Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
As the original founder of AFS and its many subsidiaries, Dan created the company vision and culture, attracted the management team, provided overall leadership and personally guided its U.S. and international expansion to success and prominence over a 14-year period, all on internally generated capital. Dan has led the company to continuous growth while reinvesting significantly to build sizeable business value. While maintaining majority control of AFS, Dan is a firm believer in a win-win business philosophy, and created an incentive stock option plan for all full-time employees. Dan is most proud of creating at AFS a highly cooperative, highly self-responsible, caring and non-political corporate culture, where very talented individuals can work together successfully. Dan has developed significant personal expertise, both nationally and internationally, in benefit plan design, the optimal funding of corporate liabilities, and the administration of multinational and local national supplemental benefit plans. He pioneered the use of Flexible Term Riders for liability tracking and MEC prevention under U.S. tax rules, delivering the product to numerous carriers. Having a strong academic background in international business economics, Dan led AFS into international markets, doing the opportunity assessment, selecting strategic international expansion targets, capitalizing several foreign subsidiaries, developing personal expertise in the supplemental benefit markets in numerous countries, creating new financial product designs outside the U.S., adapting marketing concepts to local tax and regulatory conditions, and implementing fully legal and locally approved plans with large multinational companies outside the U.S. These efforts have resulted in tens of millions of dollars of locally approved funding for supplemental benefit plans, and in the process, Dan was the largest life insurance broker in Argentina in 1995, and still manages the largest block of life insurance plans in Argentina.
At home with science and technology since his youth, Dan personally architected and developed the original software product, the AFS Master System, which became and remains the clear market share leader and product of choice in the U.S. market for supplemental benefit plans funded by life insurance. He recruited and managed a highly talented software group to continue enhancement and product development for some 13 years, including conversion to Windows and web enabling. Dan personally led the internationalization of the product, developing multinational tax, accounting, currency and language capabilities.
A speaker at dozens of conferences and industry events, Dan was also chairman of an IIR Conference on International Life Insurance and chairman of the premier SRI conference on CyberInsurance.
Dan has also been very involved in successfully adapting business insurance sales concepts for distribution through securities firms (e.g. Merrill Lynch), so that the sales process was coherent, focused and stringently compliant with legal and regulatory guidelines in the U.S.
Always looking for creative ways to deploy technological advances and new business models, Dan has been very actively engaged in four Internet and e-commerce ventures with respect to supplemental benefits and life insurance. He was a founder, principle shareholder and former CEO of WorldInsure.com, a B2C e-commerce company focused on Internet distribution of life insurance, which received $11 million in funding from a consortium of investors including several insurance companies. He is currently the CEO and principle investor in SegurosDeVida.com, a B2C site considered a category killer for life insurance distribution in Latin America. He is also leading the charge in Deferral.com, a B2B destination for the design, funding and on-line administration of 401(k) Look-alike plans (non-qualified share-based deferral plans). More recently, Dan and AFS have put together a compelling plan for COLI.com, another B2B site with a consortium of industry players that should become the hub of internet-delivered COLI plans.
Dan has a highly diverse background: attended college at a very young age, published immunological research by the age of 21, mastered Japanese, did graduate work in philosophy, theology, East Asian history and economics (some of this in Japan), spent a year as a professional translator, and did four years of graduate work at Harvard University, ending in the business economics Ph.D. program, doing business school MBA courses, graduate economics courses, and special field courses in advanced non-linear mathematical optimization. Dan left Harvard in good standing prior to finishing his Ph.D. in order to take the entrepreneurial leap and form AFS.