Purpose, Focus & Evolution

Episode 1 – Part 1, with Jose Garcia, CEO

My name is Jose Garcia. I’m the founding partner and CEO of Carlisle Management Company. Carlisle Management Company is an investment management firm based in Luxembourg, exclusively working with the lifestyle marketplace. I’ve been in the industry for over 20 years. I’ve had the opportunity to work and to see the industry first-hand from a number of different sectors. I was in the supply side. I was in the capital structure side. Then I spent some time running one of the largest providers in the industry, doing the buying and selling of sediments for large institutions. And then finally, over the last 15 years, the CEO at Carlisle Management, working exclusively in investment management of the asset class.

Why did you find Carlisle Management Company?
Carlisle Management Company was founded in 2008 as an investment management firm to do exclusively investment management in the life sentiment space. We felt that it was important. We felt that a lot of the investment management companies dealing in life settlements weren’t really life settlement companies. They were coming from different sectors of the finance world, and we thought it was important to have a life settlement investment management firm founded and managed by life settlement professionals. And that’s why Carlisle was founded in 2008. For the exclusive management of life settlements and to try to bring all of our talent, our-know how and our expertise into the investment management sector of the industry, which we felt was lacking.
15 years later, Carlisle Management Company is the largest life settlement management firm in the world.

Why does Carlisle focus on the Longevity/Life settlement space?

I think it’s threefold. I think first, because we come from the life settlement world, so we’re not investment bankers or financial professionals that decided to start doing life settlements. We are life settlement people doing life settlements. We’re doing what we think we know how to do best. We have a very experienced management team. Most of our management team members have over 20 years’ experience in the asset class, and because we come from the industry, we’ve been able to nurture and to gather a lot of relationships. We have a great distribution network. We pretty much know everyone in the industry. Carlisle has become synonymous with trust within the settlement industry, and because we are just a holistic investment manager, in other words, we don’t do trading, we don’t do servicing, we just do investment management. We’re viewed by many industry intermediaries as a client and not a competitor. And I think that allows us to gain trust and to increase our reputation within the asset class.

How have you seen the Life Settlement industry evolve over the last 20+ years?

The life settlement industry has always gone through several cycles.
The industry started as really a secondary market, mostly done through intermediaries like financial planners and insurance agencies. It was more of a high net worth market, where it was people that were doing estate planning that were being advised by financial advisors or by lawyers to do estate planning that would get access to life settlements. We saw it over a couple of cycles, is we saw that there was an increase of tertiary market activity. So post 2008 financial crisis, we started trading large cinnamon portfolios between institutions. And there, you know, that was the birth of the life settlement tertiary market. Now, what we have seen is we have kind of seen a general migration to direct to consumer. There’s been several large companies that have been making significant investments into that sector. So we’re basically now the industry is made up really of three subsectors. First is the secondary. Second is the tertiary. And now we have the direct to consumer market, which I think is getting a lot of ground. If I had to give you a sort of a better breakdown, I would say that the direct to consumer is probably the fastest growing sub segment within the live settlement industry.