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FORT WASHINGTON - Baseball legend Satchel Paige once famously warned, "Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you."
For Alan Buerger, though, it hasn't happened.
While companies across the life settlement field are seeing growth, "we're just positioned to grow at a greater rate," said Buerger, CEO of industry pioneer Coventry First.
He said Coventry has already outstripped the company Web site's estimation of market share exceeding 40 percent, suggesting 50 percent might be more accurate.
The 5-year-o1d company just ended its third fiscal quarter and is more than 50 percent ahead of last year's pace, said Buerger, a Philadelphia native. In April, Coventry announced it had acquired $1 billion in life insurance policies since November 2001.
Coventry had 55 employees in July 2002. That rose to 80 in April, and Buerger expects it to pass 100 by mid-October.
"If we had 400 employees, they'd all be productive for us," he said. "That's
the kind of opportunity we have."
Life settlement companies pay senior citizens for their life insurance policies, keep up with the premiums, then collect from the insurer at the policyholder's death. The field grew out of the viatical industry, which began in 1989 and involved the purchase of policies of much younger clients with fatal diseases, most prominently AIDS.
Most life settlement professionals started out in viatical companies, Buerger said. But that's not true with Coventry, where top management worked for life insurance giants such as CNA and Hartford. He and his wife Constance, the firm's president and chief operating officer, knew their recruits from their own insurance industry tenures - 31 years for Buerger, 20 for his wife.
Buerger said that insurance orientation gives the company "a very serious - it cannot be overstated - competitive advantage." He cited innovations such as:
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