Maximizing the value of unwanted and surplus life insurance.
A trusted partner to top wealth management firms since 2016, enabling advisors to confidently undertake the process to monetize and realize the full value of the life insurance that older HNW/UHNW policy owners no longer want or need.
MAKING IT A RATIONAL, HIGH VALUE OPTION FOR THE BEST ADVISORS
Confidence in the results is our most important deliverable.
We make the option to monetize the life insurance that no longer meets the needs of your older clients a meaningful, actionable element of their financial plan. We deliver comprehensive, robust price discovery, without the opacity, inefficiency, and high cost of the incumbent channel. You are actively engaged throughout, with end-to-end transparency and a full audit trail, understood by your client to have been the driver of a high-value service win and significant proceeds.
Experience
We bring an unmatched breadth and depth of experience as well as discipline and intellectual rigor to an otherwise murky and moribund market; a combination of capital markets, secondary market life insurance, and wealth management industry experience, ensuring the most professionally, efficiently, and effectively executed process available to wealth advisors.
Trustworthy Process
We bring institutional-grade price discovery to life settlements, replacing opaque broker negotiations and single bidders with a robust, transparent auction process that consistently delivers materially higher winning bids (average 1.3x broker winning bid), materially higher net proceeds, greater confidence in the outcome, completed in 60 days.
Shared Values
We speak the language of fee-only and fiduciary advisors and we know how hard you work to acquire and maintain your clients' trust, so we work as hard as you do – delivering a sophisticated, comprehensive, confidence-engendering service - to further enhance that trust and enable real, substantive planning outcomes.
Demonstrated Results
Comprehensive, effective price discovery and transparent, rational fees ensure maximum net proceeds to your clients, with actionable bids in 15 days and funding in <60 days. You are actively engaged throughout the process and have a comprehensive audit trail of activity.
Trusted by the Best
We count among our clients 3 of the top 5, 6 of the top 10, and more than a dozen of the top 50 RIAs in the country, with $2 trillion of AUM. We also serve a universe of private banks, trust companies, and various fiduciaries. We serve a growing universe of Best Interest oriented life insurance professionals, too.
We are the best at what we do and work with the best at what they do
Leading wealth management firms are increasingly coming to recognize the need to evaluate clients’ life insurance as part of the financial and estate planning processes, often identifying policies whose initial protection or estate planning purposes are no longer relevant or cost-effectively achieved, forcing a decision as to what to do with it - lapse, surrender, or settle.
In those instances, a growing number of the top firms in the country engage us - many after assiduously avoiding the transaction altogether for shortcomings of the incumbent distribution channel - to deliver an institutional-quality process to sell those policies as an alternative to lapse or surrender of the policy, substantively contributing to a more comprehensively executed financial plan for your clients and their families.
12+
top 50 RIAs w/ $2T AUM
10+
BGA's/IMOs/Top producers
5+
Trust companies, private banks
100%
have engaged us multiple times
What Our Clients Say
"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."
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
"Your bids are much higher and you deliver them for our clients *months* faster than we have from other firms that we used in the past."
Director of Risk Advisory
$585B AUM wealth management arm of $1.8T asset manager
"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)
$30 billion RIA
Our Client
$500 billion AUM wealth advisor arm of global asset manager
Insured
93 year old healthy female
Description
Assessing the implications of a pending premium increase, the two adult children of the insured simply no longer wanted to pay premiums after 15 years and $400,000 in premiums having been paid. Instead of a surrendering the policy, which had no cash value, their advisor pursued a sale with us, generating multiple bids from buyers, ranging from $240,000 to $580,000.
SAMPLE ENGAGEMENT #1
$2,000,000 GUL
$582,000 winning bid | $540,000 net proceeds
Our Client
$30 billion RIA
Insured
51 year old female, cancer diagnosis
Description
Shortly after the sale of her successful business to a private equity firm, the client of our first RIA client firm received a diagnosis of multiple myeloma. She had a key man policy (convertible term with ten years of term left) when her advisor reached out to us to assess her options after receiving an offer of $150,000 from a buyer that advertises on TV.
SAMPLE ENGAGEMENT #2
$5,000,000 Term policy
$900,000 winning bid | $832,500 net proceeds
Our Client
$10 billion RIA
Insured
73 year old healthy male
Description
Several years after his wife had passed, the retired farmer had sold his large farming operation, spending most of his time traveling to visit his children and grandchildren around the country and no longer wanted to fund the second-to-die policy, preferring the $20,000 remaining cash in the policy or something greater, if a settlement were a possibility - which it was.
SAMPLE ENGAGEMENT #3
$1,500,000 UL
$130,000 winning bid | $117,500 net proceeds
Our Client
$350 billion RIA
Insured
91 year old healthy male and female
Description
The retired, former CEO of a large public corporation, and his wife, with a large life insurance portfolio that was part of a complex estate plan, wanted to "trim the sails" a bit on their holdings. They chose to sell about 20% of what they owned, using the proceeds to fund other policies that they would maintain.
SAMPLE ENGAGEMENT #3
$9,800,000 Term policy
$4,300,000 winning bid | $3,977,500 net proceeds
OUR SUCCESS IS GROUNDED IN DELIVERING FOR YOU
What Your Clients Say about Us
"We were out of luck until 1908 came along. I think ours is a good example of what can be gained from your process and what it takes to get through it, which really was not bad."
$540,000 for $2M GUL
$500 billion wealth manager
"Thank you for all you've done to make this deal happen. You have an incredible work ethic and we are so fortunate that Rich made the introduction. Too bad we can't rate you on Yelp!"
