Abacus Life is a publicly traded life settlement company that buys existing life insurance policies from consumers, mostly people over 65, for a cash lump sum larger than the policy’s surrender value but smaller than its death benefit. It trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ABX, reports roughly $3.6 billion in assets under management as of mid-2026, and describes itself as the only publicly traded life settlement company in the United States. If you are considering an Abacus life settlement, the mechanics are straightforward, but the company is also the subject of a short-seller report, investor law-firm investigations, and a live defamation lawsuit that are worth understanding before you sign anything.
What Abacus Is and What It Does
Abacus was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in Orlando, Florida. The operating entity, Abacus Settlements, LLC, does business as Abacus Life and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Abacus Global Management, Inc., a Delaware corporation. Jay Jackson is chairman and CEO; Sean McNealy, who co-founded Abacus Settlements in 2004, is president.
The company says it has purchased over $4.6 billion in face value of policies since it began operations, is licensed in 49 states, and works with roughly 78 institutional partners and about 30,000 financial advisors who originate policies for it. Abacus has claimed approximately 26% market share in the life settlement industry based on 2023 data, and it holds membership in the Life Insurance Settlement Association (LISA) and affiliate status with the American Council of Life Insurers.
How a Life Settlement Through Abacus Works
A life settlement is the sale of an existing life insurance policy to a third party for a lump-sum cash payment. You receive more than the policy’s cash surrender value but less than the full death benefit. The buyer takes over premium payments and eventually collects the death benefit when you die. Life settlements are most common among policyholders over 65 who no longer need or want their coverage and prefer cash.
A closely related transaction, a viatical settlement, works the same way but involves a policyholder diagnosed with a terminal or chronic illness, typically with a life expectancy of 24 months or less. The two terms overlap in practice, and some states, including Florida, regulate both under the same statute without distinction.
Abacus operates on the buyer side. Policies typically reach it through brokers and financial advisors rather than direct walk-in sellers, though the company acquired online life insurance brokerage AccuQuote in October 2025 to build a more direct consumer channel. Once Abacus buys a policy, it either holds the policy in a portfolio it manages for institutional investors or resells it into the secondary market. In 2025, the company reports it acquired 1,310 policies and sold 1,059 with a combined face value of nearly $1.8 billion.
What Sellers Typically Receive
Industry-wide numbers give a rough sense of scale. According to the LISA 2025 member survey, the industry completed 2,955 transactions in 2025 and paid consumers a total of $626.6 million. The average payout per policy was $212,066, compared with an average cash surrender value of $24,360 that insurers would otherwise have offered on those same policies. Over the five years from 2021 through 2025, LISA members paid consumers $3.6 billion for nearly 15,000 policies.
Those are averages across all LISA members, not Abacus-specific payouts, and any individual offer depends on the insured person’s age, health, policy type, face amount, and premium load. The main takeaway is that the number an insurer quotes to surrender a policy is not the ceiling on what the policy is worth on the secondary market.
Consumer Protections Built Into the Process
Life settlements are regulated primarily at the state level. Most states require life settlement providers and brokers to be licensed through the state insurance department, and many have adopted consumer protections modeled on or influenced by the NAIC Model Act. Common safeguards include:
- A rescission period that lets you cancel the sale for a set window after signing.
- Mandatory escrow of proceeds through an independent third party, so the buyer cannot take assignment of the policy without your money being available.
- Disclosure requirements covering tax consequences, the potential impact on public benefits such as Medicaid, and the sharing of your personal medical information with the buyer and its investors.
Variable life settlements are also classified as securities transactions and fall under SEC jurisdiction and FINRA rules. FINRA advises consumers to verify that any financial professional involved in a variable life settlement is properly registered.
Not every arrangement in this space is a legitimate settlement. Regulators have long warned about stranger-originated life insurance (STOLI), in which speculators recruit individuals to buy policies specifically to resell them. A 2009 Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing flagged STOLI as a persistent fraud concern and noted that 42% of life settlements that year occurred in states without specific settlement laws. Enforcement history also includes an SEC case against Mutual Benefits, which sold over $1 billion in fraudulent life settlement investments to 29,000 investors, and a Texas action against Retirement Value LLC, which collected $77 million from about 900 investors in a scheme involving underestimated life expectancies. Those cases were against sellers of investment interests, not against consumers selling their own policies, but they explain why regulators focus on life expectancy accuracy and transparent accounting.
