Defined terms for the annuity market and lifetime income landscape.
A tontine is a closed pooled-income arrangement in which a fixed group of members each contributes capital at the outset and receives a periodic income share for life, with the share of pool resources released by each member's death redistributed automatically among the surviving members.
Tontine payout mechanics are the structural rules that determine how a tontine pool's income is calculated, distributed, and adjusted over time — how pool assets and composition translate into per-survivor payments and how the share released as members die is redistributed.
Tontine pool governance is the set of rules, decision rights, and structural features that determine how a specific tontine pool operates — membership and closure rules, the redistribution rule, exit and liquidity provisions, adjustment rules under stress, and dispute resolution.
The tontine scandal refers to the early-20th-century US life insurance controversy — most directly tied to the 1905 Armstrong Investigation of the New York life insurance industry — that led to the suppression of tontine-structured policies in the United States.
A tontine structure, in the Longevity Standard context, is a mortality pool in which survivors receive redistributed shares of the capital of deceased members, used in the Longevity Standard framework as the structural reference for all pooled lifetime income arrangements.
