Michelangelo's David
A symbol of "the dignity of man," representing the Renaissance ideal of human excellence, freedom, and the power to shape one's own life, moving away from more pessimistic medieval views.
An enlightened approach to life settlements for top financial advisors.
We enable conscientious HNW/UHNW wealth advisors at top RIAs, principled life insurance professionals, and Trust companies to extract maximum value from older clients' unwanted and surplus life insurance, delivering transparent and effective price discovery, expedient execution, and charging a fee 1/4 the incumbent channel of brokers.
WHO WE ARE
Broadly experienced capital markets professionals with extensive experience and expertise in the institutional market for in-force life insurance, seven years with a PE buyer and since 2016 enabling wealth advisory professionals to confidently engage buyers.
WHAT WE DO
Conduct a controlled, disciplined, and rigorous price discovery process with 20+ high-quality institutional buyers to ensure maximum value for your older clients' unwanted and surplus life insurance, consummating the transaction in 60 days and being paid a 7.5% fee (min. $12,500).
ALONE IN OUR APPROACH
We deliver substantively better outcomes (1.8x the proceeds and less than half the time) than the incumbent channel of life settlement brokers and single buyers, in the most professional, transparent, and expeditious means to monetize surplus life insurance.
WHO WE ARE
Experienced capital markets professionals with expertise in the institutional market for in-force life insurance, for seven years with a private equity buyer and since 2016 enabling advisors at top RIAs, principled life insurance advisors, fiduciaries, and trustees to confidently engage the market.
WHAT WE DO
Conduct a controlled, disciplined, and rigorous price discovery process with 20+ high-quality institutional buyers to ensure maximum value for your older clients' unwanted and surplus life insurance, consummating the transaction in 60 days and being paid a 7.5% fee (min. $12,500).
ALONE IN OUR APPROACH
We deliver substantively better outcomes – both psychic and financial, 1.8x the net proceeds of brokers – in a more transparent, expeditious, and confidence-engendering process than any other approach available to policy owners or their trusted advisors.
CHANGING LANDSCAPE AND A SUBSTANTIVE OPPORTUNITY
Increasingly, leading wealth management firms recognize the need to evaluate their clients’ in-force life insurance policies as part of their estate planning, asset allocation, and cash management processes. Inevitably, this leads to the identification of unwanted or surplus policies - policies whose initial protection or estate planning purposes are no longer relevant or cost effectively achieved.
In fact, more than 40,000 HNW/UHNW >72 forfeit $75 billion of UL chassis life insurance, 2/3rd of which would have considerable market value to a universe of high-quality institutional buyers of in-force life insurance, is lapsed each year.
But, the legacy distribution channel is wholly inappropriate for fiduciaries; opaque, inefficient, and ineffective price discovery, egregious fees, and myriad predatory behaviors, resulting in market penetration of <10%. Accordingly, 1908 has built the only wholly transparent, institutional quality process to sell (settle) these policies to institutional investors, ensuring comprehensive and effective price discovery. And charging a fee of 7.5% (vs. 33% of the incumbent channel) and completing engagements in 60 days (vs. 130+ days).
Demand for in-force life insurance originates from private equity firms, dedicated funds, and investors with significant longevity market experience and duration demand. Generally, the market seeks UL, VUL, IUL, and term conversions ranging from $1M—$50M+, paying between 5% - 50% of face value (average 28%) and 8x - 10x surrender value, depending on a number of factors regarding policy cost and duration and insured age and health.
1908 works with 3 of the top 5, 6 of the top 10, and more than a dozen of the top 50 RIAs in the country, several trust companies, fiduciaries, and fiduciary-minded life insurance professionals, as demand for our services is growing alongside the adoption of life insurance best practices across the advisory space.
And we'd love to work with you, too, if you share our values and desire to do right by your clients, whether a fee-only, fiduciary, trust, or life insurance advisor.
EXPERIENCE, VALUES, discipline, RELATIONSHIPS
Uniquely qualified, uniquely effective
We started this business because we were frustrated by what we saw at a large private equity buyer of in-force life insurance for seven years, offended by the incumbent channel's business practices, opaque and woefully ineffective price discovery, and egregious commissions, knowing that top wealth advisors would only engage the market in a meaningful way if real change were to occur.
Changing a market with an incumbent channel that wants to protect its egregious economics is hard, but fun, and we work only with people we like and respect personally and professionally, who share our values, and who we’d want to spend time with, if we weren’t working together.
