LIFE CHANGES. SO DO YOUR CLIENTS' LIFE INSURANCE NEEDS.
We enable substantial service wins and AUM growth from the life insurance that your older clients no longer want or need.
We are engaged by the most conscientious advisors at top RIAs and the most sophisticated, principled life insurance professionals in the country to monetize older clients’ unwanted and surplus life insurance, delivering transparent and effective price discovery, expedient execution, rational fees, and maximum proceeds.
About us
Who we are
Experienced capital markets professionals with deep experience and expertise in the institutional market for in-force life insurance (life settlements), for seven years as buyers, since 2016 working with top RIAs and life insurance producers.
What we do
Conduct a controlled, disciplined price discovery process with a universe of vetted, high-quality institutional buyers for clients of top wealth advisors and life insurance professionals of their clients' unwanted and surplus life insurance.
How we are different
We deliver a substantively different process and substantially better outcomes in the most transparent, fastest, and confidence-engendering process approach available to policy owners or their advisors.
OUR MISSION
In 2016, after seven years with a large private equity buyer of in-force life insurance, we set out to fix a badly broken life settlement "market," (a disorganized universe of institutional buyers, not really a market, per se) in which ineffective price discovery and egregious commissions - more than 30% of the value of the transaction - were just a couple of the many shortcomings that we sought to fix. These shortcomings resulted in less than 10% of the potential market being engaged, leaving billions $US on the table by older 40,000 HNW/UHNW policy owners who forfeit at least $75B of permanent life insurance every year. We wanted to work with the best wealth advisors at the best RIAs, who were largely absent from the market, and principled life insurance professionals who wanted an alternative to the incumbent solution, to deliver a smarter, more effective, and lower cost way to monetize unwanted and surplus life insurance.
If you share our values about client advocacy, intellectual rigor, rational compensation, and simply doing the right thing, we'd love to work with you, too, to deliver this often overlooked, but high-value, service.
OBSERVABLY, MATERIALLY BETTER RESULTS
Delivering for Your Clients
With a fundamentally smarter, more effective price discovery process that yields substantially higher winning bids, coupled with a fee structure that is 1/4 the broker model, your clients receive significantly more proceeds for their unwanted and surplus life insurance. And we do it in less than half the time.
Below are the resluts of our last ten auctions.
$46,500,000
Death Benefit/Face Value
$18,590,000
Total Winning Bid $ over Surrender Value
$17,195,000
Net Proceeds to Sellers
1.28x/1.75x
Observed Multiple of Broker Bid/Net
More opportunities than most are aware.
Given the extent of ownership among the HNW/UHNW, the high aggregate lapse rates, and the economics of a well-executed life settlement, the only reason not to undertake the process to sell a policy is a channel that an advisor cannot trust to be worthy of his or her reputation or client's time, which is why fewer than 10% of policies lapsed by HNW/UHNW policy owners are presented to buyers.
We've changed that.
50%
>72 HNW/UHNW own at least one policy
>80%
of policies are forfeited; 4%/yr, 75% have value
8x/25%
Avg. settlement multiple of CSV/% of face value
A SIMPLE QUESTION
In a rapidly evolving and increasingly competitive wealth management landscape, in which clients are demanding more personalized and integrated services, assuming that you can partner with a firm that shares your values regarding transparency, professionalism, effective price discovery, and compensation, is there any circumstance in which you would not want to enable a client to extract hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars from a life insurance policy that is no longer of sufficient utility for them to maintain?
More experience. Different values. Better results.
We started this business because we were frustrated by what we saw as buyers with a large private equity buyer for seven years, offended by life settlement brokers’ business practices, opaque price discovery, and egregious commissions, and simply believed that we could – and should – do it better, for the advantage of all stakeholders. And, importantly, to have fun doing it, working with people we like, who share our values, and who we’d want to spend time with, if we weren’t working together.
2016
year founded
>30%
higher net proceeds (on fees alone)
7.5%
fee (% of value realized)
80%
auctions successful
We engage you the way you engage your clients
We know how hard you work to acquire your clients and how hard you work every day to maintain the trust that they have in you to work in their interest. We understand that as a wealth advisor or life insurance professional looking out for the best interests of your client and assessing the potential utility of a life settlement, while maximum bids and net proceeds are obviously of the greatest significance, a broader description of the value proposition of the transaction is important to consider.
We deliver that full value proposition - transparently, efficiently, and expeditiously – and work like crazy to earn your trust every day.
TRANSPARENT, FIDUCIARY, BI
Active advisor engagement, complete audit trail, all interactions in Bid Room, and a simple 7.5% (of realized value), 1/4 the brokers' 30% commission.
EFFECTIVE PRICE DISCOVERY
Higher winning bids than badly flawed broker process, which only requires the winner to beat the #2 bid, not bid to their true value.
RELIABLE COUNTERPARTIES
We engage 10+ regulated Providers that represent the 20+ of the most reliable sources of institutional capital that are buyers of in-force life insurance.
FAST, EFFICIENT EXECUTION
Unlike the broker process that requires weeks of set-up and months just to get to a winning bid, we complete our auction in weeks and funding in 60 days.
