Right at the bottom of your screen. Feel free to type in any questions throughout the presentation, and we can save time for Q&A at the end. But with that said, I'll pass it over to Rob.
Brendan, thanks very much, and thanks, everybody, for joining us. Really look forward to discussing Abacus Life with you, and I'm also thrilled to be part of the Sidoti conference and presentation. I've worked, by the way, with Sidoti indirectly. Prior to joining Abacus Life, October 1st, I spent 13 years at Nasdaq working directly with public companies, including Abacus Life. Folks have asked, why Abacus and why now? First of all, my background includes having worked for a portfolio manager that ostensibly had managed strategies of uncorrelated assets. That included 2009 and 2010, and as we know, all correlation went to one. This is a truly dynamic and uncorrelated asset that we're going to be discussing. The other is our CEO, Jay Jackson, who's, now that we mentioned it, his commercials, you'll notice on CNBC and Fox Business and Bloomberg all day long discussing life settlements.
He is exactly how he appears on the commercials. He's a force of nature, and you don't say no to Jay Jackson. So I am thrilled to be part of the team, to be working with David Jackson, who is our associate with Capital Markets and Investor Relations, and to discussing our value proposition with you today. As we are a public company, the disclaimers, which I'm sure you'll also always see, and also, what is Abacus Life? We are an alternative asset manager that has pioneered the market maker and the specialization in advanced longevity and actuarial technology. Because we like to put it, we are an originator and a market maker with a massive moat around our core business, which is high growth and high margin.
We focus on life settlements, which is the acquisition of life insurance policies from their owners, and then we place those policies with institutional investors in our network who are interested in a direct allocation to U.S. mortality, which we're going to get to later on, as an uncorrelated asset class. Founded over 20 years ago, our three founders, plus our CEO, are still with the company and still coming in and focus on life settlements every day. We have grown from a handful of employees to over 150, and we went public on Nasdaq in July of 2023. We've also done two subsequent equity raises in June and November of this year.
From an allocation standpoint, and putting on my old portfolio manager hat, if you do a screen for a U.S.-listed financial under $200 million and $2.5 billion, with revenue growth in excess of 20%, ROE in excess of 15%, and a margin in excess of 50%, you're going to find there's one company, and that's us. From a value proposition standpoint, it is back to we are a high growth, high margin, highly specialized business that is a phenomenal and a compelling opportunity. Life settlements, this is our core business. And what are we doing with life settlements? A little bit of history here. There's a landmark case in the Supreme Court from 1911 that defines life insurance policies in the United States as an asset. In any other jurisdiction, life insurance is a contract between the insured and the underwriter.
As it is an asset, and with the business that has evolved specifically over the last 20 years, these assets can be sold to a third party. That's where life settlements providers and Abacus Life comes in. These are policies that will remain in effect and that the ultimate owner is going to collect on those life insurance policies when the individual expires. In the meantime, in the business or in the size of the market that we're looking at, there's $13 trillion of life insurance policies that are in effect in the U.S. 90% of those lapse. That means that 90% of policies out there, and the underwriters are very aware of this, and it's to the benefit of their business, that the individuals will hold them simply stop paying.
For universal and whole policies that are directly of interest to us, the underlying insured can also surrender those for the cash value. Our education process is about making the owner of the policy aware that this is an asset that can be sold and not just a liability. The typical profile of those who surrender life insurance policies to us is a 65 or older. They've owned a policy for over 20 years. The universal or whole policies, the premiums get to be expensive, and the reasons that they had bought or taken the policy out 20 years ago have been dealt with. In the intervening two decades or more, they've accumulated a portfolio, and they've also started to begin to focus on their estates as well, so a policy, as they get older, that becomes more expensive.
From our standpoint, and what we're depicting here, and we can send this as a follow-up because it bears repetition, is that the market or the underwriting process that we engage in for these policies. The long and the short of it is we are obtaining policies for more than the cash surrender value, but less than the death benefit, and again, back to the fact that 90% of the policies are lapsing, is the two or more decades of policies that have been paid, which is what we're depicting here with the value of a life settlement transaction, that is simply a sunk cost that doesn't get dealt with as an asset. Quick history in Abacus, and like I mentioned, the foundation of this is the U.S. Supreme Court decision that defined it as an asset.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, that's where life settlements as a market began to develop. One of the things that was an impetus to this was the age issues back there, and these were individuals who were surrendering their life insurance policies because they had a shorter lifespan. Throughout the 2000s, the founders of Abacus Life, who had their backgrounds in life insurance and actuaries, they began to pool their assets and to acquire life settlements policies. Stepping into the 2020s, as Jay Jackson joined and became CEO, the focus shifted to Abacus as being an originator of life settlement policies and then a market maker in placing those with the ultimate institutional investors. Starting in 2023, in becoming a public company and the equity raises that we've done, there's several benefits we see there. And first of all, is the cost of capital.
