Corporate Testimonial
This Fortune 50 global firm’s relationship with Lynch & Associates dates back to the late 1990’s. The firm first brought Lynch in to assume broker services for its existing corporate-owned life insurance (COLI) policies that had been purchased to support a deferred compensation plan. Although this initial engagement was one plan only, it was not long before the company turned to Lynch to consolidate its entire portfolio of COLI investments and deferred compensation plans. During a six month review, the Lynch team completed an evaluation of all the different COLIs, spelled out the terms and conditions that were in place, and identified ways to further optimize the programs.
The firm’s Director of Retirement Investments said, “Basically, we hired Lynch as a global COLI oversight adviser. They get a fee based on certain assets under management, and they need to achieve savings in the amount of the fee every year to be paid that fee, so our interests are aligned. Another thing they did was help us gain additional flexibility in one of our larger accounts to more effectively hedge our growing liabilities. They worked with MetLife for probably a year and a half to get this done. I had been trying to accomplish this for two or three years and was never successful. As a result, we got an additional $100 million in variable insurance capacity to hedge our growing mark-to-market equity and fixed income liabilities.”
Lynch & Associates took over the company’s tracking system and optimized it so the entire deferred compensation program can be viewed across multiple operating companies and tracked against the COLI program to assess the effectiveness of the hedging strategy.
“We’re delighted with that. They saved us $1 million in hard costs by reducing expenditures. They restructured an existing set of policies and saved us $17 million present value dollars in premiums. They took all of our insurance policies, ran them in their system and found $7 million in death benefits that had not been obtained by our existing third party administrators. All of that was just in 2010.”
The company official believes that Lynch differs from its competitors in the personal and customized service it offers.
“This is a small group that is highly specialized. I am able to put that team in front of our most senior executives to explain these programs, and they always acquit themselves well. We have the same team dealing with us now that we have had for almost 10 years. They absolutely understand what we want and are willing to customize the information in any way that we request. We have always been very well served by Lynch, and I am delighted with the relationship. Corporate-owned life insurance policies go on for decades, so this relationship will go on through the remainder of my career. But eventually, I am going to retire, and someone else is going to have to take this over. They are going to need Lynch.”