿付能力规则，设立带有明确阈值的资产负债监管指标，并新增设差异化预警区间的监测指标。
- An accompanying implementation notice allows insurers whose regulatory indicators are not yet met a three-year transition period, subject to a board-approved catch-up plan filed with the regulator.
配套的实施通知允许监管指标暂不达标的保险公司设置3年过渡期，需制定经董事会批准并报监管部门的达标规划。
- For foreign-invested insurers, the rule matters most for long-duration savings and annuity books in a low-yield environment, where liability cost discipline and investment matching will be tested against uniform national standards.
对外资保险公司而言，新规的意义集中体现在低利率环境下长期储蓄与年金业务上：负债成本纪律与投资匹配将按全国统一标准接受检验。
China’s new asset-liability management rules for insurers: NFRA Measures 2026 explained | 中国保险公司资产负债管理新规：2026年《办法》解读
Overview
On 20 August 2026, the National Financial Regulatory Administration (NFRA) published the Measures for the Asset-Liability Management of Insurance Companies (保险公司资产负债管理办法, NFRA Order No. 4 of 2026, hereinafter “the Measures”), together with an implementation notice titled *Matters Concerning the Implementation of the Measures*. The rule, which takes effect on 1 January 2027, upgrades the 2018 *Interim Measures for the Supervision of Insurance Asset-Liability Management* and five supporting regulatory rules into a single formal framework of six chapters and 46 articles.
Asset-liability management (ALM) in the insurance context means the process by which an insurer formulates, executes, evaluates and adjusts the policies and procedures governing its assets and liabilities, in line with its development strategy, operating objectives and risk appetite, so as to keep assets and liabilities reasonably matched and reduce mismatch risk. The Measures convert that description from an internal-management ideal into a set of enforceable governance, process and indicator requirements.
Why the rules were rewritten
NFRA explains the background in its official Q&A. First, the State Council’s 2024 opinions on strengthening supervision, preventing risks and promoting high-quality development of the insurance industry expressly called for “reinforcing joint asset-liability supervision”. Second, the prolonged low-interest-rate environment requires insurers to strengthen their ALM governance structures, policies and procedures. Third, 2026 is the year China’s insurance industry fully applies the new accounting standards (the CAS 22/23/24 family aligned with IFRS 9 and IFRS 17); because the recalibration changes how asset-liability matching indicators are measured, interest-rate volatility now has a significantly larger effect on both sides of the balance sheet.
The drafting was problem-oriented. Regulators identified four gaps in the previous regime: asset and liability management conducted in isolation, unclear policies and procedures, indicators lacking supervisory standards, and insufficient supervisory measures. The Measures are designed to close those gaps while reflecting economic value — the matching indicators and stress scenarios are meant to reveal an insurer’s true economic value and risk level rather than artefacts of rule design or artificial assumptions.
Objectives and management principles
Article 4 of the Measures defines the three core ALM objectives:
- Duration-structure matching (期限结构匹配): maintaining a reasonable match between asset cash flows and liability cash flows over a long horizon, enhancing the company’s economic value and guarding against interest-rate risk and reinvestment risk.
- Cost-yield matching (成本收益匹配): ensuring asset returns cover liability costs with sustainable profitability, guarding against spread-loss (利差损) risk.
- Liquidity matching (流动性匹配): ensuring the insurer can obtain sufficient funds in the short term to pay maturing debts or meet other payment obligations, guarding against liquidity risk.
Article 5 then states the four governing principles:
- Full coverage — ALM covers all assets and liabilities in the insurer’s general account, managing them as an integrated whole while accommodating the different characteristics of each liability class through differentiated asset-allocation policies.
- Reasonable matching — matching must be commensurate with the company’s development strategy, risk appetite, capital strength and management capability; mismatch risk must be kept within reasonable bounds.
- Prudential soundness — assets and future income must be able to cover the insurer’s obligations to policyholders, insureds and beneficiaries, capital requirements and other responsibilities; on the liability side this means a long-term, steady business philosophy and optimised liability structure; on the asset side it means long-term, prudent value investing that respects safety, liquidity and profitability.
- Coordinated governance — ALM must balance economic value, profitability, liquidity and solvency requirements, reflect the mutual influence of assets and liabilities, and consider correlations among asset classes and among products or business lines.
