Welcome back, everyone. We have an update from Citizens, Inc. It trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CIA. It's 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. Happy to welcome President CEO Jon Stenberg and Jeff Conklin, the CFO. John, Jeff, welcome to the conference. We're excited to hear your update.
Great, well, I'll just do a super short explanation of our company real quick for those of you who are new to us, aside from having kind of the most interesting stock ticker out there. We are also a very interesting company. When you think the reason we do these things is because we don't fit neatly in a box, and humans like to put things in categories, and so it takes a little bit of time to understand what we're about and what box you should put us in, so normally, when you think about a U.S. life insurance company, you think of security, safety, but you also think about agonizingly slow growth, where the sales of most life insurance companies here in the U.S. grow by the rate of inflation.
We were the fastest-growing life insurance company in the United States last year, and we're a 50-year-old company. That's a very, very unique combination. We're also unique in that two-thirds of our premium came from insureds overseas. That's very, very unique. We have insureds in more than 75 countries. The two markets that we play in mostly are our overseas market, and those are for people around the world that would want U.S. dollar-denominated whole life. It's a very safe, secure whole life policy in U.S. dollars. If you are located in Colombia, for example, which obviously has a history of political instability and other issues, you might want the one thing in your life that, to be safe and secure, might be your life insurance. A U.S. dollar-denominated life insurance, which to us in the U.S.
Seems safe and boring and not really exciting, would be actually really exciting to you to have that part of your financial picture at least be safe and secure. And so we do great business in South America, and you can see here the top four countries outside of the U.S. are all in South America. We also do great business in Taiwan. That's amazing, high-quality business, and we'd love to serve them. But that leaves open also a lot of growth in other countries in South America and in other countries in Asia. Now, domestically, our primary market is hardworking blue-collar people that got their life insurance through their factory or their county school or whoever they were working for, and then they retired, and that life insurance is not portable. They can't take it with them, and they find themselves in their upper 60s without life insurance.
And so we offer them an affordable small policy so they can have a dignified funeral and burial without having to burden their family. And so that's where we've really grown in the United States. We went from five to 43 states within two years, and we're putting a lot of effort into making sure that that is really high-quality business and that the agents there absolutely love working with this. And so we build a long-term, profitable business there. And there's a lot of growth here in the United States left. We can go certainly upmarket now that we're in all these states. And so there's lots of growth potential both internationally and domestically. So with that, I think I'll end my comments, and we can go to Q&A.
Thank you, Jon. If you can talk a little bit more about that, like some strategic steps you're taking to grow your international business and also your U.S. business. Also talk about some strategic advantages and why you and Citizens are so successful.
So there's a couple, there's two questions there. So the first one, a concrete step we're taking right now is we're looking to buy and install a new admin system. Now, that doesn't sound very interesting, but it's actually really key. Our current admin system, which has performed very well for many decades, that's the problem. It's many decades old. It's written in an old assembly language that you have trouble finding people to program and also can't handle new modern types of products. And in some countries, it will be difficult for us to grow without these new modern products because they've moved beyond whole life. And here in the United States, as soon as you go upmarket, most of that market has moved beyond whole life.
Installing a new system that can handle these modern products would unlock many countries and also unlock us going upmarket here in the United States. That's a concrete step we're taking. I would say a competitive advantage that I might mention, having personally worked at very large companies like Lincoln Financial Group and New York Life, that really crush your soul with the bureaucracy. They crush innovation. We're not burdened with that. We're a hard-charging team that's hungry for growth, and we're not bureaucratic. Our goal is to become a large company while acting like a small company, that little engine that could, never becoming bureaucratic and becoming non-innovative. We're taking those innovations to markets like final expense that have not had it before.
We're finding that if you listen to the agent and you think, "How do I make the life of the agent and the client easier?" and you bring those innovations to that market, we're building a real rabid fan base among the agents out there that do business in this place because we're a company that they can, it's easier to do business with us. That is a real sustainable competitive advantage because there's just not a lot of innovation in some of these markets.
With that said, since you are an international company, how do you balance international versus domestic growth priorities, and where are the priorities?
So long-term, we'd like to be roughly 50% international, 50% domestic. Now, what's interesting is traditionally two-thirds of our premium come, as you can see on the pie chart there, our revenue, which is mostly made up of renewal premium from past sales, is international, only one-third in the United States. Well, our sales in 2024 were two-thirds domestic and only one-third international. And it wasn't because we had a bad year internationally. We actually grew at a very healthy pace. So over time, that'll start to moderate towards 50/50. I like the symmetry and balance of having 50% of our revenue here in the United States and 50% international. But it means if our growth internationally is going to have to start keeping up with our growth here in the United States to end up at that 50/50.
So right now, the focus is on the United States and making sure our new final expense business is profitable and we get high-quality business. But those growth horizons, especially in Asia, are really calling our attention, and we think there's tremendous opportunity for growth for our model in Asia.
First-year premiums have grown year over year for many consecutive quarters. How much of that growth is expected from existing products versus new product launches?
Backward-looking growth, obviously, it's all within our basic whole life, almost entirely from basic whole life insurance. As I mentioned before, looking forward, we'll want to create new types of insurance to reach new countries and new markets, especially when you go upmarket. They're going to want modern universal life level term products. And so our new system will allow that, and we think we'll be able to start producing those products sometime next year.
Can you comment on your investment portfolio composition and the impact of current interest rate conditions?
That's a great question for a CFO.
Life insurance is very highly regulated by state insurance departments. We have to stay within reasonable allocations or allocations they provide. Our investment portfolio overall is very conservative. We have an A rating across all of our portfolio. 99% of our bonds are investment grade. As far as interest rates go, we are always looking for yield enhancements. We're always looking for a safe bond that provides the best yield we can get at the point in time we purchase. We more recently started looking at yield- enhancement, private placement type securities, as well as other asset-backed securities to help us grow operating earnings.
Perfect. And are you acquisition-minded at all, or would you leverage the balance sheet?
We're really looking at organic growth and not diluting our capital, and we're also debt-free, and we're not eager to change that either. Through our partnership with a particular RGA, our reinsurance partner, they reinsure a lot of our business, and that really allows us to grow in a capital-efficient way, and what's really cool is we can also dial that up or down depending on whether we want to retain more of that business in the future, so we're looking at getting the growth now in a capital-efficient way, and then in the future, we might dial that reinsurance back a little bit and retain a little bit more of that business to drive profits. So we're trying to do this growth in a really capital-efficient and smart, forward-looking way.
Perfect. Well, Jon, thank you. Jeff, thank you. Appreciate this update. Congratulations. And we're looking forward to hearing more great progress in 2026.
Great. Thanks so much, everybody.
Thank you.
All right, everyone. We'll be right back.