So we're taking in $1 of assets, be it equity or debt, and we're putting it to work. We're buying life insurance policies with it. Our cost of capital has been improved by being a public company. The other is from a credibility standpoint with the engagement of counterparties and also with the individuals who are originating these policies. Being a public company and being listed on Nasdaq has been a big credibility builder for us to initiate and bring these conversations to conclusion.
Back to our edges as well and the moat around this business, we have principals with 30 years in this business who are still coming in, who are backed by a growing team of experienced executives that in the acquisitions of these policies and the fact that we can leverage on accumulated 30 years of discipline and network and credibility in the origination of these policies, and we're seeing it bear fruit with our financial highlights, which I'm going to get to next. Our Q3 numbers, by the way. So as we began to take in capital and to deploy it into the markets as well, we have been able to do so while also growing our revenues and especially our margins.
These are the metrics from Q3 as well, and the one that we're especially proud of, by the way, was the fact that we have deployed capital and we have done so as we've improved the margins. That's one of the things that we really like to highlight on this slide here as well. And a lot of the questions we get are just about the revenue, the lumpiness of the life settlements business, the carrier buybacks, which we're going to get to in a minute. So between Q2 and Q3, one of the things we're pointing to is $28.1 million versus $29.1 million of revenue. However, we did that at the exact same EBITDA.
If this was a more established business, and as we changed the mix of our revenues from mostly through intermediaries to a growing percentage of direct, the cost of acquisition improves or goes down, and we did a difference of $1 million in revenue and also a difference at 170 basis points of margin. If this was a more mature business and you're talking about changing the mix or even reducing revenues and growing the margin, that would be something that would be compelling from a value standpoint and something that we could discuss all day long. We've added shares in being a public company. Another thing we want to focus on is when we're talking about the difference between 18% and 23% in terms of return on equity. That answers the question we got about our November equity raise.
Why were we doing the equity raise three months after we had done the initial one after the SPAC offering a year before? The answer is we're looking at return on equity opportunities in the underlying portfolio of life settlements and life insurance policies in excess of 20%. That could revert to the mean, but right now we're seeing compelling opportunities for us to deploy our capital at a growing return on equity. We get the question, what are you doing with the capital and the capital that you deployed? We deployed $93.2 million of capital in Q3 and $104.7 million in Q2 of this year. That's what we're doing with the equity and the debt that we've raised, and we are acquiring policies or originations with it. We're going to end 2024 with over 750 policy originations.
So we're continuing to grow our penetration in that part of the business. At the same time, Abacus is also a growing component of the tertiary market as well. So that means two things. First of all, institutional funds that might be liquidating could have some residual policies. They can come back to Abacus, and we can acquire those and help place those with other institutional buyers to match funds liquidity profiles. The other thing, and this is a key part of the growth of the core business in life settlements, is carrier buybacks. Insurers, the original underwriters out there, have a growing amount of policies, predominantly universal life, that they had made some mortality or surrender assumptions 25 years ago or so that haven't panned out.
These are policies that remain on their books that the regulators have told them they need to hold a greater amount of reserves for. We know the profile of those policies, and when we originate or, having years ago, place those into an institutional portfolio, we can go obtain those policies for the underwriter and then bring them back to the underwriter. That accomplishes several things, but the key part of it is the underwriter is able to lapse the policy and release the reserves. That carrier buyback participation is a growing component of the active management of our portfolio. And the other part of that is the reinsurers are also a growing part of this. They tend to move quicker than the underwriters themselves, although it's moving in a very positive direction for us in terms of earnings.
And the reinsurers, we've discovered, actually hold or own a large part of this risk. So they've been a big part of the carrier buybacks as well. Leads to a question that we get in terms of the portfolio and the participation. Does more institutional involvement in life settlements in the U.S. mean a tougher business for us or more compressed margins? It actually means the opposite. So if the funds are stepping into the market at 13%-14% IRR, they might compress that a little bit for this uncorrelated asset class. It could be 11%-12%. That increased participation means a healthier market for placement of the life insurance policies that we are originating as well. We are back to this into the focus as well, just to hit on this one more time.