For a foreign-invested life insurer in China, these principles matter because they formally anchor “liability-first” discipline: the investment team can no longer be optimised purely for return when liability costs and policyholder obligations are not simultaneously managed.
Governance structure: who owns ALM
Chapter 2 prescribes a tiered governance system. The board of directors bears ultimate responsibility; senior management directly leads; a designated ALM lead department coordinates; functional departments cooperate; and the internal audit department supervises. The practical consequence is that ALM can no longer live in one silo — product pricing, investment, finance and risk functions must share a common framework with clear owners at each level.
The Measures also require insurers to formulate an ALM plan and to strengthen the asset-liability link across business planning and product development, product pricing management, insurance business management, asset-allocation policy, major investments and entrusted investments. Insurers must carry out stress testing and look-back analysis, prepare regular reports, and adjust the ALM plan in a timely manner.
Regulatory indicators and monitoring indicators
Chapter 4 introduces two layers of metrics:
- Regulatory indicators (监管指标), aligned with the new accounting standards and solvency rules, with clearly defined thresholds. These are the hard numbers on which supervision will focus.
- Monitoring indicators (监测指标), a set of additional metrics with differentiated early-warning bands designed to increase sensitivity so that deterioration is visible before it becomes critical.
For insurers with foreign shareholders, the important point is that indicator definitions are now uniform nationally. Local-option accounting and measurement choices that previously produced divergent ALM pictures will be normalised, which is generally helpful for group-level reporting and for head-office understanding of the China entity’s true risk profile.
Supervision, reporting and the three-year transition
Chapter 5 sets out the supervisory toolkit: information reporting, third-party review, capability assessment, and the power to take regulatory measures or impose administrative penalties depending on the circumstances. In parallel, the implementation notice issued on the same day addresses reporting and transition arrangements. Insurers whose regulatory indicators are not yet met may be allowed a three-year transition period; they must prepare a catch-up plan with a clear timetable, obtain board approval, and file it with the regulator, which will track and evaluate progress during the transition.
What this means for foreign-invested insurers
The Measures apply to all commercial insurers established within China under the Insurance Law — property and casualty as well as life — including subsidiaries and branches of foreign groups. Practical implications for foreign-invested insurers include:
- Product pricing and investment must be jointly governed. The requirement to strengthen the asset-liability link across pricing, product development and asset allocation institutionalises what well-run foreign insurers already do, but now with regulatory expectations attached to each node of the process.
- Long-duration savings and annuity portfolios come under sharper scrutiny. In a low-yield environment, the cost-yield matching objective directly targets spread-loss risk on guaranteed-rate products. Foreign life insurers writing traditional savings and annuity products should re-test pricing assumptions against the new indicators well before the 1 January 2027 effective date.
- Governance documentation needs updating. Board-level ultimate responsibility and internal-audit oversight mean committees, terms of reference and reporting lines in the China entity should be reviewed so the tiered structure is explicit and auditable.
- Indicator readiness is a 2026 workstream. Although the Measures take effect on 1 January 2027, the new accounting standards are already in force in 2026; insurers should use the intervening months to run the new regulatory and monitoring indicators in parallel so that any gap can be addressed inside the three-year transition rather than after it.
- Groups can expect more comparable local reporting. Uniform indicator definitions make it easier for foreign parent companies to consolidate and compare the China entity with operations elsewhere.
Practical steps
- Map current ALM governance (board, senior management, lead department, functional owners, internal audit) against Chapter 2 of the Measures and close any gaps in written terms of reference.
- Run a preliminary computation of the new regulatory and monitoring indicators against 2026 data; identify which thresholds are at risk.
- If indicators are not met, prepare a board-approved catch-up plan with a timetable, ready to file with NFRA and its local offices.
- Re-test pricing and product-development governance for savings and annuity lines against the cost-yield matching objective, including stress scenarios and look-back analysis.
- Align internal reporting calendars with the new information-reporting obligations so that the 2027 reporting cycle is not a scramble.
