Navigating The Complexity of Life Insurance
Unlocking Financial Security with an Innovative Approach to Policy Optimization
Understanding Life Insurance
Life insurance is one of the oldest financial products but also one of the most misunderstood: in addition to securing one’s legacy through the death benefit, it’s also a crucial financial vehicle for accumulating and protecting one’s own wealth during their lifetime. The importance of life insurance as a strategic tool for high-net worth individuals to optimize their tax situation is clear given approximately 16% of all assets in the US are held in cash value life insurance. However, this percentage has been decreasing for two decades as the number and complexity of life insurance products has increased. Many have attempted to create robo-advisors to quickly and easily insure consumers, but this is only a stop-gap solution that does not optimize for your financial goals. Furthermore, no agent or advisor can stare through hundreds of thousands of potential policy outcomes and consistently give the best, most personalized advice—even if they know your financial goals. Without the proper combination of expertise and technology, the burden to tailor the optimal life insurance portfolio in alignment with financial goals is too high, with too many variables.
Streamlining Life Insurance
We created Optifino with the mission of demystifying and streamlining the life insurance industry for consumers and advisors. We are developing the industry-standard approach to tailoring personalized life insurance portfolios, backed by machine-learning and experts, while developing an industry-first aftercare—since traditionally the agent never sees the insured after policy delivery. This will help bring renewed growth to the industry by increasing education around products, improving confidence in outcomes, and creating less of a burden in the onboarding and underwriting process. Consumers benefit from more independent comparisons and transparent outcomes that contribute to their financial goals—even as they evolve. The advisor wins with the ability to streamline the creation of tailored solutions, without needing to learn the ins and outs of the ever-evolving product set while focusing on bringing more value to their client’s active investment portfolio.
Over the long term, Optifino has the unique ability to develop more understanding and more certainty around how different life insurance products help people meet their financial goals across different economic environments. As one of the last tax-advantaged assets, modernizing life insurance represents a massive opportunity. Over the next two decades, ~$84 trillion will change hands in the US alone (Merrill Lynch), of which a significant portion will be subject to estate taxes—a number that will only rise in 2026 when current taxation thresholds are scheduled to be cut in half (barring new legislation). With so much wealth held in stocks also comes the difficulty of timing the market, and a well-designed life insurance portfolio helps create more certainty and a hedge against the broader investment portfolio. But, life insurance is not one-size fits all, if you want to build and preserve your wealth then it must be designed not just in harmony with your financial goals but also life stage and risk-appetite.
Breaking Down Barriers
The biggest barriers are a general lack of education around the purpose of life insurance and too little time for trusted advisors to educate themselves more deeply. There are few independent solutions to educate yourself on the implications of the decision you are making, so our resources and visualizations are designed to educate all those involved. Trusted financial professionals are drawn to solutions that offer faster, easier and more consistent application and underwriting processes (LIMRA), allowing them to focus most often on managing investments with little time to learn about the complicated policy architecture of life insurance. They cite the burdensome sales process as to why life insurance is not a larger portion of their business (LIMRA). We are designed to take the burden off them, while working to ensure they still get paid and grow their business. Until now there was no tech stack that educates both client and advisor, integrates financial goals, compares thousands of policies across top carriers, architects the most personalized life insurance portfolio, and manages the underwriting and aftercare process.
The Optifino product vision incorporates built-in education every step of the way to make life easier for both advisor and client—explaining policy types, visualizing risk scenarios, and defining the tax-advantaged benefits of life insurance. Our experts work directly with clients and advisors to provide the most holistic recommendations, since 30% of financial professionals say the most difficult aspect of the life insurance sales process for clients is understanding how insurance products fit with other financial products (LIMRA). Our model is a marketplace backed by subject matter experts, designed to professionalize the support provided for financial professionals and their clients. When approximately 69% of financial professionals agree that centralized platforms make it easier to find appropriate insurance solutions for their clients (LIMRA), we know Optifino is the solution to inject new energy into the industry.
The Optifino product foundation is built upon combining man and machine to provide the most tailored recommendations for our clients based on their financial goals. The Optifino optimization engine identifies the ideal life insurance solution across top carriers. Once we identify a solution, our ongoing concierge support tracks the completion of each step—from onboarding through underwriting. However, where other services end their support here, we are only getting started. We not only improve the efficiency of personalized life insurance policy design, we also continue to optimize against our client’s goals as they evolve since life insurance is not a set-and-forget vehicle. Our lifetime of aftercare includes ongoing policy monitoring, premium reminders, annual policy reviews, provider due diligence, and management of trust owned life insurance. We maintain relationships with the top carriers to provide market updates and educational content via newsletters.
Why Us, Why Now
The Optifino team shares over one hundred years of combined insurance and investment experience. CEO David Kleinhandler spent three decades in the life insurance space, having started his own firm and sold over $10B in insurance policies. Michael Doniger—our chief innovation officer who leads our machine-learning algorithms—is a seasoned investment professional with 20+ years of managing assets, having most recently served as the Director of Research for Citadel Fundamentals Strategies. Our CTO, Eduard Snesarev, brings over 15 years of experience in designing, building, and maintaining large scale distributed systems—having held leadership positions at Dropbox and Cadre. Amongst our experienced advisors, we benefit from the experience of Charles Rettig, who served as the 49th Commissioner of the IRS, presiding over the nation’s tax system.
Together, they bring incredible depth and breadth in wealth management and life insurance experience, and more generally, building services around some of the biggest decisions in life. The rest of the team is composed of accomplished like-minded contributors that magnify the vision. Thus far, we have been in stealth developing the technology the last 18 months, and recently started beta testing the product in the market in Q4. We are working with people who want to build the optimal holistic portfolio, taking the time to understand their financial goals and identify the policy for their current life stage. We are having major success doing professional reviews and optimizing client's policies. The biggest takeaways to date: we are built to deal with complex financial goals and portfolios. For the affluent and entrepreneurs, complexity is the by-product of success and we are your partner to simplify the process, mitigate risk, and minimize uncertainty.
Today, the platform officially comes out of stealth and launches publicly. If you are in the market for a life insurance policy, you already know the difficulty in finding a solution that is right for you. We’re here to help. If you have already received a policy recommendation, we’re here to provide a second opinion. If you currently have a life insurance policy, are you confident that your plan was designed in alignment with your financial goals? Are you sure that it’s still working towards your financial goals as they have evolved? If you are working with an advisor, make sure to ask them if they are using Optifino!
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