2016
Year Founded
8x/28%
Avg. premium to CSV/% face value
80%
Auctions successful
7.5%
Fee (Gross Bid - CSV); min $12,500
“The 1908 folks are just the best. We appreciate their hard work and actually enjoyed the experience. It was nice to have the option, I was afraid we were out of luck on our policies until they came along. I think our cases are good examples of what can be gained (or blood loss stopped) and what it takes to get through it, which really was not bad." - Policy Seller (to their advisor, our client)
Most Recent Engagement
With a looming premium increase, the adult children of the healthy 93 year-old female insured no longer wished to maintain two $1M policies that they'd owned for 15 years. Their advisor engaged us to sell the policies and we completed the process in 65 days, delivering a winning bid 2.55x an offer that a broker had made.
$2,000,000 GUL
$582,000 winning bid
$540,000 net proceeds
93 yo healthy female
"Once it was clear how big a difference your approach makes for our clients, we could never again in good conscience go back to the broker we used before we were introduced to you and the 1908 team."
Client Service Lead
$10 billion in-force life insurance advisor (part of $350B 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."
Managing Director, Head of Insurance Solutions
$190 billion RIA
"I know our advisors just added a new tool to their toolbox and I’m excited to see our teams collaborate."
Region Head, CFA
$15 billion 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."
Senior Insurance Advisor (CFP)
$10 billion RIA
"1908's model has turned this sector upside down amidst all these cowboy brokers."
Managing Director (ChFC, CLU)
$30 billion RIA
"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."
Vice President (CFP, CLU)
Large national life insurance broker
"We *love* working with you and your team."
Co-Founding Partner (CLU, ChFC)
$10 billion in-force life insurance advisor (part of $350B RIA)
"You are our only partner in the life settlement space and have built an outstanding reputation with our advisors. We appreciate your partnership and the great work you do for our clients!"
Director of Financial Planning (CFP, CPA, LLM)
$28 billion RIA
Our Clients
We count among our clients many of the most highly-regarded HNW/UHNW RIAs and Trust companies in the country. Three of the top five, six of the top 10, and more than a dozen of the top 50 RIAs, with $3 trillion AUM, including many firms that assiduously avoided life settlements altogether until they learned of our approach and the benefits for their clients.
We also serve a rapidly growing universe of principled, Best Interest-oriented life insurance professionals at the most sophisticated insurance advisory firms in the country, including many who transitioned their activity to us upon learning of the significant difference in our approach from the incumbent channel that they had previously engaged, as well as Trust Companies, trustees, and wirehouse advisors.
12+ Top 50 RIAs
10+ top life insurance advisory firms
Several trust companies & others
DELIVERING FOR REAL FAMILIES
Service wins and AUM growth
For too long, principled life insurance professionals have been faced with a Faustian bargain of ignoring altogether the benefit of the sale of a client's unwanted life insurance policy or engaging a fundamentally broken and egregiously expensive distribution channel that insults their intelligence and business ethics.
We have changed that, advocating less for life settlements than for conscientious wealth management, life insurance, and Trust professionals to have a responsible means to maximize the value of a life insurance policy that is no longer of sufficient utility to justify maintaining or for which there are preferred means to achieve an estate planning objective, as the insured ages and circumstances change.
Rebalancing charitable trust
85 year old healthy male
$350 billion RIA
$12,000,000 GUL
$5,300,000 winning bid
$4,770,000 net proceeds
Change in beneficiaries
91 year old healthy female
Large national wirehouse
$754,000 GUL
$437,400 winning bid
$404,595 net proceeds
Simply no longer wanted policy
73 year old healthy male
$10 billion RIA
$1,500,000 GUL
$130,000 winning bid
$117,500 net proceeds
Illiquid trust
85 year old healthy male
$10 billion RIA
$2,000,000 UL
$200,000 winning bid
$185,000 net proceeds
Unnecessary key man policy
51 year female w/ multiple myeloma
$28 billion RIA
$5,000,000 convertible term
$900,000 winning bid
$832,500 net proceeds
Adjustment of life insurance portfolio
91 year old healthy male and female
$350 billion RIA
$9,800,000 GUL
$4,300,000 winning bid
$3,977,500 net proceeds
Illiquid charitable trust
85 year old healthy female
$10 billion RIA
$5,300,000 GUL
$2,948,000 winning bid
$2,726,000 net proceeds
Illiquid trust
79 year old male/78 year old female
$10 billion RIA
$5,200,000 GUL
$802,500 winning bid
$742,000 net proceeds
Divorce/change in beneficiaries
73 year old healthy male
$70 billion RIA
$3,000,000 GUL
$165,000 winning bid
$152,500 net proceeds
Expired buy/sell agreement
67 year old male w/ cancer diagnosis
General Agent (RIA referral)
$1,500,000 UL (converted term)
$475,000 winning bid
$439,375 net proceeds
Departed CEO policy - company owned
72 year old healthy male
Large public multi-national company
$51,000,000 GUL
$10,000,000 winning bid
$9,500,000 net proceeds
Smarter Planner Podcast
Hear in this episode of the "Smarter Planner Podcast" Belle Osvath, CFP, interview 1908's founder, Scott Sanders, about his company's innovative approach to helping financial planners work with their clients to sell life insurance policies that they and their advisors determine they no longer want or need.
