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StanCorp shareholders approved the deal Monday at a special investor meeting in Portland, Ore.
Shareholders cast more than 99 percent of their votes in favor of the transaction, the company said.
Meiji Yasuda, a Japanese company, hopes to close on StanCorp by March 31. Completion of the deal is subject to approval by regulators in the United States and Japan.
StanCorp, the parent of Standard Insurance Company and The Standard Life Insurance Company of New York, has been a major player in the U.S. disability, group life, retirement plan, individual disability and individual annuity markets, and it is also a major originator of commercial mortgage loans.
The founders of the company that became StanCorp incorporated it as the Oregon Life Insurance Company in 1906. The name changed to Oregon Mutual Life Insurance Company in September 1929, when the company became a policyholder-owned mutual insurer. The company adopted the Standard Insurance Company name in 1946.
The board formed the StanCorp holding company in 1998 and took the company public through an initial public offering in 1999.
The Western Underwriter, which eventually became National Underwriter Life & Health, one of the print publications that helps run the LifeHealthPro.com news portal, and National Underwriter were covering the company at least as early as 1908.
In the Dec. 3, 1908, edition, the Western Underwriter listed Oregon Life as a company that offered life insurance with a “total disability clause,” or a provision that paid benefits when an insured became totally disabled.
In the Jan. 13, 1916, edition, William Crawford wrote in the Western Underwriter that some western managers liked to “import men,” but that L. Samuel preferred to “secure new men and train them in the company’s own ways” for Oregon Life, rather than getting men from the East. Samuel says “too many of the eastern men who have applied for connection with the Oregon Life seem to think it needs a Moses and that they could serve in that capacity most acceptably,” Crawford reported.
In the April 19, 1917, edition, National Underwriter wrote about the Oregon Life policy provisions that might affect insureds who would be fighting in World War I. Oregon Life “is not accepting new business on members of the militia or those contemplating enlistment,” according to the article. “It has a war clause in its old policies providing for notice to be given… The actual losses by war will be annually apportioned among the members of the war class, which is guaranteed not to exceed 10 percent of the face of the policy. The amount may be either paid in cash or charged as a lien with interest.”