System for facilitating life settlement transactions

Abstract

A system and method for buying and selling life insurance policies includes an online database for storing information concerning in-force policies as needed for evaluation by a potential buyer. Owners of policies, either directly or through agents, who might be willing to sell their policies, register with the online website with critical financial and medical underwriting information relating to their policies, as needed for evaluation by a potential buyer. In the online database such information is organized and categorized as to parameters of various medical and financial information, to be reviewed online in an orderly manner by investors and potential buyers of policies. A membership preferably is required for a potential buyer to have access to the online information. In a preferred implementation of the system, an auction is held online to obtain essentially the best price for each policy.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A computer-implemented method for buying and selling in-force life insurance policies including a computer that supports operations of a website comprising at least a web-based interface, wherein access to at least one portion of the web-based interface is limited to administrators and authorized buyers or buyer representatives, and a database having therein information concerning a plurality of in-force life insurance policies each being a life insurance policy on an insured individual, the method comprising:
 locating, using the web-based interface, from among the plurality of in-force policies stored in the database, those in-force policies whose current policy owners are willing to entertain offers from potential buyers to buy the policy from that current policy owner;   obtaining, via the web-based interface, financial and medical underwriting information about the in-force policies from their current policy owners, as needed, and storing it in the database for evaluation by the potential buyers;   categorizing the financial and medical underwriting information electronically so as to allow queries on the database, based on one or more category, to create a listing of in-force policies being tracked that are available for sale, by some query criteria, for review by the potential buyers, wherein the query criteria includes at least results of a life expectancy report and medical underwriting data stored in the database, the medical underwriting data relating to insured individuals insured in those policies, in response to user interaction with the web-based interface, filtering offered policies at least based on life expectancy report data and medical underwriting data for those offered policies;   tracking membership records so that access to at least a buyer portion of the database is limited to potential buyers who are represented in those membership records; and   coordinating auctions between potential buyers of policies and the current policy owners of those policies or their representatives.