RECENT ENGAGEMENTS
$437,400 winning bid
$32,805 1908 fee
Large national wirehouse
91 year old healthy female
$754,000 UL
Change in beneficiary status
$770,000 winning bid
$57,750 1908 fee
$245 billion AUM RIA
75 year old healthy male
$3,150,000 GUL
Divorce
$700,000 winning bid
$52,500 1908 fee
$9 billion AUM RIA
61 year old male (manageable cancer)
$2,000,000 converted term (UL)
Health diagnosis, preferred liquidity
$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)
$130,000 winning bid
$12,500 1908 fee
$9 billion AUM RIA
73 year old healthy male
$1,500,000 UL
No longer needed (wife preceded him in death)
Uniquely qualified, uniquely effective.
All humility aside, we are the very best at what we do; we do not care about being the biggest, we care only about being the best and delivering differentiated results for you. While we occupy only a small corner of the HNW/UHNW wealth management world, we are wholly committed to delivering an outsized impact for our clients, the best wealth advisors and life insurance professionals in the country, when your clients have a life insurance policy that they no longer want or need and from which they would prefer the liquidity of a sale to lapsing or surrendering it.
We speak your language and deliver a disciplined, transparent, and intellectually-rigorous price discovery process, grounded in a comprehensive understanding - borne of experience - of how institutional buyers value in-force life insurance contracts. And we have a traditional client service mentality, much like you have with your clients, respecting your time, intelligence, and relationships.
And we really love what we do.
Truly differentiated results for the best advisors and the best firms
We work with only the best, most conscientious advisors to the HNW & UHNW, of various disciplines, who tirelessly advocate for their clients. Among those who engage us to assist them when they have older clients who own life insurance that they no longer wish to maintain and would prefer the liquidity that a settlement might generate:
-
TOP RIAs: Three of the top five and six of the ten largest HNW/UHNW RIAs (>10 of the top 50, with more than $900 billion AUM)
-
Top Life Insurance Professionals: A rapidly growing universe of BI-oriented life insurance professionals at many of the most sophisticated and client-centric insurance agencies in the country, especially those with CFPs and ChFCs and are duty-bound to engage their clients in a fiduciary manner and those who want to engage RIAs and Trust Companies for distribution
-
Wirehouse advisors
-
Trust Companies and individual fiduciaries
If you put your clients’ interests first in everything you do and would like to enable them to monetize unwanted and surplus life insurance in a way that is consistent your values, we’d love to work with you, too.
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."
IF YOU USE A BROKER, YOUR CLIENTS ARE PAYING A HIGH PSYCHIC AND FINANCIAL PRICE.
We are the alternative to a badly deficient incumbent solution
To understand how and why our approach delivers such differentiated results, it helps to first understand how badly deficient the alternative is and the implications for your clients.
If traditional brokers were just expensive, it would be one thing, but, the truth of the matter is that their descriptions of what they do to drive the price in a life settlement are utterly fanciful and all part of an effort to create the perception of complexity and of having created value where it ostensibly wouldn't have been discovered without their engagement and “negotiating” expertise - there is literally nothing to negotiate, only to analyze and value.
It’s all a Kabuki theatre that costs your client a lot of time, energy, and money.
HIGHEST BIDS
Smarter, more effective price discovery
Our single-round, blind, best and final auction, based on a better understanding of game and auction theory - and, more importantly, on our experience as buyers of in-force life insurance policies for seven years, when many times that we won an auction, we were not yet at our maximum value - is not only much faster and efficient than the brokers' badly flawed process, but uniquely effective at compelling bidders to bid to their true private value, not anchoring to others' bids, resulting in substantially higher winning bids for your clients.
And by virtue of how life insurance contracts are valued and that even seemingly small differences in underlying variables can result in dramatic variance, the difference between our approach and what competing solutions, which reward bargain hunting, can generate is not just a fraction higher, but often a *multiple* of the second highest bid.
RECENT ENGAGEMENT
Our client, the advisor (CFP) with a $245 billion AUM RIA, was referred to us by one of our life insurance partners. He approached us about a $3.15M policy owned by his client, a 75 year-old practicing physician (the owner and insured), who was going through a divorce that required a split of all of the marital assets. They had taken the policy to market with a life settlement broker just a few months earlier, but he and his client were not happy with the results of that process, which would have yielded $337,000, so they declined to accept the high bid of $503,000.
We assessed that the policy was likely worth significantly more than $503,000, and, with our lower fee, we were confident that we could deliver significantly better results. As the market had already seen the case and reviewed the medical records, we moved immediately to our three-day auction and received multiple bids, including a winning bid of $770,000, which, after our 7.5% fee, yielded the seller $712,500, 1.9x the net of the broker process of $337,000, after their 33% commission on the $503,000 winning bid.
$3,150,000
POLICY - GUL
$770,000
WINNING BID
$712,500
NET PROCEEDS
$375,500
PROCEEDS MORE THAN BROKER
Your awareness and advocacy matter
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 are on their own and 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%
unwittingly forego the opportunity without even considering the option
5%
engage a broker, subjected to opaque and ineffective price discovery and 30% fee
5%
engage a single buyer, like those on TV, which make non-competitive bids
Simple, transparent, fast, effective
Our 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), and consummation and funding within 60 days. How? Because we do not have to contrive complexity or prolong buyer engagement, pretending to "negotiate," in order to justify egregious commissions.
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.
80%
of auctions successful
20+
buyers reached
60
days to fund
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 analysing 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.