Despite the change in margin, we lower the cost of that revenue, and our margins increase, and that is a direct function of the capital deployed and the return on equity. This is just a depiction, by the way, of the use of our balance sheet. For now, or during Q3, we're holding policies on our balance sheet for an average of 116 days. The capital that we've raised is actually going to give us a little more flexibility when it comes to that. If we can hold a policy for even another 20 days on our balance sheet, two things happen. First of all, we get the benefit of the accretion when it comes to the active management core components of our business. And the other is, in each quarter, we see this.
There are policies at the margins that the individual lapses, and we get the mortality benefit and the full face value or the death benefit as well. If we can hold policies for just a little longer without having to turn it over to free up capital and step back in to buy the life insurance policies, that's going to be a net benefit to the growth of our business. Two other things to just cover here as well is the weighted average life expectancy is really a function of the institutional allocation out there. So life expectancy of 66.5 months, and for 2024, our face value of the life insurance policies that we're acquiring is going to be right around $2 million. Last thing we want to cover here as well is this is the changing mix and to the point of margins as well.
The more we grow the direct-to-consumer channel, which has been growing, and also the wealth manager channel, and the less we've been relying in the movement from 65% to now 20% and less coming through the brokers who bring batches of policies to us, the better for our growth and for our margin. And we continue to leverage on this and to focus on that component of the mix. Other questions we get in terms of growth initiatives and opportunities. The direct-to-consumer is generating 12,000 leads a month for us. These are individuals or the wealth managers who see Jay Jackson's commercials, get steered to our Life Settlement Calculator, through our website and generate leads for us. 11,000 of the 12,000 are kicked out instantly. It could be somebody like myself, mid-50s, relatively healthy, 25-year life expectancy. There's no market or paper for that.
Our interest is seven years and in, so there's two reasons to grow this. In the ABL Wealth platform, first of all, there's 11,000 conversations that end once we understand there's no market for the life settlement policy. But these are individuals and managers who've reached out to us, and we are now with the ABL Wealth acquisitions that we've made, especially with FCF Advisors. We can have conversations with those individuals about financial planning. Also, roughly 40% of the payouts, right around $250 million for last year, went directly to the consumers who don't have wealth management relationships. We're talking about being part of that conversation. The next part of FCF Advisors is we're working with the SEC on interval funds so that the mortality or life expectancy can become a direct component of financial planning.
Carlisle Management Company, it's a $2 billion Luxembourg-based asset manager that allocates directly to life settlement policies. It's been a client of Abacus for years. We closed the acquisitions of both of these on December 2nd. It enables us to do two things: direct allocation to life settlements through a limited partnership structure. And also, we're going to realize the benefit of the integration into Abacus, especially on the administrative front. We think that that synergy is going to be on the order of $2 million-$3 million. It also is a key step of Abacus's continuing transformation into a global alternative asset manager that, over and above the core part of the business in life settlements, means that Abacus is diversified and more of the sum of its parts.
Last part that we want to discuss with you too is, as we step into the diversification of the business, ABL Tech, that's a key part of it as well. ABL Tech is our core data in tracking mortalities of individual life insurance policies that are in or on our balance sheet, days or dollars. If we are tracking the mortality of these individuals, we're filing a claim right away. We also assist some third-party funds with this as well. We are now selling this mortality data primarily to public pension plans. We just signed CalSTRS, which is the largest teachers' pension plan in the U.S.
We are matching their individual pensioners with their mortality data, with the list that they give us, and we are, within a few days and over 95% accuracy, informing these pension plans that the individual pensioners may have passed and that these are payments that should be surrendered. It is actually a bigger and a higher profile problem for them that we are helping solve, and we view this, or we think about this, in terms of roughly one dollar per life per year, and as we went from this business standing up in March of 2024 to we now have 25 clients, we have twice that in the pipeline and building momentum, roughly a subscription of a dollar per life per year. If we get to a million lives, we're at breakeven, and anything beyond that becomes 80% margin.
So to sum up Abacus Life and the value proposition, our core life settlements business is a growing high margin and growing high margin core value proposition with a significant moat from our discipline in it. ABL Wealth is a diversifier of the business to exploit the opportunities that are right in front of us, and ABL Tech is a coiled spring that drives right from our discipline. So I think I'm coming up on the end here. If there are any questions, I'd be delighted to take those.
Pretty well.
How'd I do?
