Welcome back, everyone. We have an update from Citizens Inc. Trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CIA. It is a diversified financial services company providing life, living benefits, and final expense insurance and other financial products to individuals and small businesses in the U.S., Latin America, and Asia. Please welcome President, CEO John Stenberg, and CFO Jeff Conklin. Welcome, guys. We're ready for your update today.
Awesome. Thanks, Anna. I'm so excited to be here with everybody again. For those who are new to us and us to you, I will give a very, very brief overview of who we are. We trade on the NYSE as CIA, a very memorable ticker, I think, one we have a little bit of fun with when we travel to South America. We've got about 250 employees. We have policyholders in 75 countries, and we now have over 3,000 producing agents, and that's way up from just a couple of years ago, $1.7 billion in assets, and we have over $5 billion of insurance in force. I'll just mention very quickly what the dots are on the global map there. Business that we do internationally comes in through our operation in Puerto Rico. We are headquartered just north of northern Austin, Texas.
We are insurance domiciled domestically in Colorado, and there's a dot in South America and Taiwan because that's where the majority of international premiums come. Domestically, we have two major businesses. We have a home service business, and their premium comes from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. We are a national carrier of domestic final expense. Those two businesses are similar but different. With that, I think we can open it up to questions. I am in the wonderful city of Miami. I've been here. I've had seven meetings with distributors and potential distributors in the last seven days, and we try to get out there and talk and, more importantly, listen to our distributors. That's what I'm doing right here, right today in Miami. With that, let's open it up to some questions.
All right. Thank you, John. Jeff, we're going to start with you. What is your outlook once you get over the matured endowment benefit payment strongest headwind period in 2025?
Let me start by saying that we are a long-term business, which means we have policyholders that have been with us for many, many years, and they would expect us to be paying back their benefits. We knew this expected higher cliff was coming in 2025, and we've been working hard in two different ways. One is creating products to help with this little cliff we have to aim to try to have a product ready for these maturing endowments to keep some of our funds from going out and giving more protection to our policyholders. The product we developed has actually been very successful and is a small percentage of our total sales, but it is keeping some sales and increasing premiums. In addition, we also started developing a domestic product a couple of years ago, which is we're having that to help offset this maturing endowment.
Over the next few years, we will have a high level of maturities, but we are offsetting it by gaining sales.
Talk about what you're most proud of when you look back at the company's accomplishments in 2024 and the first half of 2025. How does this expanded footprint position you for even greater success in the coming years?
Sure. Great question. For 2024, that's a very easy question to answer. We were the fastest growing mature life insurance company in the United States. We grew from less than $20 million of sales domestically to nearly $50 million sales domestically. No other company can match that, especially mature companies, that percentage of growth. Now the first half of 2025, we've maintained that foothold we have in domestic final expense is where the growth came in. We're really now maturing our services to serve all these new clients and all these new agents. We went from less than 1,000 producing agents in 2023 to over 3,000 now. We've built systems and processes to be able to efficiently handle and give good customer service to our clients and good producer service to our agents. We're extremely, I call it building the factory.
We're putting the final touches in the factory, and that'll be a factory that'll produce a high level of sales for years and years to come.
How are you with your own product? Do you think what you have is sufficient, or will you continue to make new products for sale?
Another good question. We are looking to invest in new systems so that we will increase our speed to market in product development. We anticipate that we'll always need to respond to the market with new products, new features, new writers, new programs, new processes. It's just what we have to do. We do business differently than we used to in the past, where we'd have one product for five years. We're entering markets where we do need to be more responsive to the market, and we're making those investments in processes to do that. We anticipate a lot of new products in the coming years as we respond and grow into new markets.
Talk about your most important drivers of growth domestically and internationally and discuss your strategic advantages.
Domestically, it's kind of the same for both. How many agents do you have that are contracted with you that can do business with you? How good of a job are you doing converting them from contracted agents into producing agents? You see on the slide that I was talking about, 3,300 producing agents. That's a massive increase over 2023. We have 8,000 agents contracted. We're continuing to add new agents, bring them on board, and then you train and retain. You train them, you get them to love you, you get them to understand your systems and processes, and that's how you grow. We also have, one of our key advantages domestically is we can white label.
Very few, if any, major company in the United States can go to a major producer and say, we will give you a product with your name of choice on it, and only you can sell this product with that name on it. It gives those major agencies a real advantage in recruiting their agents. 60% of our business in this domestic final expense has come from that. It's been really successful. That is an absolute key advantage.
What do you see the best use of your time for growth, adding reps or working with the existing reps to add clients?
Yeah, there's no way to pick one or the other. You have to do both. For our existing reps, the focus really is on giving them a great experience. I call it agent ergonomics. If you can make your agents' life easier, they will use you more and more. You just become the go-to carrier. We've really become the go-to carrier for many of those agents. If you make them love you, they will give you more and more of their business. Word of mouth and recruiting are both easier when you have that core fan base. That helps you add new agents that will turn into future potential raving fans. Yeah, it's kind of both. One leads to the other.
How do you make life easier for your agents and new clients?
What I do with my team is look at your phone. Every app you have has been socially engineered, has been gamified to get it to be easy for you to use, to want you to come back to that app. We kind of have to think of our business like that. We have to think through every interaction we have with the agent, from commission statements to applications to how we treat their clients, as an opportunity to make raving fans. It is a wide offense on any hiccups in the system and any frustrations that the agent has with us. We have to attack those at every angle.
Perfect. Gentlemen, do you have any closing remarks for our viewers today?
I would just say that we're a rare bird in that we are a life insurance company, so that you think of, oh, just predictable, stable, but we're also a growth company. We are very much in growth mode. We have our eyes on expanding in Asia in the future. We have our eyes on expanding into even more states domestically, and we have really exciting plans. I look forward to giving you updates on that in the future.
Perfect. Thank you, John and Jeff, for this update. We look forward to continuing along with your progress.
Thanks so much, Anna. Thank you, everybody.
Thank you.
All right, everyone. We had Brazil Potash. They have to postpone until December, but we'll be back with Zista Gold at 3:25 P.M. Eastern. We'll see you soon.