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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, 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.
Our Story
In 2016, we set out to fix the badly broken life settlement market, in which ineffective price discovery and egregious commissions were just a couple of the many shortcomings. We wanted to engage the best wealth advisors, who had been almost completely absent from the market, and those life insurance professionals who would prefer an alternative to the incumbent channel, to deliver a smarter, fundamentally better, more effective, and lower cost way to monetize their clients' unwanted and surplus life insurance.
If you share our values about client advocacy, leaving no stone unturned in advancing the interests of your clients, intellectual rigor, and rational compensation, we'd love to work with you, too.
In a relentlessly competitive market, we enable one niche, but high-value, service offering for conscientious advisors
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 and might prefer the liquidity or from which the proceeds of a sale might enable a more appropriate, preferable strategy?
If not, please read further. We think you'll quickly see why so many others in your role work with us and deliver meaningful value to their clients.
66%
of HNW desire increased personalization from their wealth managers (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
$9 billion AUM RIA
73 year old healthy male
$1,500,000 UL
No longer needed (wife preceded him in death)
A more frequent and substantive opportunity than most are aware, overlooked by advisors
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 institutional buyers, 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.
>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
<10%
Are presented to market
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 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
Doing the right thing.
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.
Effective Price Discovery
Higher winning bids than fundamentally, badly flawed broker process, which only requires the winner to beat the #2 bid, not bid to their true value.
Fast Execution
We do not waste time with non-value add steps or unnecessarily prolonged "negotiating," ensuring consummation and funding in 60 - 75 days (vs. >120).
Real 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.
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."
We are Engaged by the Best Advisors
Among those firms that have engaged us are three of the top five and six of the ten largest RIAs (several others in the top 50, with more than $900 billion AUM) 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.
Regardless of whether you are a wealth advisor at an RIA, a life insurance professional at a BGA/IMO, or a Trustee or other fiduciary and 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.
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), and consummation and funding within 60 days.
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
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, including a life insurance policy. The advisor 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 the estate about $337,000, so they declined to accept the high bid of $503,000.
We assessed that the policy was likely worth significantly more than the $503,000 that the broker had gotten a few months earlier, and, with our lower fee, we were confident that we could deliver significantly better results for our client. As the market had already seen the case and reviewed the medical records, we moved immediately to our 3 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
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.
Your advocacy matters...
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.
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.