Life changes. So do your client's life insurance needs.
We ensure that you can maximize the value of the life insurance that your older clients no longer need.
We deliver the first and only life settlement solution that meets the highest standards of client care for wealth advisors at top RIAs and principled life insurance professionals, ensuring complete transparency, effective price discovery, rational fees, and maximum proceeds to your HNW/UHNW clients from life insurance that they no longer want or need.
A truly differentiated life settlement solution for the best wealth advisors and life insurance professionals.
As buyers of in-force life insurance for seven years with a large private equity buyer, we saw first hand how badly the incumbent channel performs price discovery, its egregious economics, and how infrequently it substantvely advocates for policy sellers rather than its own interests.
So, in 2016, we decided to do something about it, create a better price discovery mechanism, engage only the most conscientious HNW & UHNW wealth advisors and principled life insurance agents in the country, and deliver far greater proceeds to sellers - your clients.
Fiduciary and Best Interest
End-to-end transparency, advisor engagement, audit trail, and a simple, transparent fee of 7.5% of realized value, 1/4 the brokers' 30% commissions
Higher Winning Bids
Smarter price discovery that yields higher winning bids than the flawed broker process, which only requires the highest bidder beat the second highest bid, not bid to their true value.
Faster Execution
We do not waste your or your clients' time with non-value add steps or unnecessarily prolonged price discovery, ensuring consummation and funding in 60 - 75 days.
Real Capital
We engage 10+ of the most reputable regulated Providers that represent all of the 20+ sources of institutional capital that are buyers of in-force life insurance.
Uniquely qualified. Uniquely effective.
We were so frustrated by the badly flawed approach of brokers - opaque process, egregiously expensive, ineffective price discovery, and prolonged calendar that we concluded that we wanted to lead the way in bringing a new level of professionalism, transparency, effective price discovery, and rational fees to an otherwise moribund market that could seemingly ever grow past 10% market penetration.
With a breadth and depth of experience that is unsurpassed in the industry, we have taken a very different approach. Alone. The view is better and, more importantly, our results speak for themselves.
2016
YEAR FOUNDED
>30%
HIGHER NET PROCEEDS
25%
AVG. % OF FACE VALUE
7.5%
FEE
60-75
DAYS TO COMPLETE/FUND
10+
TOP 50 LARGEST RIAs SERVED
PODCAST APPEARANCE -
FINANCIAL PLANNING ASSOCIATION
Hear in this episode of the Smarter Planner Podcast Belle Osvath, CFP, interview Scott about his company's innovative approach to helping financial planners work with their clients to sell life insurance policies that are no longer needed.
Simply doing the right thing and simply doing it better.
We are on a mission to disrupt and replace a badly broken distribution channel whose members have for years placed their economic interests ahead of those of their clients. As buyers of in-force life insurance for seven years before founding this business, it became clear to us that the incentive structure and level of fees that characterize the incumbent channel levy a wholly unreasonable tax on policy owners, with very real psychic and economic implications for those who wish to sell a life insurance policy that they no longer want or need.
So, with a fundamentally different philosophy that underlies everything we do, and unmatched breadth and depth of experience, we undertook to deliver a materially differentiated and better service for advisors of HNW/UHNW clients to ensure that you can deliver a life settlement solution worthy of your reputation and standards.
We love what we do and we work with the very best who share our values
We have been engaged by advisors across the wealth management spectrum, including many firms that assiduously avoided life settlements before learning our approach, and a few that previously used brokers, but that came to understand the profound differences in our approach and the attendant benefits for their clients.
Among our clients are three of the top five and six of the ten largest RIAs in the country (several others in the top 50) and a rapidly growing universe of BI-oriented life insurance professionals at many of the most sophisticated and client-centric insurance agencies in the country. And if you put your clients’ interests first in everything you do and would like to enable them to monetize unwanted and surplus life insurance, we’d love to work with you.