$92,500 for $1M UL
$195 billion UHNW RIA
"I can't believe that they got that much for the policy. I was excited about the possibility of $125,000 and in a million years did not think I could get more than three times that for it."
$439,000 for $1.5M UL
UHNW life insurance advisor/GA
REMARKABLE results for real families
Ensuring that you can deliver for your clients and their families when you and they assess that they no longer want or need to maintain a policy
For too long, conscientious wealth advisors - and even principled life insurance advisors - 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 profoundly changed that.
"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."
UHNW Insurance Advisor (ChFC, CLU)
$350B RIA
ROBUST, COMPREHENSIVE, EFFICIENT PRICE DISCOVERY
Higher winning bids, by design, discipline, and rigor - and materially higher net proceeds
Unlike the incumbent channel, which rewards bargain hunting and rarely - and only by coincidence - discovers a policy's market value, we recognize and take advantage of the fact that each bidder's "private value" for a policy is unique and independent of others' valuations.
In 90% of cases that produce bids, we see divergent values, with a winning bid that is often not just a fraction higher than the next highest bid, but a multiple. In only 10% do we see convergence among multiple bidders, indicative that the incumbent channel would also likely also have discovered that high value (after rounds of "negotiations").
Importantly, those higher winning bids, in combination with our much lower fee structure, result in substantially higher net proceeds.
1.3x
premium of our winning bids to incumbent channel
1.8x
premium to incumbent channel's net proceeds
7.5%
fee (of realized value), minimum of $12,500
Preferred to fund different strategy for Trust after death of husband on 2nd to die policy
Divorce - rather than maintaining policy, settle and split proceeds
Change in beneficiaries obviated need for death benefit
Preferred liquidity of a sale to SV of a policy that owner no longer wanted to maintain
Unpalatable increase in premiums, policy no longer "worth it"
Opportunistic windfall, borne of health diagnosis and unwanted policy (term conversion)
Illiquid trust that owner could not/would not fund more
Adjusting large life insurance portfolio & prefer proceeds of sale to SV
Charitable Trust that donor no longer wished to fund/still healthy & lived much longer than anticipated
Corporate-Owned Key Man on departed CEO; policy obviously no longer necessary, but of value
Buy/Sell policy after sale of business of no value to insured/owner's estate
Proceeds to fund repayment of poorly performing premium finance loan to avoid collateral call
Key Man policy on owner after sale of business with subsequent health diagnosis that created value in policy
With growth of other assets in the estate, owners simply no longer wanted policy for beneficiaries
Term conversion opportunity for windfall
Last 15 engagaments
IF YOU ARE VIGILANT, YOUR CLIENT WILL NOT MISS OUT
The universe of underlying reasons that policies are lapsed is as broad as your client base
Given that 50% of 70+ HNW/UHNW HH's own life insurance and that 85% is later lapsed (about 4%/year), as policy owners' and insureds' lives change and the utility of the insurance often declines and/or becomes unaffordable relative to planned needs, 40% of your clients who live past 70 will benefit from you being able to engage them about what options they have.
You are uniquely positioned to engage them about the relevance and utility of life insurance they own (and likely fund out of your AUM) to financial and estate planning objectives. After all, who has a better understanding of the life events - and opportunity to identify and quantify them - that impact their financial plan and the relevance to that plan of any life insurance they own?
And we can provide tools to streamline and simplify the front-end process of identifying which policies are most and least likely to exhibit value.
Intelligent market engagement
We deploy the only institutional-quality process to sell (settle) in-force life insurance policies, engaging only the most reliable capital through regulated intermediaries (Providers), never fringe capital, ensuring the lowest transaction risk, greatest expediency, and highest confidence in the orderly completion of the transaction.
With an in-force illustration, we can give you an assessment as to likelihood of market interest and a range of values where we would expect the policy to trade, before you undertake any real effort to start the market engagement process.
10+
bidders
2
days to policy assessment
15
days to actionable bids
60
days to funding
WITHOUT YOU, THERE ARE NO OPTIMAL OUTCOMES
Your clients lose without your engagement and advocacy
Is a client of your firm better off with you, their trusted wealth advisor, not responsibly engaging them about selling an unwanted or surplus life insurance policy from which they might be able to extract significant liquidity? Is there a client who wouldn’t want to at least know? Or know that there are options other than engaging a single buyer, who is not compelled to bid aggressively, or a broker, who will subject them to a brutally prolonged process and extract egregious commissions?
We're here to ensure that you can offer something different. And better.
10%
$4 billion/year
are settled, but do no receive the full value from a channel that does not identify the policy’s true value and/or extracts egregious fees
90%
$45+ billion/40,000 policy owners
unwittingly forego the opportunity altogether, unaware of the option and without an advisor to engage them about the best options
<72/72+
if healthy/if unhealthy
$500K
minimum policy size
Any UL
policy type
Which would clients choose, if you gave them the choice?
Which is more likely to reinforce your image as a principled, Best Interest advisor?
Which is more likely to engender the confidence of advisors you want to work with?
Much faster go/no-go and less time on process and fewer iterations
.jpg)
Comparable compensation to brokers' while doing the right thing for your client
You typically receive your compensation in 60 - 75 days, not 130+
THOUGHTS FOR LIFE INSURANCE PRODUCERS
Pragmatism and doing right by your client.
Simply, if a client were to ask you about the approaches, which would be easier to describe and defend? How would you intellectually defend the price discovery and how would you defend the commissions?
We understand that you must/want to be compensated for your role in this high-value transaction and we will work with you to ensure you receive compensation comparable to what you receive from a traditional broker, even at lower %’s, borne of our 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.
Subscribe now to start to receive our updates.