About Longevity Standard
Long-term financial products deserve closer examination.
Important financial decisions are often made when price, headline features, and marketing claims are easy to see. The conditions that determine long-term value can be much harder to see.
Why we exist
Longevity Standard exists to move more of that understanding forward.
The problem
The important questions often appear too late.
At purchase
A product can look understandable.
Price, headline features and marketing claims are all in front of you.
Years later
Conditions, trade-offs and dependencies become obvious.
By then, the decision may already have been made.
Move value discovery forward.
The work
Independent investigation from the side of the people relying on the product.
Longevity Standard investigates long-term financial products using transaction-specific materials, independent research, and structured, source-linked company and product information.
Transaction-specific materials
Independent research
Structured company and product information
01
Establish what actually applies.
02
Understand how the product is designed to work.
03
Make the important findings easier to inspect.
Research infrastructure
Each investigation adds to a growing evidence base.
Reused across investigations
Structured, source-linked research on financial institutions, products, forms, riders, versions, source documents, and dated observations.
Specific to one Review
The product in front of us, and the evidence that belongs to it.
What applies is established again for the specific form, version and date being reviewed, so nothing carries over on its own.
What is being built
The output may be a Review. The underlying asset is the research and evidence behind it.
Our approach
Make complexity inspectable, not merely simpler.
Long-term financial products can be complicated for legitimate reasons.
Guarantees cost something.
Liquidity has value.
Pooling can create value.
Flexibility and certainty involve trade-offs.
We investigate
How the product works
What the buyer gives up
What supports the value being offered
What may ultimately be delivered
We do not begin by assuming
—
That complexity is bad
—
That every cost is waste
—
That every financial promise is suspect
Evidence
Say what the evidence supports. Show where it stops.
What we distinguish
We work to distinguish what is established, what can change, what depends on future conditions, and what remains unresolved.
Where it stops
Where an important conclusion depends on a source, the evidence should be inspectable. Where the evidence is incomplete, the uncertainty should remain visible.
Independence
The economics are tied to the work.
Our economics are tied to doing the investigation.
That keeps the work focused on the people and institutions relying on the product.
Not which product is chosen.
Not how much is purchased.
Not whether a transaction takes place.
Who we serve
Individuals and institutions making consequential long-term decisions.
Institutions
Organizations evaluating, offering, explaining, or overseeing long-term financial products.
I’ve spent much of my career working across insurance, healthcare, data, modeling, and decision support. Much of that work has been in markets where important decisions are complicated by fragmented information and products that are difficult to evaluate.
Earlier in my career, I founded Cordova Advisors, where we developed a model for consumer-directed healthcare that simulated healthcare spending across different plan designs, with analysis for both individuals and plan sponsors. The model combined actuarial analysis with decision support, and we built a web-based application that allowed people to interact with it directly and explore how different assumptions and plan structures affected outcomes. Cordova was subsequently acquired by Vimo, the parent company of GetInsured.
I then spent several years at Vimo as VP of Partnerships and Content while the company was building an integrated healthcare comparison-shopping platform. Much of my work focused on developing the data partnerships needed to bring together information across health plans, physicians, hospitals, HSA administrators, prescription drugs, and other parts of the healthcare system, and to support both publishing and broader distribution of those datasets.
I later founded Annuity Digest in 2009 as an independent reference for the annuity market.
There is a recurring theme in that work. I am interested in using data, models, structured evidence, and analytical tools to make complicated financial arrangements easier to inspect and understand.
That same idea is behind Longevity Standard. We are building an independent research and analytical platform for long-term financial products, focused on understanding the actual promises being made, the evidence behind them, and the conditions that determine what a buyer ultimately receives.
I am a CFA charterholder.
Related research
Annuity Digest is part of the research foundation.
The relationship
Annuity Digest develops structured reference information on annuity companies, products, and source materials.
Longevity Standard uses independent research, including structured company and product information where relevant, to support deeper investigation of long-term financial products.
Annuity DigestInvestigate the product. Follow the evidence.
See what an independent Review establishes, or how the work is done.