10+
Top 50 HNW/UHNW RIAs, with >$800 billion AUM
10+
BGAs/IMOs/Top UHNW Insurance Producers
Several
Various Trustees, T&E attorneys, and Trust Co's
$2,550,000 winning bid
$191,250 1908 fee
$25 billion AUM RIA
91 year old healthy female
$5,700,000 GUL
Trust Owned/estate planning adjustments
$475,000 winning bid
$35,625 1908 fee
Life insurance GA
67 year old male (rare cancer)
$1,500,000 converted term (UL)
Individual owned (buy/sell agreement, post sale)
$437,400 winning bid
$32,805 1908 fee
Large national wirehouse
91 year old healthy female
$754,000 UL
Trust owned
$700,000 winning bid
$52,500 1908 fee
$9 billion AUM RIA
61 year old male (manageable cancer)
$2,000,000 converted term (UL)
Individual owned
$900,000 winning bid
$67,500 1908 fee
$25 billion AUM RIA
51 year old female (manageable cancer)
$5,000,000 convertible term
Key Man policy (retained upon sale of business)
$2,948,000 winning bid
$157,500 1908 fee
$9 billion AUM RIA
85 year old healthy female
$5,300,000 GUL
Charitable Trust owned
$2,600,000 winning bid
$50,000 1908 fee
UHNW Life Insurance Advisor
75 year old male/75 year old female
$29,000,000 GUL
Individual owned - wanted to exit premium loan
$5,300,000 winning bid
$265,000 1908 fee
UHNW insurance advisor (part of $140B RIA)
85 year old male/79 yeay old female
$12,000,000 GUL
Trust owned
$90,000 winning bid
$7,500 1908 fee
$140 billion AUM RIA
72 year old healthy male
$1,000,000 UL
Individual owned (was collateral on business loan)
Simple, Fast, Effective Process
Our simple, transparent, expeditious price discovery process is respectful of your and your client's time, effort, and, honestly, intelligence. We typically deliver actionable bids in 5 days (after a two-week underwriting period), consummation and funding within 60 days, all requiring less than 10 hours of your time, most of which is only after you and your client know whether the winning bid is sufficiently compelling to move forward with the administrative effort of contracting.
We enable the price discovery benefits of real competition among multiple credible buyers without the opacity, inefficiency, and high cost of a broker. Importantly, you are intimately engaged in the process – with end-to-end transparency and an audit trail – and understood by your client to have been the driver of a high-value service win and significant windfall from an asset that would otherwise have been forfeited for little or no benefit.
And everything is executed in a secure ShareFile bid room, not via e-mail and phone calls.
20+
BUYERS REACHED
80%
OF AUCTIONS SUCCESSFUL
15
DAYS TO COMPLETED AUCTION
60
DAYS TO FUND
We have seen time and time again direct evidence of the benefits of both higher bids and materially lower fees that accrue to our clients who want to do a life settlement as a result of using 1908’s service.
Director of Insurance Services (CFP)
$9 billion AUM RIA
MATERIALLY HIGHER WINNING BIDS
While there are several high-quality institutional buyers of in-force life insurance, including many well-known firms and insurance carriers, it is a loosely-organized, illiquid, niche market. But, that is actually an opportunity to generate often outsized winning. Why?
Because the market is inefficient with high variability among buyers of the value ascribed to a policy, borne of small differences in the underlying assumptions about the policy or the insured - or just of different discount rates and funding strategies. Simply, we offer the only solution that compels buyers to actually bid to their unique values, rather than permitting buyers to bid below their true value for the policy in an effort to acquire the policy at a bargain price because nobody else in the market asses as high a value.
Our approach in uniquely effective at compelling bidders to bid to their true private value, resulting in faster, higher bids for your clients (unlike the broker approach, in which the winning bidder simply has to beat the second highest bidder - and subjects your client to an opaque, confusing, prolonged "negotiation"), because it is the only approach that recognizes how policy buyers actually value in-force life insurance, punishes bargain hunting, and rewards those who bid to their true value, even those who lose, by not wasting their time in an iterative process.
Recent Engagement
An UHNW life insurance advisor (who began using us three years ago, after years of using traditional brokers), part of a $140B RIA, approached us about a client with a large life insurance portfolio who wanted to explore the sale of $9.8M second-to-die GUL (two policies) as part of a broader estate planning exercise for the 91 year-old couple.
The below results are why this firm, and others, engage us strategically to contemplate what the best course of action might be with all of their older clients with whom they are regularly assessing the value and utility of their life insurance portfolio.
$9,800,000
GUL
$4,300,000
Winning Bid
$3,977,500
Net Proceeds (fees: 1908 5%/Advisor 2.5%)
75
Days to Complete/Fund
Region Head, CFA
$15 billion AUM RIA
"I know our advisors just added a new tool to their toolbox and I’m excited to see our teams collaborate."
