Life-insurance is a multi-trillion dollar asset class that almost nobody thinks of as an asset. That didn’t stop Jay Rogers, cofounder and director of infineo, who pooled half a billion dollars of institutional policies, convinced banks to lend against them, and is putting the whole structure on a blockchain. He sat down with TheStreet Roundtable to explain how infineo is transforming this industry.
Rogers’ firm merged with the tokenization platform at the end of 2024 and has tokenized roughly $622 million in policies since then, among the largest real world asset (RWA) digitizations anywhere.
“Our plan was to go out and build this technology on our own, but we were introduced to Infineo, who was quite a bit further ahead of where we were,” he said of the merger.
His thesis is that the asset was already institutional grade, and tokenization adds distribution and efficiency.
The most misunderstood asset class
“Life insurance is one of the most misunderstood asset classes in our economy,” Rogers said. “It’s a foundational component of the US economy — and really any country’s economy. What life insurance is at its core is a management fund. These carriers are management funds of large assets.”
Seen through this lens, life insurance is less of a bet on dying, instead it acts as a share of one of the oldest and most conservative run investment pools in finance.
Another reason institutions love these investments is because they receive tax-preferential treatment.
“Institutions invest billions of dollars to acquire these policies that have tax-preferential treatment, and they get yields by participating essentially in the general account of these management funds — whether it’s New York Life, Mass Mutual, all of these companies,” Rogers said.
Institutions have held life insurance policies for decades as a balance sheet staple. Banks call it BOLI (bank owned life insurance), and as of late 2024, more than 3,000 US banks reported BOLI holdings with a combined cash surrender value of $205.7 billion.
Rogers spent his pre-crypto career selling exactly that.
“Prior to blockchain even being at the forefront of anyone’s mind, we were selling institutional life insurance policies to credit unions, banks, healthcare systems, universities — helping them both to retain people and drive yield on their balance sheet in a tax-efficient way,” he said.
The insight infineo was built around is that an asset this established shouldn’t remain so static.
Proving it as collateral
Before blockchain ever entered the picture, Rogers was asking banks to treat life insurance as collateral at scale.
“We developed a pool of these assets, we got to 500 million in assets under management, and we went to work with different banks in the United States to create a CDO backed by our trust,” he said. “We were provided a line of credit off of that collateral, truly proving that this is viewed as unbelievably safe and secure collateral.”
Then he said something that will raise eyebrows.
“It’s one of the only assets that’s guaranteed to go up in value every year,” Rogers said. “It might not go up by the same amount every year, but it’s not going to go down in value — like a pool of mortgages, for instance.”
This “guarantee” is a promise written into permanent life insurance contracts that the policy’s value can only grow. This promise, however, is only as good as the company making it.
This is why bank regulators liken these policies to making a long term loan to the insurer, and tell the banks themselves to vet insurance companies the same way they would vet any other borrower.
The other risk these policies face is them collapsing because someone stops paying the premium, which Rogers immediately addressed.
“Institutional life insurance is normally fully funded, prepaid, and just sitting at that institution until these people die,” he said.
The key word here is “sitting,” and it’s what infineo was built to fix.
An asset class, worth trillions, fully paid for, growing quietly, and stuck. It is impossible to trade, borrow against easily, or move. Infineo thinks it can increase liquidity and help banks do more with their assets.
