Jay Jackson
Chairman & CEO
Those are good numbers. But the more interesting story is what it takes organizationally to produce them. Breaking your own records doesn’t just reflect hard work. It reflects careful investment in our process and business model, our people at Abacus, and our institutional partners.
Systems That Scale Without You
When I first began at Abacus, I could tell you details about individual transactions. At 1,310 policies in a single year, that’s impossible. Which means the organization had to develop underwriting standards, actuarial models, and pricing frameworks that work whether or not senior leadership is in the room.
That’s not a small shift. It requires documented processes, empowered teams, and enough redundancy that no single person becomes a bottleneck. It means hiring people who are better than you at specific things and then actually letting them do those things.
Building Liquidity Into the Business Model
That requires different capabilities. It means building relationships with institutional buyers who trust your pricing. It means having the actuarial precision to know when to hold an asset and when to monetize it. It means creating enough portfolio velocity that you’re generating realized gains ($178.6 million) on top of unrealized appreciation ($49.3 million).
This is what separates asset managers from asset hoarders: One builds a business. The other builds a balance sheet and hopes it compounds.
People Who Have An Ownership Mentality
When people own the outcome—not symbolically, but financially—they make different decisions. They care about efficiency. They protect the brand not in the short term, but in the longer term. They’re willing to do the unglamorous work that doesn’t show up on LinkedIn but absolutely shows up in results.
Record-setting years don’t happen because we set ambitious targets. They happen because the people doing the actual work treat the business like it’s theirs. Because it is.
Institutional Relationships That Can Handle Volume
Those relationships don’t develop overnight. They’re built on years of consistent execution, transparent pricing, and a reputation for doing what you say you’ll do. The 2025 numbers are the result of infrastructure we’ve been building since 2004—$10 billion in policies purchased, thousands of transactions completed, decades of actuarial data refined.
You can’t shortcut trust at institutional scale. You earn it one transaction at a time, over years, until the people with the capital know you’re the first call when they need exposure to the asset class.
Record years don’t happen by accident. They happen because you’ve built an organization capable of producing them—and then you get out of the way and let it work.
