Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
March 09, 2008 at 04:00 PM
Given the relatively young age of the secondary market for life insurance policies, conducting due diligence is an especially important part of any transaction as the consequences are not necessarily clear should a claim be filed months or years after ownership of the policy has been transferred.
David-Irwin Binter, president of Neuma, Inc., a life settlement company based just outside of Chicago, says his firm looks at “all types” of details on behalf of buyers prior to going through with a sale. Binter will be speaking on the topic at the National Underwriter Life Settlement Summit in Philadelphia this week.
Primarily, he says, the risks for a buyer that need to be reviewed involve making sure the policy can be sold and that it was a legitimate insurance policy to begin with. What goes into that, he says, is making sure it was properly issued by the insurance company in a transaction where all of the involved parties that were supposed to be licensed were licensed, and that the original insurance applications were filled out properly and accurately by the seller’s insurance agent.
“You want to make sure the policy is valid and freely transferable,” he says.
Problems can and do occur, Binter says, in all of these areas, and in fact, he adds that “to say there’s a most common problem might be a little hard.”
Among the more common, he acknowledges, however, are inaccuracies in the documentation for a life insurance policy, or cases, where, as he puts it, “someone has been a little too sloppy.”
In general, Binter says most problems can be resolved fairly quickly, and that life settlement providers will work with agents to ensure that a transaction will still go forward.
“We will go back to agents,” he says, to ask for a clarification of any information that appears might raise a red flag further down the road.
Other problems, however, pose more of a challenge if they can raise questions of whether the policy should have been issued initially, such as a misstatement on the original application. “There are some things you can’t correct after the fact,” he says.