Great. Fantastic. Really appreciate the overview here. We have a couple of questions from our attendees in the Q&A bank below. Can you talk about the competitive landscape here and, I guess, what ABL's advantage is relative to peers?
And also, I guess, just out of curiosity, do competitors include the larger institutional investors that you ultimately partner with when you go to sell these policies?
Second part first. We don't see the institutional partners as competition for us as well. Competition for us on the origination side, we're the largest component of this. We're the only public one. There is a company, Coventry. You probably noticed their commercials as well. They're private, and they tend to go more down market. We get the question, "If this is such a great business on the origination side, why wouldn't institutions step in and just obtain their licenses?" They've tried. There's some that have done it and lasted less than a year. You can obtain the licenses as well. What we've got is the moat of our 30 years in the discipline and the network we've built.
And again, the other question we get is, "Institutional interest, is that a headwind?" It's the tailwind because it means there's more bidding competition for the life settlements that we're originating.
Got it. Got it. That's helpful. Maybe talk about the business model a little bit. So I think you mentioned the average number of days that you ultimately hold a policy on your balance sheet is a little. I think it was over 100 days or so. I guess, how's that trended over time, and what's kind of the goal number there?
We think of the goal in terms of balance sheet, which we've arrived at.
So if we have a balance sheet of roughly $500 million between equity and debt, then you can think of that in terms of $125 million or so, a quarter deployed into the market in acquiring the policies, which means we have the flexibility to hold on our balance sheet policies that we think are going to be a net benefit or a tailwind to us. The shortened duration was mostly a function of we needed to sell a policy in order to free up the capital to step back into the market. So the goal is flexibility while we remain nimble and in equilibrium with our balance sheet.
That makes sense. That's helpful. Kind of as a follow-up, in terms of when a policy lapses, I think you mentioned there's some instances where you ultimately get to keep the cash value, the surrender value.
I guess, how often does that happen, and what's kind of the scenario there?
And David, we saw roughly $3-$4 million of that in Q3.
Those are the additional maturities.
Yeah. So these are what we consider at the margins. Brendan, these are policies that we're getting the full death benefit of because they're sitting on our balance sheet. Whoever owns the policy is going to get the full death benefit as well. So it's back to the flexibility from the equity and the debt capital that we've raised, as we might get a sense with our discipline and experience of policy sitting on our balance sheet that might mature. It's a morbid way to put it, but it matures sooner than later. This isn't central to our business. Our business is about origination and placement.
Yeah. That makes sense. That's helpful.
Maybe from a more broader perspective, what are kind of the long-term demand drivers here? What do you kind of pin the addressable market at and maybe talk about market share a little bit?
Sure. We think of the addressable market, by the way. So we'll go from top and down. There's $13 trillion of life insurance that's in effect in the U.S. And again, the U.S. is the only jurisdiction where this works because it's the asset. If we cut to universal and the whole policies of the individuals who are older or have a shorter life expectancy, conservatively, it's $250 billion of addressable every year. And net, $4.5 billion that's being surrendered in life settlements. So we are barely scratching the surface here. In terms of the key drivers, it's a growing institutional interest in allocating to mortality as an uncorrelated asset class.
So the more established, the more credible, the farther we get away from having been the Wild West 20 years ago, we're seeing more institutional participation from the capital markets on the market-making side of this.
Got it. That makes sense. And we'll wrap up with one more question here just on the marketing and distribution side. Can you talk about your marketing approach? I know you mentioned CNBC as a channel there.
Yeah. There's our marketing slide, if you can see that.
Oh, yep. Perfect.
We get the question of what drives the leads for us from a marketing standpoint, from the direct-to-consumer and also back to this from the agents as well, who are the wealth managers. It's this. It's traditional advertising in television and also radio. As well, we do some digital-based advertising.
But if you think about the profile of the individuals, they're the ones who are tuning into Bloomberg and Fox Business and CNBC, and they have the volume on as well. We do some advertising digital. It doesn't come close to the traditional advertising and how it drives to our website to get into the life settlements calculator. One other thing to add to that too is now that the political season is over, we don't go chasing, so we didn't spend more to place ads. We just got very selective and judicious about where we're placing those ads. We have a lot more flexibility now that the prices have come down because the political season's over.
Absolutely. That makes sense.
It's TV and traditional that drives the vast majority of the 12,000 leads we're getting a month.
Got it. Well, Rob and David, really appreciate the overview today. We'll wrap up there. Thank you again for your time.
Thank you, Brendan, and thank you, everyone, for your interest.
Great. Thanks, everybody. Have a good day.
Thank you.