Author: Greg Winterton
Technology advances are driving improved processes in all industries and markets, and the longevity markets are no different. Life Risk News’ Greg Winterton spoke to Mark Venn, Director at ClearLife, to learn more about his firm and how technology is impacting longevity investors. GW: Mark, yourself and Chris Stuart, ClearLife CTO, worked together at Mizuho before setting up ClearLife. What was the ‘eureka’ moment that led to the decision to launch your own firm? MV: If I’m being completely honest, it was probably more hubris than “eureka”! After three years of investing in life settlements – and 14 years in…
It’s incredibly difficult to measure the size of the life ILS market in terms of assets under management held by investment funds. There’s little publicly available data, and naturally, many asset managers won’t provide information unless they’re forced to. So, we wanted to ask our readers what they thought, with a little bit of educated guessing on our part. We offered three options: below $10bn, between $10 and $25bn, and over $25bn. The middle option won out in the end, and fairly convincingly; almost two-thirds of our readers think that the market is between $10 and $25bn in AUM. It’s…
A significant percentage of deal activity in the life ILS market consists of ‘value in force’ (VIF) transactions; the life ILS fund lends money to life insurance companies, with the collateral being the premium payments of a block of policies. One impact of the higher interest rate environment on both sides of the Atlantic is that deal activity in the VIF space is, currently, subdued when compared to previous years when lower interest rate regimes were more normal. The reason is clear; higher risk-free rates trickle down into the alternative financing market. “Counterparties have much higher costs of financing now.…
In 1983, the UK government introduced the mortgage interest relief at source (MIRAS) program, which was designed to encourage homeownership in the country by offering borrowers tax relief on interest payments on their mortgage. Albeit circuitously, this policy paved the way for what followed; the Traded Endowment Policy (TEP) market, where individual policyowners could sell their policy on the secondary market to a third-party investor. Thus, the first substantial secondary life market was born. The sale of mortgage endowments in the UK eventually became something of a consumer – and therefore political – hot topic, however, as it became clear…
Life settlement secondary market transaction data continues to encourage
Skellig ICAV, a collective investment vehicle from Ireland, along with Gannet Funds and its securities intermediary, Wilmington Trust, have reached a settlement with John Hancock Life Insurance Company of New York in a lawsuit accusing the insurer of unlawfully increasing the cost of insurance on a targeted group of universal life insurance policies. The plaintiffs had filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, citing “sudden and massive COI increases” and seeking compensatory and punitive damages, equitable relief, and attorneys’ fees. Details of the settlement were not released. The suit was…
Life Risk News UK Pension Risk Transfer Consultants roundtable
Talk to almost any life settlement broker and they’ll tell you that they saw an uptick in activity in the industry’s secondary market in 2022 when compared to the prior year. Corroborating those views, however, isn’t possible until the end of the Spring and early Summer each year, when trade body the Life Insurance Settlement Association and industry trade magazine The Life Settlement Report, part of The Deal, publish their own data which cover transactions in the secondary market. So, ahead of these data releases, Life Risk News asked our readers, Do You Think There Were More Secondary Market Life…
Life Risk News Q&A with Thomas Deinet
Positive trends in the life settlement market, like in other asset classes, are to be cautiously welcomed