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, 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, charging a rational fee.
INTRODUCTION
Making life settlements a rational option for you
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, various fiduciaries, and to confidently engage the market.
What We Do
Conduct a controlled, disciplined, and intellectually 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.
How We Are Different
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.
we speak your language and understand the obligation to your clients
The best at what we do
We started this business because we were frustrated by what we saw as buyers with a large private equity buyer of in-force life insurance for seven years, offended by the incumbent channel's business practices, opaque and ineffective price discovery, and egregious commissions, knowing that top wealth advisors would never not engage the market in a meaningful way without real change, and believed that we could – and should – do it better.
Changing an opaque market and unnecessarily confusing transaction to work for conscientious wealth management professionals 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%
Average premium to CSV/% face value
10+
Top 50 RIAs served
7.5%
Fee (Gross Bid - CSV)
HIGHER WINNING BIDS, FASTER EXECUTION, LOWER FEES, MUCH HIGHER PROCEEDS
Real results for real families
For too long, wealth advisors and 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, professionally-executed means to maximize the value of a life insurance policy, like the examples scrolling here, that no longer serves a client's protection or estate planning need for which it was purchased or for which there are preferred means to achieve an estate planning objective, as the insured ages and circumstances change.
Reliably Higher Winning Bids
Our approach, borne of experience as buyers for seven years and an understanding of how asset-constrained markets price oppotunities, 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.
The difference 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.
"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
Engaged by the best
We count among our clients 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 more than $3 trillion AUM. All firms that assiduously avoided life settlements 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, especially among those with CFP and ChFC designations, as well as Trust Companies, trustees, and wirehouse advisors.
Why do they engage us? We share their values and commitment to delivering as professional and transparent a service to as they do with their clients.
10+
Top 50 RIAs
10+
Top life insurance firms
Several
Other fiduciaries and wirehouse advisors
WOULD ANY CLIENT NOT WANT TO AT LEAST KNOW ABOUT THESE POSSIBLE RESULTS?
High-value service wins and organic AUM growth
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.
A no longer relevant key man or buy/sell policy. A change in beneficiaries. Diminished willingness or ability to fund a policy or a trust. An unpalatable increase in premiums with insured outliving the need for a policy. A simple preference for the liquidity that a sale might generate. And as many other reasons as clients who own a policy.
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
Business sold/unneeded 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 private multi-national company
$51,000,000 GUL
$10,000,000 winning bid
$9,500,000 net proceeds
1.3x
average multiple of broker winning bid
1.8x
average multiple of broker net
80%
auctions successful
15/60
total days to bids/funding
Rationalizing a Loosely-Organized, but highly-regulated Market
Disciplined market engagement
We access only the highest quality, most reliable capital through the most reputable regulated intermediaries (Providers, licensed to engage sellers on behalf of their capital partners), never fringe capital or Providers with which we don't have extensive transaction experience, to ensure the lowest transaction risk and maximum expediency in the market.
Our approach ensures that your clients benefit from the inefficiencies of a market in which buyers often ascribe divergent values to the same policy, not enabling them to calibrate their bids to others' bids. And we do it in weeks, not months, executed in a secure ShareFile bid room, not via e-mail and phone calls.
Your clients are badly served by brokers
If traditional brokers were just expensive, it would be one thing, but, the truth of the matter is that the descriptions of what they do are utterly fanciful and part of an effort to create the perception of complexity and of having discovered value where it ostensibly wouldn't have been discovered without their “negotiating” expertise, to justify otherwise indefensible 30%+ commissions - and it rarely discovers the policy's true value.
40% OF YOUR CLIENTS WILL LAPSE OR SURRENDER A POLICY AFTER THE AGE OF 72
Simply knowing what clients own and its role in their financial plan yields substantial benefits for more clients than most assume
Without your engagement, your clients face only bad or, at best, sub-optimal, outcomes when contemplating what to do with unwanted and surplus life insurance. Your knowledge of clients' financial planning objectives and protection needs as well as their means/liquidity and life events that affect the utility of a life insurance uniquely positions you to identify those changes that give rise to the lapses and the corresponding opportunities to instead monetize a policy to ensure, at minimum, that they do not unwittingly miss out on the opportunity because you did not talk about it with them.
We are here to ensure that you can confidently undertake the process with your client, knowing that if the policy can produce value for your client, that you, with us, will find it.
50%
of HNW/UHNW HH's >72 own relevant life insurance, any UL or convertible term, for a variety of protection, business planning, or estate planning reasons
85%
of those policies - $75B/40,000 policies - are lapsed or surrendered each year (4%) as the utility declines with changes in need or cost to maintain rises to an unpalatable level
75%
would sell for a substantial premium to policy surrender value and 5% - 50% of face value to a universe of regulated, institutional buyers of in-force life insurance
90%
miss out altogether, lapsing or surrendering a policy that might otherwise sell in a transaction with high-quality counterparties, yielding significant proceeds
10%
receive far less than they should by engaging a broker to which they pay egregious fees or a single buyer that is not compelled to bid aggressively
A message for principled life insurance agents
Doing the right thing
Which approach 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? A family member's, if you wanted to ensure that they received the maximum possible proceeds? How would an advisor with whom you share clients likely react to the different approaches and which would likely put you in better stead with them?
We will work with you to set an appropriate fee for your efforts in the case to ensure that you are properly compensated - we typically split a 10% - 15% fee with our life insurance partners. Given our higher winning bids, even at a lower % than the brokers pay, you will likely receive comparable compensation to what you earn with broker transactions that deliver far less to your clients.
And you get to do the right thing for your client.
"I just cringed every time I had to talk to a client or their advisor about the broker's commissions. I hated it. And I had no hope of describing with any confidence the process and timelines."
UHNW life insurance producer who recently started using 1908 after years of using brokers for his clients' life settlements
DIFFERENTIATING TODAY, EXPECTATION TOMORROW - WHY WOULD
Strategic imperative for conscientious advisors
In a rapidly evolving, increasingly competitive wealth management landscape in which clients are placing a 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?
If your answer is "no," we're here to help.
66%
of HNW desire greater personalization in their wealth management relationship (PWC)
56%
of advisors’ top growth priority is to expand service offering (Natixis)
80%
of HNW practices plan to expand service offerings over the next five years (Cerulli)
47%
of HNW desire a more holistic service offering from primary wealth manager (McKinsey)
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.
MORE FREQUENT AN OPPORTUNITY THAN MOST ARE AWARE
What policies sell?
With your knowledge of your clients' financial planning objectives and life events, you are uniquely positioned to identify those changes that give rise to the opportunities to monetize a policy. It’s rarely as simple as affordability, it’s a *utility* discussion or a discussion about liquidity preference, but otherwise relatively easy to identify with even a minimal level of proactive engagement and discussion.
With any foresight and awareness whatsoever, you are uniquely positioned to ensure that your client can responsibly undertake, with you, a sale of their unwanted or surplus life insurance at a significant premium to what they would receive by surrendering it.
<72/72+
if less than healthy/healthy insured
UL/VUL
policy type (and convertible term)
$500K+
policy size
Any
ownership structure
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.