Defined terms for the annuity market and lifetime income landscape.
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.
The tontine versus annuity comparison is the structural comparison between a tontine — a direct pooled arrangement with visible redistribution and member governance — and a commercial annuity — an insurer-intermediated arrangement with invisible redistribution and insurer governance.
Total adjusted capital is the measure of an insurance carrier's available capital used as the numerator in the risk-based capital ratio, consisting of statutory surplus plus specified additions including the asset valuation reserve and other items prescribed by state insurance regulators.