Sources
- 中国政府网 — 金融监管总局发文着力提升保险业资产负债管理水平（新华社）: https://www.gov.cn/lianbo/202608/content_7078878.htm
- 国家金融监督管理总局 — 《保险公司资产负债管理办法》（令2026年第4号全文）: https://www.nfra.gov.cn/cn/view/pages/governmentDetail.html?docId=1268952
- 国家金融监督管理总局 — 有关司局就《保险公司资产负债管理办法》答记者问: https://www.nfra.gov.cn/cn/view/pages/ItemDetail.html?docId=1268958
- 央视网财经 — 保险业迎资产负债管理新规: https://finance.cctv.cn/2026/08/24/ARTIK9AIPJ4OtMXccVBrILlJ260824.shtml
Related reading
- see also: Foreign institutions and China’s capital markets — August 2026 opening snapshot (344-foreign-institutions-capital-markets)
- see also: Financial sector opening measures for foreign institutions (55-financial-sector-opening)
中国保险公司资产负债管理新规：2026年《办法》解读
概述
2026年8月20日，国家金融监督管理总局（下称”金融监管总局”）发布《保险公司资产负债管理办法》（2026年第4号令，下称《办法》），并同步印发《关于实施〈保险公司资产负债管理办法〉有关事项的通知》。《办法》共6章46条，自2027年1月1日起施行，将2018年《保险资产负债管理监管暂行办法》及五项监管规则升级为一部统一的正式规章。
保险业语境下的资产负债管理，是指保险公司根据发展战略、经营目标和风险偏好，制定、执行、评估和调整资产负债相关政策和程序，维持资产与负债的合理匹配，降低资产负债错配风险。《办法》将这一描述从”内部管理理念”转化为一组可执行的治理、流程与指标要求。
为何重修规则
金融监管总局在官方答记者问中说明了背景。其一，2024年《国务院关于加强监管防范风险推动保险业高质量发展的若干意见》明确提出”强化资产负债联动监管”。其二，长期低利率环境要求保险公司完善资产负债管理治理结构、政策和程序，加强资产负债协调联动。其三，2026年中国保险业全面实施新会计准则（与IFRS 9、IFRS 17 对齐的 CAS 22/23/24 系列），资产负债匹配指标口径随之调整，利率波动对资产和负债两端的影响显著加大。
起草坚持问题导向。监管部门梳理出旧制度下的四类短板：资产与负债管理脱节、政策和程序不清晰、指标缺乏监管标准、监管措施不足。《办法》旨在补齐短板，同时着力反映经济价值——资产负债匹配指标及压力情景设置，意在反映公司真实经济价值和风险水平，减少因规则设定或人为假设造成的干扰。
管理目标与原则
《办法》第四条界定三大资产负债管理目标：
- 期限结构匹配：维持资产现金流与负债现金流在较长期限结构上的合理匹配，提升公司经济价值，防范利率风险和再投资风险。
- 成本收益匹配：资产收益能够覆盖负债成本，具备一定持续盈利能力，防范利差损风险。
- 流动性匹配：短期内能够获得充足资金以支付到期债务或履行其他支付义务，防范流动性风险。
第五条继而确立四项管理原则：
- 全面覆盖——覆盖普通账户全部资产和负债，将资产与负债作为整体管理，同时兼顾不同负债类别特征，采取差异化资产配置政策。
- 合理匹配——匹配须与公司发展战略、风险偏好、资本实力和管理能力相适应，将错配程度维持在合理范围。
- 稳健审慎——资产和未来收入须能覆盖对投保人、被保险人或受益人的义务、资本要求及其他责任；负债端坚持长期稳健经营、优化负债结构，资产端坚持长期稳健价值投资，遵循安全性、流动性、收益性原则。
- 统筹协调——统筹经济价值、盈利能力、流动性和偿付能力要求等多维目标，反映资产与负债的相互影响，并考虑不同资产类别、产品与业务种类之间的相关性。
对外资寿险公司而言，这些原则的意义在于以正式制度固化”负债先行”纪律：当负债成本与保单义务未被同步管理时，投资团队不能再单纯为收益而优化。