The Morpheus Report and Ongoing Controversy
On June 4, 2025, short seller Morpheus Research published a 76-page report alleging that Abacus was “manufacturing fake revenue by systematically underestimating when people will die.” Morpheus said the report was based on a three-month investigation involving interviews with 33 industry experts and former Abacus employees. Its core claims were:
- That Abacus relied on Lapetus Solutions, a life expectancy provider in which Abacus holds a minority interest, to produce artificially short life expectancy estimates, which inflate the present value of policies on the company’s balance sheet.
- That Abacus used opaque “mark-to-model” accounting to report roughly 30% returns when the industry norm is closer to 12%, and that discount rate cuts in Q1 2025 generated approximately $28.4 million in non-cash unrealized gains.
- That the December 2024 acquisition of Luxembourg-based Carlisle Management was used to offload overvalued policies to related-party funds at marked-up prices, and that commission fees had been funneled to an entity previously controlled by Abacus co-founders.
The stock dropped more than 21% after the report was published. Law firm Wolf Popper LLP announced an investigation into potential claims on behalf of investors, and multiple sources indicate the Schall Law Firm opened a related fraud investigation as of January 2026.
Abacus rejected the allegations. The company engaged actuarial firm Lewis & Ellis to conduct an independent review of its Q1 2025 portfolio of over 700 policies while stripping out all Lapetus life expectancy data. That review produced a valuation of $449 million, which Abacus said was within 1% of its own reported $446 million figure. Abacus also pointed to Q2 2025 sales of 226 policies for $141.4 million, about 1.65% above their previously reported balance sheet value, as evidence that its valuations track real market prices. Morpheus countered that Abacus’s own SEC filings describe its portfolio as valued using “Level 3 inputs,” specifically identifying life expectancies and discount rates in its discounted cash flow models.
On June 30, 2025, Abacus filed suit against competitor Coventry First LLC and its co-founder Alan Buerger in Orange County, Florida circuit court. The complaint alleges that Coventry orchestrated a “systematic campaign of false and misleading statements” to defame Abacus, drive down its stock price, and interfere with its business, including statements to auditor Grant Thornton, analysts at TD Securities, the SEC, and Abacus stockholders. The complaint seeks damages of at least $388.5 million. Coventry called the lawsuit “baseless” and “without merit” on July 2, 2025, and argued that Abacus’s own SEC disclosures identify Lapetus as its “primary life expectancy provider.”
Lapetus itself is central to the fight. CEO Jay Jackson previously held a seat on the Lapetus board, and Abacus holds a financial investment in the firm. A study by professors Daniel Bauer and Nan Zhu, cited by Coventry, found that in 4,000 cases reviewed, Lapetus life expectancy estimates were shorter than those of peer providers by an average of approximately 29 months. Lapetus has defended its methodology, claiming accuracy rates exceeding 95–97%. An independent assessment by actuarial consultancy COIOS, published in June 2025, noted that Lapetus employs board-certified physicians using a “Hive database” of medical studies but flagged concerns with certain aspects of the methodology, including the use of a debit-credit approach that COIOS called “inappropriate” for conditions like cancer, and transparency issues in Lapetus reports. Coventry has separately filed a petition in Leon County, Florida seeking to force the state Office of Insurance Regulation to release Lapetus’s triennial audit reports, which the OIR has withheld based on Lapetus’s claim that the records are trade secrets.
None of these disputes have produced findings against Abacus, and the company denies the allegations. For a consumer selling a policy, the practical relevance is narrower than for an investor buying the stock: the fight is largely about whether Abacus is valuing policies too aggressively on its own books, which if true would mean policies are worth more than Abacus estimates, not less. But the same life expectancy inputs that drive balance sheet values also drive purchase offers, so an unusually short life expectancy estimate can suppress what a seller is offered.
How to Evaluate an Offer From Abacus
If you are approached about selling a policy to Abacus, or through a broker or advisor who plans to shop your policy to Abacus, a few checks are worth doing:
- Confirm that any broker or advisor is licensed in your state and, if a variable policy is involved, registered with FINRA.
- Ask for the life expectancy estimate being used to price your policy and which provider produced it. Given the public dispute over Lapetus, knowing whether a Lapetus figure is the only estimate driving the offer is a fair question.
- Get at least one competing offer. Industry payout averages suggest a wide range around any single number, and the point of a broker is to create competition among buyers.
- Read the disclosure package for the rescission window, escrow arrangements, tax notice, and information-sharing consents before you sign.
- Compare the offer to your policy’s cash surrender value and, if you can, to what keeping the policy would cost in future premiums against what your beneficiaries would receive.
Selling a life insurance policy is a one-time decision that cannot easily be undone once the rescission period closes. Whether Abacus or another buyer is on the other side of the transaction, the value of the process comes from making the offer compete and reading what you sign.