Abacus Global to acquire $53M stake in Manning & Napier

0:00Very welcome back inside our proactive newsroom and joining me now is Jay Jackson. He is the CEO of Advocates Global Management and Jay it's great to see again. How are you? I'm doing great. Thank you. Good stuff. Exciting times for the company. A really big deal announced and we'll talk about that some financial stuff in a second. But first on this, Manning and Nipir, $53 million stake in the company. Tell me a little bit about them and why you made this move. Sure. Like we were looking for complimentary businesses to our already very successful business model and our core engine in our life solutions division where we acquire policies and then have those on our balance sheet, resell those or hold those. So I think for us, it was a matter of what other businesses complement this. Our asset management division certainly complemented that and then we raised capital to acquire policies. And then really for us, I think a third piece and very important piece of this flywheel was how do we gain more access to originate policies while providing services

1:00to our current clients. So Manning and Nipir literally goes back 50 years. In fact, in 94, there's called the Manning Act and they were one of the first firms to push for legislation around putting your clients first. This is a firm with $18 billion, $3,400 plus retail accounts. And they built an excellent reputation with their internal clients or with their retail clients. And so what we thought we'd be able to do is that we saw this relationship is incredibly additive. And that being that they have 3,400 clients that could potentially have a policy that they might seek liquidity for. This is a direct fee back into our life, life solutions division. Super interesting, generate revenue for both firms. The other piece of the alliance that I find very interesting is we have excess leads from our own clients, meaning that we may have done payouts or we have literally thousands of people who reach out to us every single month. And maybe they don't qualify to sell their policy, but we would like to introduce them to other financial products

2:03and they're seeking financial guidance. And now we can bring those clients over to Manning. And then hopefully capitalize them. It's a long-term client on the Manning platform. So there's tons of synergies here. Also, they could offer their clients our own alternative investment funds. So terrific, really smart allegiance for us and look forward to doing more. Jay, how important was it to have this type of a deal? Because it is a large one to be done with someone who has the name recognition, the longevity they've had 55 years, I think. That obviously had to weigh in on this decision as well. Super important, right? Like you want to build your partnerships. Around companies that mimic your values, right? That have similar synergies. And the people at Manning and Appear have a long track record of treating their clients, right? Treating them first. And I think that when we looked at the scale of this investment, we had looked at other firms. And we just felt like this particular firm with their track record, their history. It was a great fit for what we

3:08were meeting our own culturally as well as opportunistically. Yeah. And lastly, just the ability to, for both companies, just to continue what you're doing, yet see some synergies together. You don't have to change much. You're just sort of adding, I guess, as a way to describe it. That's exactly right. When people look at this, it's not a pivot at all from our core business. It's just negative, right? In fact, it's better than that. It's feeding the other areas of our core business. And we're helping feed the areas of their core business. And that's truly what this is about. And so, you know, we made this minority investment. We look forward to the growth of this, not just underlying investment, but the growth of how we can build out these synergies. And then it's also really a playbook for how we can do this again and again. And really quickly, you mentioned you were on a call earlier. You're very, very happy with where the business is at in the health of it. We're in a great spot, right? And I know there's a lot of uncertainty out there. There's conflicts. There's other things that are happening in real time. But if you consider the underlying asset that we manage, this is the type of asset that investors come

4:12to, right? They're leaking, they're seeking less correlated assets in a very volatile time period. And our policy holders are also reacting in a similar way in a sense that they're looking for capital and liquidity in places that maybe they hadn't sought before. So it's the type of market where uncertainty and volatility, we tend to perform better. We manage an uncorrelated asset. And we're actually seeing that in the numbers. So Q4 looked great looking into 26. If you look at our guidance and some of the targets we put out, we have a very optimistic view of Advocates over the next year and three years. Exciting times ahead for sure. Jay, thanks so much. Great to catch up with you. Really appreciate the time. We'll talk soon. Great. Thanks. All right. Jay Jackson, the CEO of Advocates Global Management.