Advisors and Best Interest Compliance: Why Partnering With Us Matters

In today’s regulatory environment of tighter fiduciary standards and consumer best interest regulations, many financial advisors and insurance professionals are faced with an additional set of compliance obligations in 2020.

In addition to SEC’s Regulation Best Interest (Reg. BI) involving broker-dealers, some states have begun enacting their own sets of consumer-first rules, including New York’s best interest regulation for producers selling life insurance and annuities in that state.

While the new federal and state rules (please see “Life Settlements in the New Era of Best Interest Regs and Stronger Fiduciary Standards”) do not specifically apply to the secondary market sale of life insurance assets,  advisors will want to demonstrate compliance with the spirit and intent of the new regs when representing their clients in life settlement transactions.

Partnering with an experienced broker like Asset Life Settlements is the first step in that process.

 

 

Asset Life Settlements Has a Fiduciary Duty to the Policy Seller

Partnering with an experienced life settlement broker means that the advisor can feel confident he/she has fulfilled their fiduciary duty to represent their client’s best interests.
When advisors partner with Asset Life Settlements, they are working with one of the industry’s most experienced and respected secondary market brokerage teams.

We have a fiduciary duty as required by law to represent the policy seller’s best interests and to obtain the highest possible cash offer for your client’s policy. We achieve that goal by creating a bidding competition among multiple secondary market buyers and using our negotiating skills to achieve as high a purchasing price as possible.
Advisors will often ask us the following question: If life settlement brokers have a fiduciary duty to represent the best interests of the policy seller, whose interests do the buyers represent?

Secondary market buyers (known as providers) represent the interests of their institutional Investors. Their priority is the acquisition of life insurance policies at the greatest discount possible in order to achieve the highest possible return on their investment once each policy matures (e.g. death benefit paid out).

By working directly with only one buyer to receive just one offer, advisors and their clients will never know whether another buyer would have paid a higher settlement amount.

Bottom line: Entrusting the sale of your client’s policy to the experienced team at Asset Life Settlements provides clients with peace of mind and the ability to “sell with confidence.”