Overview

Winged Keel Group's Private Client Team helps our clients by designing, implementing, and administering large life insurance portfolios.

Our clients generally use life insurance to achieve one or more of the following:

• To facilitate the funding of estate tax liabilities,
• To provide specific inheritances or charitable bequests, or
• To accumulate investment assets in a tax-efficient manner.

Our clients are financially sophisticated business owners, private investors, senior executives, and families with substantial inherited wealth.   Unlike most life insurance brokerage firms, Winged Keel does not solicit clients for referrals. Instead, we work as a member of a team of specialists organized by highly-respected professional advisors such as trust and estate attorneys, private bankers, trust companies, accounting firms, family offices, and private wealth managers.

Winged Keel has evolved to a fully developed, multi-generational professional partnership that provides stability and continuity and allows us to serve clients throughout their lifetimes.   In many cases, a client's life insurance portfolio will be one of their longest held assets.   With this in mind, we have worked hard to build the strength and the depth that will allow us to administer life insurance portfolios for long periods of time.   Winged Keel is owned by its employees, and our client relationship managers range in age from their mid-20's to their mid-80's.

We are relentless in our pursuit of incremental improvements in processes, technologies, and human capital resources.   Our ongoing investments in Design, Underwriting, and Client Administration capabilities have become a core strategic thrust, and our focus and our success have enabled us to increase our market differentiation relative to competitors who have similar intentions but are much less developed in terms of their infrastructure and ownership transition planning.   In short, we have a long-term vision of the future and we have an operating platform that allows us to serve clients for multiple generations.

Design

Winged Keel Group's client relationship managers and case designers evaluate each client's unique circumstance and model customized analytics to measure the economics of various alternatives that should be considered to meet specific estate and income tax planning needs that have been identified. Our clients generally own insurance outside of their estates in structures such as irrevocable life insurance trusts. These structures are often funded through a combination of gifting and lending methods including lifetime exemption and annual exclusion gifts, intra-family loans, private split dollar, and Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts (GRATs).

Underwriting

The insurance industry, like any other competitive market, is constantly introducing new products and pricing strategies.   Each insurance company has a different way of assessing an individual's risk profile.   A particular medical condition may be viewed as a significant concern to one company, but not another. As an independent brokerage firm, Winged Keel Group can access the entire insurance marketplace for solutions that best meet the financial goals of our clients.   We create a Risk Classification Auction™ among the most competitive and highly rated insurance companies to optimize the pricing of each client's life insurance portfolio.

Client Administration

Large life insurance portfolios require a level of ongoing attention that experienced professional advisors have come to appreciate.   When a portfolio is diversified among a number of different life insurance companies with premiums due at different times, it becomes critically important to have a process in place to assure that all premiums are paid in a timely fashion.   Winged Keel's proprietary Premium Assure™ process is designed to do just that. Winged Keel has also developed a number of other administrative processes that can be tailored to meet a client's particular needs, including customized reporting, premium invoicing, inforce illustrations, scheduled task management, and budget-to-actual comparisons for the insurance policies and accompanying funding vehicles. We also recognize that client circumstances change over time, as does the life insurance market.   Our disciplined approach to using technology to capture policy data enables us to routinely review client portfolios and quickly identify those clients who would benefit from new ideas and new products that become available.