Life Insurance Selling - October 2007
By Gordon Bess, CLU, FLMI

"THE FROST IS on the pumpkin, and the hay is in the barn..." so goes a line from one of my favorite James Taylor songs, "Walking Man." October is harvest time, and not just for the agricultural set. The life settlement industry, our main theme subject this month, is beginning to harvest greater credibility and respect as a member of the financial services community.

The latest evidence of this is the official membership granted in late August to Welcome Life Securities of Boca Raton, Fla., as a specialty broker-dealer by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). (For those of you who haven't heard yet, the National Association of Securities Dealers merged with the member regulation functions of the New York Stock Exchange to form FINRA in July 2007.) FINRA has granted specific authority to Welcome Life Securities to supervise settlement transactions involving variable life policies.

This establishes a new beachhead of regulatory supervision for the life settlement industry and should open the way to more life settlement activity by brokerdealers. "For years, we've been targeting broker-dealers to educate them and their registered reps and advisers on this business," says John M. Welcom, president and CEO of Welcome Funds Inc., a life settlement brokerage firm he founded in 1998. "From a compliance standpoint, we're now on the same level as any brokerdealer, although we're not authorized to do any business other than variable life settlement transactions."

...To read the full article, please Click Here