Partner (CLU, ChFC)
$10 billion in-force life insurance advisor (part of $140B RIA)
"My mind is analytical and I love it when someone dives deep into an industry looking for ways to improve it. You have certainly done that with your approach. You did a great job explaining to us why your firm is structurally different from the brokers we used in the past and I appreciate that and agree with your approach. We'll help many families together."
Head of Insurance
$120 billion AUM RIA
"I won’t even imagine the reaction of one of our advisors to learning too late that a life insurance partner that we work with didn't engage 1908 and put a shared client into a brokered life settlement and charged our client those outrageous fees."
Senior Insurance Advisor (CFP)
$9 billion AUM RIA
"We have seen time and time again direct evidence of the benefits of both higher bids and materially lower fees that accrue to our clients who want to do a life settlement as a result of using 1908’s service."
Vice President (CFP, CLU)
Large national life insurance broker
"Your approach aligns with where the true advice business for life insurance is going, including bringing real transparency to the otherwise murky industry of life settlements."
Managing Director (ChFC, CLU)
$30 billion AUM UHNW RIA
"1908's model has turned this sector upside down amidst all these cowboy brokers."
A small, illiquid market, but high-quality capital and regulated counterparties.
Since 2010, the universe of buyers of in-force life insurance has become highly institutional, with many household name private equity, hedge funds, endowments, and private and public pensions having purchased policies.
But, truthfully, relative to other assets, it is a small, illiquid market, typically with fewer than 20 active buyers. So compelling that one buyer willing to pay the most for your client’s asset – an unwanted life insurance policy – to actually pay that value is the challenge, resulting in something of a bespoke market.
That it is bespoke is actually an opportunity to generate often outsized winning bids – if your partner knows how to compel buyers to bid to their value. And we do.
$5B
Face Value settled each year
$1.5B+
Capital deployed to sellers each year
10+
Regulated intermediaries to reach to capital
A more frequent and substantive opportunity to do the right thing for clients and their families than most are aware
Each year, more than 40,000 HNW/UHNW households >72 years old forfeit (lapse or surrender) $75 billion of the $1.5 trillion of in-force permanent and convertible term life insurance, at least $50 billion of which likely has value in excess of surrender value to institutional buyers. But less than 10% of the policies are presented to market, half through direct buyers that you see on TV (and are unlikely to pay a competitive bid, for lack of competition) and the other half through egregiously expensive brokers that run ineffective price discovery and extract a third of the value of the transaction in commissions.
In order to create a better outcome for your client than lapse or surrender (or even keeping a policy that is not of sufficient utility to justify ongoing premiums), all you need is to know what to look for - from the most obvious observations, like there is no longer a need for a policy, to more nuanced analyses about the relative utility of a policy - and to start the conversation. And we can help with that.
>50%
>72 HNW/UHNW own at least one policy
>80%
lapsed or surrendered; 3% - 4% annually
8x/25%
Avg. settlement multiple of CSV and % of face value
Without you, your clients are on their own, facing only bad outcomes
Are any of your clients objectively better off without you responsibly engaging them about monetizing an unwanted or surplus life insurance policy from which they might be able to extract hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars?
Of course not.
Without you, your clients face only bad and sub-optimal outcomes, foregoing significant proceeds altogether, which happens 90% of the time, and receiving far less than they should, by engaging intermediaries who will either extract egregious fees - after a badly flawed price discovery process - or offer less than a competitive bidder would offer.
90%
will miss out entirely
5%
will pay egregious commissions to a broker
5%
will receive non-competitive offer from single buyer
What sells
If you come across a client who expresses an interest and exploring the option to sell a policy that they no longer want or need, or you find them in or more programmatic and strategic approach to analyzing your clients life insurance, below are the basic criteria that describe a policy/insured that is likely to have value in the secondary market.
If you can get us a recent in-force illustration, we can give you a sense within 24 hours how likely it is that a policy will attract bids and a general idea of how much the market is likely to bid.
UL/Term
Policy Types (any UL product)
$500K - $50M
Policy Size
<72/>72
if not healthy/if healthy
Any
Ownership Structure
Let's Talk
If you'd like to learn more about what we do and how we can be of service to you and your clients and their families, please reach out. We'd love to be of service.
Thank you.