治理结构：谁对资产负债管理负责
第二章规定了分层治理体系：董事会负最终责任，高级管理层直接领导，资产负债管理牵头部门统筹协调，职能部门相互协作，内部审计部门检查监督。实际操作层面的结果是：资产负债管理不能再囿于单一部门——产品定价、投资、财务与风险职能必须在统一框架下运行，并在每一层级有明确的责任人。
《办法》同时要求保险公司制定资产负债管理方案，并在业务规划和产品开发、产品定价管理、保险业务管理、资产配置政策、重大投资、委托投资等环节加强资产负债联动，开展压力测试和回溯分析，定期编制报告，并及时调整资产负债管理方案。
监管指标与监测指标
第四章引入两层指标：
- 监管指标：结合新会计准则和偿付能力规则设立，明确指标阈值。这是监管关注的核心硬指标。
- 监测指标：一组新增的补充指标，设置差异化预警区间，增强敏感性，使风险恶化在演变为危机前即可见。
对外资股东而言，关键在于指标口径现在全国统一。以往因会计与计量选择不同而呈现的差异化资产负债管理图景将被拉平，这通常有利于集团层面汇报，也有利于总部理解中国子公司的真实风险状况。
监督管理、报告与三年过渡期
第五章给出监管工具箱：信息报告、第三方审核、能力评估，以及视情形采取监管措施或依法实施行政处罚的权力。同日发布的实施通知明确了报告报送与过渡期安排。监管指标暂不达标的保险公司，允许设置3年过渡期；保险公司应制定达标规划，明确时间进度安排，经董事会批准并报监管部门后执行，监管部门在过渡期内跟踪评估。
对外资保险公司的意义
《办法》适用于依据《保险法》在中国境内设立的所有商业保险公司——财产险与人身险均含——包括外资集团的子公司与分支机构。对外资保险公司的实际影响包括：
- 产品定价与投资须协同治理。 要求在定价、产品开发与资产配置各环节强化资产负债联动，这使运营规范的外资保险公司的既有做法制度化，且每个环节都承载监管预期。
- 长期储蓄与年金业务受更严格审视。 低利率环境下，成本收益匹配目标直指保证利率产品的利差损风险。销售传统储蓄与年金产品的外资寿险公司，应在2027年1月1日生效日前尽早按新指标复核定价假设。
- 治理文件需要更新。 董事会最终责任与内审监督意味着应审查中国实体的委员会设置、职责范围与汇报线，使分层结构清晰、可审计。
- 指标就绪是2026年的工作线。 虽然《办法》2027年1月1日才生效，但新会计准则2026年已实施；保险公司应利用过渡月份并行试算新监管指标与监测指标，以便在三年过渡期内解决问题，而非拖到过渡期之后。
- 集团可期待更可比的本地报告。 统一的指标口径使外资母公司更易合并并比较中国实体与其他地区的经营情况。
实务建议
- 对照《办法》第二章梳理现有资产负债管理治理（董事会、高管、牵头部门、职能归属、内审），书面补齐职责分工缺口。
- 以2026年数据初步试算新监管指标与监测指标，识别存在达标风险的阈值。
- 若指标不达标，制定经董事会批准的达标规划并附时间表，备妥向金融监管总局及其派出机构报送。
- 对照成本收益匹配目标复核储蓄与年金产品的定价和产品开发治理，包含压力情景与回溯分析。
- 将内部报告日历与新信息报告义务对齐，避免2027年报告周期仓促应对。
来源
- 中国政府网 — 金融监管总局发文着力提升保险业资产负债管理水平（新华社）: https://www.gov.cn/lianbo/202608/content_7078878.htm
- 国家金融监督管理总局 — 《保险公司资产负债管理办法》（令2026年第4号全文）: https://www.nfra.gov.cn/cn/view/pages/governmentDetail.html?docId=1268952
- 国家金融监督管理总局 — 有关司局就《保险公司资产负债管理办法》答记者问: https://www.nfra.gov.cn/cn/view/pages/ItemDetail.html?docId=1268958
- 央视网财经 — 保险业迎资产负债管理新规: https://finance.cctv.cn/2026/08/24/ARTIK9AIPJ4OtMXccVBrILlJ260824.shtml
相关阅读
- 见：境外机构与中国资本市场——2026年8月的开放图景（344-foreign-institutions-capital-markets）
- 见：金融业开放新措施（55-financial-sector-opening）