Life changes. So do your clients' life insurance needs.
We enable you to identify and act on those changes to deliver high-value service wins and drive organic AUM growth.
We are engaged by wealth advisors at top RIAs and principled life insurance professionals to maximize the value of older clients’ unwanted and surplus life insurance, delivering the first and only life settlement solution that meets the highest standards of client care, ensuring transparent and effective price discovery, 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, aka “life settlements,” with this business since 2016, seven years prior as buyers.
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.
How we are different
We deliver substantively and substantially better outcomes in a more transparent, faster, and more confidence-engendering process than any other approach available to policy owners or their advisors.
In a ceaselessly competitive market and clients demanding more of their primary wealth advisors, we enable one small, but high value, service offering.
In a rapidly evolving and increasingly competitive wealth management landscape, 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 maximum value - often hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars - 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?
If not, please read further. We think you'll quickly see why so many others who share your role and sentiment have chosen to work with us and deliver meaningful value to their clients.
66%
of HNW investors desire increased personalization from their wealth management relationships (PWC)
80%
of HNW practices plan to expand service offerings over the next five years (Cerulli)
56%
of advisors’ top growth priority is to expand service offering (Natixis)
47%
of HNW desire a more holistic service offering from primary wealth manager (McKinsey)
$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
$ billion AUM RIA
73 year old healthy male
$1,500,000 UL
No longer needed (wife preceded him in death)
Uniquely qualified, uniquely effective.
We started this business because we wanted to be different and to make a difference. And, importantly, to have fun while we do it and work with people we like, who share our values, and who we’d want to spend time with, if we weren’t working together.
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 and your clients. 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.
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.
2016
YEAR FOUNDED
>30%
HIGHER NET PROCEEDS
60 - 75
DAYS TO COMPLETE PROCESS
7.5%
FEE
A differentiated life settlement solution for the most conscientious wealth advisors and life insurance professionals in the country.
As buyers of in-force life insurance for seven years with a large private equity buyer before we started this business, we saw first hand how badly the incumbent channel performs price discovery, its egregious economics, and how infrequently it substantively advocates for policy sellers rather than its own interests - hardly the stuff of fiduciary advisors.
So, we decided to do something about it, creating a better, more effective and efficient price discovery mechanism, engaging only the most conscientious wealth advisors at the top HNW/UHNW RIAs and principled life insurance agents at the best firms in the country, charging a rational fee, and delivering far greater proceeds to the sellers of their unwanted and surplus life insurance - 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.
Highest Winning Bids
Smarter price discovery that yields higher winning bids than the flawed broker process, which only requires the winning bidder beat the #2 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 "negotiating," instead ensuring consummation and funding in 60 - 75 days.
Real Capital
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.
Our Clients
RIAs
We deliver an expeditious, disciplined, transparent engagement enabling high-value service wins and organic AUM growth for firms that provide comprehensive financial planning to HNW/UHNW clients. Importantly, you can communicate confidence to your clients that you have extracted the maximum value from the market for their asset, but the fees are transparent, defensible, and rational.
Life Insurance Professionals
If you make your clients aware of the options, which would they pick? Unless your only concern is the highest possible percentage of the commission from a settlement, ours is far and away the best solution in the market. And in a rapidly evolving HNW/UHNW wealth management landscape, working with us better positions you to work with fee only and fiduciary advisors, to whom you can demonstrate aligned values and with whom you can generate high-value service wins and AUM.
Trust Companies & Fiduciaries
The implications - psychic and financial - of our approach for the beneficiaries of any Trust that holds life insurance policies are as dramatic as they are obvious and measurable. Simply, there is no scenario in which any competing solution, with lower bids and/or dramatically higher fees, will deliver results that would in any way be preferable to beneficiaries.
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.
10+
Top 50 HNW/UHNW RIAs, with >$900 billion AUM
10+
BGAs/IMOs/Top UHNW Insurance Producers
Several
Various Trustees, T&E attorneys, and Trust Co's
Advisors and firms who leave no stone unturned in advocating 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.
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
Our single-round, blind, best and final auction is based on a better, more sophisticated understanding of game and auction theory - and on our experience as buyers for seven years, when many times that we won an auction, we were not yet at our maximum value, than the fundamentally flawed process of "negotiating" that brokers employ. It is observably uniquely effective at compelling bidders to bid to their true private value, not anchored to others' bids, resulting in substantially higher winning bids for your clients.
Ours is the only approach that recognizes how policy buyers actually value in-force life insurance, which can vary wildly on otherwise seemingly small differences in the unique view of underlying valuation criteria (such as the health of the insured, the discount rate that a buyer uses, assessed risk of extension, etc.).
It punishes the bargain hunting that muti-round, open bidding actually rewards, and substantially rewards those who bid to their true, unique value, even those who lose, by not wasting their time in an iterative process that only gives the seller the illusion of increased value and takes months to complete.
Recent Transaction
Our client, an advisor at a $25 billion HNW/UHNW RIA, engaged his client, a 91 year-old woman, the remaining insured on two second-to-die policies totaling $5.9M in death benefit, about the optimal use of the policies, given her very good health and potential utility of the proceeds from a sale and not having to service the policies for several more years (e.g., redeploy the proceeds of a sale and avoided premium $'s into another investment strategy).
The advisor created a very sophisticated model to demonstrate, given the structure of the Trust and timing of distributions of the proceeds of the Trust to her grandchildren, that over a threshold amount, net of taxes and transaction expenses (our fee), the Trust's optimal strategy was to sell the policies. Our auction produced results greater than that threshold amount.
Given the likely winning bid in a broker process of $2,150,000 (the most our winning bidder would have been compelled to pay in an open auction) and a commission of $468,000 (the lesser of 8% of face value and 33% of winning bid minus cash value of $0), the net before taxes would have been $1,682,000, below the threshold that the advisor had set (and $675,000 less than the $2,357,363 net that we produced), it is unlikely that the policy owner/Trust would have been able to justify the sale.
$5,900,000
GUL
$2,550,000
Winning Bid
$2,360,000
Net Proceeds (fees: 1908 - 7.5%)
$675,000
Greater Proceeds than Broker
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 deliver real value to clients and their families more often 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, all you need is to know what to look for - from the most obvious observations, like there is still the need for a policy, to more nuanced analyses about the relative utility of a policy (vs. using what the proceeds of a sale to fund an alternative strategy, if policy isn't for protection) - and to start the conversation. And we can help with that.
>50%
>72 HNW/UHNW own at least one policy
>80%
lapsed or surrendered; 4%/yr; 75% likely of value to institutional buyers
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 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.