Recently, the French government passed a law designed to provide the French economy with a more effective means of finance and to promote retirement savings, as well as employee stock ownership. The act - The Plan d'Action pour la Croissance et la Transformation des Entreprises (PACTE; Action Plan for Business Growth and Transformation) - “will facilitate access to diversified funding” and “provide companies with the [...]
The acting Superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, reacting to almost "1,400" complaints from in-state consumers, recently issued an alert about universal life policies that provided insight for any trustee managing universal life policies. The alert focused on flexible premium universal life policies without secondary death benefit guarantees. As pointed out in the publication, universal life is meant to be a [...]
Over the years, the life settlement industry has had its ups and downs. During its heyday in 2007 and 2008, consumers sold $12 billion in life insurance death benefits to investors in the secondary market. But the economic downturn dried up investor money, and as late as 2015, just $1.7 billion in death benefits changed hands. (1) For many years, life insurance provided just two [...]
Earlier this year we started the TOLI Challenge with the question: What is most important when determining the liability of a trustee’s actions? Click here for that answer. Today, we have a follow up true or false question. Only permanent life insurance policies can be sold in the life settlement market, True or False? It may surprise you that the answer is false – some term [...]
Back in November, we wrote about the possible “squashing” of “investors’ hopes for unlimited returns using life insurance.” At that time, the government of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan altered the regulations for a specific universal life insurance policy that some investors had hoped would be their pot of gold. However, the regulation change did not affect a court case that has since settled in [...]
Universal life policies came into the market offering premium flexibility and transparency that was unknown in whole life policies. However, universal life policies lacked one thing those whole life policies had - death benefit guarantees. If you paid your premium on a whole life policy, the policy death benefit was guaranteed to be paid. The earliest universal life policies (current assumption) were fixed investment products [...]
When we first ventured into the trust-owned life insurance (TOLI) servicing business, our lead product was a policy tracking and trust administration system - what is known today as InsuranceIQ, and it was light years ahead of anything TOLI trustees had at their disposal. At the time, most trustees simply got an in-force ledger every couple of years, along with a rating update for the [...]
We have written as recently as November of last year about the issues trust-owned life insurance (TOLI) trustees encounter when dealing with policy illustration projections. If you are a fiduciary managing a policy, a sales or an in-force life insurance ledger may be one of the only tools you have to predict the outcome of a policy under your care. However, life insurance illustrations are [...]
Less than a year ago we reported that AM Best published a special report in which the rating firm issued a negative outlook on the US life insurance and annuity market. They cited the continuing low interest rates, a flattening yield curve, regulations, potential for market corrections and the need for innovation as the major reasons for the outlook. The report highlighted one potentially harmful [...]
What is most important when determining the liability of a trustee’s actions? Over the years, we have noticed that the knowledge of TOLI trustees varies from trust company to trust company. After publishing the TOLI Handbook in 2018, we thought we would “chunk it down” in 2019 with the TOLI Challenge—a series of questions designed to test the knowledge of the typical TOLI trustee. We [...]
