Jay Jackson
Chairman & CEO
We announced this week that Abacus is tokenizing secondary life insurance assets. And I want to be clear about what that means, because the word “tokenizing” carries baggage. So let me explain what we’re actually doing and why it matters.
This isn’t a crypto strategy. This isn’t hype. This is infrastructure.
The Friction in Secondary Life Insurance Markets
Every. Single. Time.
Imagine buying a stock and having to manually verify ownership certificates, dividend history, and split history before you could complete the trade. That would be absurd. But that’s literally how life insurance trades work today. A process that should take days takes weeks, requiring manual confirmation from multiple parties, and consists of fragmented documents scattered across different systems.
The reason? There’s no immutable record. When a policy changes hands, there’s no single ledger showing who owns it now, what liens are attached, what the cash flows are, who has priority claims. So every new buyer has to re-verify everything the last buyer already verified.
That friction costs money. It slows down capital deployment. It keeps qualified international investors out because the operational complexity isn’t worth it.
How Streamlining Will Transform this Asset Class
This means:
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One source of truth. Instead of documents scattered across email, filing systems, and different banks, there’s a single record everyone can see and trust.
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Faster transactions. Instead of weeks of manual verification, transactions compress to days. Buyers transact on the basis of diligence already performed and visible on the ledger.
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International access. Qualified foreign institutions, sovereign allocators, family offices—they can now access U.S. life insurance without the operational complexity that used to keep them out.
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Better chain of title. An immutable record of beneficial ownership eliminates ambiguity around assignments and lien priority.
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Automated servicing. Premium tracking, cash-flow distributions, investor reporting—smart contracts handle the administrative work that used to require layers of intermediation.
Abacus is uniquely positioned to do this because we already source, underwrite, and service a substantial share of the secondary life insurance market. We’ve built the infrastructure, the mortality tracking systems, the institutional servicing capabilities. Tokenization extends those capabilities.
This also reflects our strategic shift. We’re moving from an origination-led business to a recurring-fee alternative asset management platform. Tokenization accelerates that transition by making secondary life insurance a more efficient, more transparent, more liquid asset class. That attracts institutional capital, builds AUM, and creates recurring management fees.
We’ve already tokenized over 100 policies. We’re planning to bring our entire balance sheet portfolio on chain by year-end 2026.
The Bigger Picture
The $14 trillion life insurance market has been manually serviced for decades. But with the introduction of this new infrastructure, we will revolutionize this industry so that what used to take weeks now takes days and what used to require three different vendors now works seamlessly. Ultimately it will mean that the $224 billion secondary market is finally going to work like a modern asset class.