SMARTER, MORE EFFECTIVE PRICE DISCOVERY
MATERIALLY HIGHER WINNING BIDS
Our approach, borne of our experience as buyers for seven years and an understanding of how asset-constrained markets price opportunities, is uniquely effective at compelling participants to bid to their true private value, not bidding anchored to others' known bids, yielding substantially higher winning bids than the badly flawed approach of the incubment channel.
The difference in our winning bids and what a broker can produce with its "negotiations" is often not just a fraction higher, but a multiple of what a broker could produce, putting hundreds of thousands and even millions more in your clients' account and your AUM.
Rationalizing a Loosely-Organized, but highly-regulated Market
Intelligent market engagement
We access only the most reliable capital through regulated intermediaries, never fringe capital, ensuring the lowest transaction risk and greatest expediency in the market.
Unlike the badly flawed broker approach, our approach ensures that your clients benefit from the inefficiencies of a market in which buyers often ascribe wildly divergent values to the same policy, not enabling them to calibrate their bids to others' bids by enforcing blind, best and final bidding. And we do it in weeks, not months, executed in a secure ShareFile bid room, not via e-mail and phone calls.
1.3x
average multiple of broker winning bid
1.8x
average multiple of broker net proceeds
~20
buyers reached
15/60
days to actionable bids/funding
Even minimal engagement about what they own reveals opportunities
A common misconception among many advisors is that the opportunity to monetize a client's unwanted or surplus life insurance policy is limited to when they can no longer afford it - that is only a small portion of the transactions that we actually undertake.
With your intimate knowledge of clients' financial planning objectives and life events that change the utility of a life insurance policy and/or liquidity preference, you are uniquely positioned to identify those changes that give rise to the opportunities to monetize a policy as an alternative to lapsing or surrendering it.
<72/72+
if less healthy/if standard
UL/GUL/VUL
policy type (or convertible term)
Any
ownership structure
>$500K
policy size
without you, clients are on their own
Your advocacy is critical
In a rapidly evolving wealth management landscape that is placing an ever higher premium on financial planning expertise and execution, assuming that you can partner with a firm that shares your values and professionalism, is there any circumstance in which you would not want to enable a client to extract maximum value from a life insurance policy that is no longer of sufficient utility for them to maintain or from which the proceeds of a sale might enable a more appropriate strategy?
We enable you to responsibly and confidently talk with them about what option makes most sense and to effectively and expeditiously engage high-quality institutional buyers of in-force life insurance, if a settlement is what they want to pursue.
90% don't know to act and lapse/surrender
5% engage single buyer
5% engage a broker
Stand out as a principled life insurance professional, doing right by your clients
Which approach, ours or a broker’s, do you believe will give clients and wealth advisory partners alike the confidence that you have a client's best interests at heart? Which would you use for your own policy, or a family member's, if you wanted to ensure that they received the maximum possible proceeds?
And we understand that you must/want to be properly compensated for your role in this high-value transaction and we will work with you to ensure that you are seen as having driven the value in the engagement and that you receive compensation comparable to what you receive from a traditional broker, even at the lower %’s, borne of our higher winning bids.
Do the right thing for your clients
Enhance reputation with wealth advisors and others
Comparable comp due to higher winning bids
Insights and analysis on the market and options for your clients with surplus and unwanted life insurance.
Our quarterly e-mail newsletter delivers insights on the forces shaping market, ideas on how to identify opportunities and engage your clients, and examples of recent transactions that we have undertaken with the most sophisticated and conscientious wealth advisors, life insurance professionals, and fiduciary and Best Interest advisors of all stripes.
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