Jay Jackson : Sure. Thank you, Wilma. We had filed and have filed an N2 prospectus. I think our last filing is available online public. And that was our fourth turn of SEC comments. We have whittled those down, I think, pretty significantly, and we’re very excited about that opportunity. We’re waiting on feedback now on what those next line of comments will be, but we are hopeful that, we’ve been able to accommodate the SEC responses along the way here and our hope is to have that targeting for us at that towards the end of April. I know that’s moved a few months here from when we initially hoped closer to February. But with all things considered this is the first product of its kind with the SEC and they’ve expressed that and they’re spending additional due diligence time just to make sure that we have the proper disclosures.
But overall, we think that’s going to be a product, at least in our business that has a significant impact, particularly within our ABL Wealth. That’ll be an interval fund that has its own ticker, and effectively available to the public and will be distributed out through RIAs and other distribution platforms, through RIAs and broker dealers, et cetera. So, we have a significant amount of interest already in that product where funds and are others have said, gosh, we’ve seen the filing. We would be very interested. Now we can’t have those conversations with them until we have a clean prospectus, which again, we’re hopeful to have that sometime in the next 30 days. But we believe that the overall interest and the contribution to our revenue will also be significant and that will be significant in 2024, and obviously thereafter.
And so, it’ll impact a number of areas of our business. And we’re right now just waiting patiently to receive some additional feedback from the SEC, but we expect that to be very, very soon.
Wilma Burdis : And then maybe if you could talk a little bit about the deployment pipeline where your capital position stands, the capital you expect to generate and what you can deploy
Jay Jackson: As I think Bill highlighted, we had a record capital deployment in the fourth quarter. I think it was $68 million. And year over year, that was up almost a hundred percent. And we had a record year on capital deployment in 2023 with $218 million. So, what we’re able to see is with the investment we’re making back into Abacus and our business and relationship to marketing and distribution that capital deployment, we expect to continue that trend. And with that, from our perspective, it takes us to the premise of additional capital ultimately on the balance sheet. And whether that’s through an interval fund, mutual fund product or that’s through other means, whether it’s a bond, which we did in January, which by the way, we were very proud of it was oversubscribed because the interest is significant or other type of equity finance instruments specifically around potentially do we consider issuing more primary shares through a secondary offering.
All of those things are at the forefront of our mind and we’re working closely with that because right now, when you think about capital deployment, it’s not the opportunities that we have and the revenue that we’re earning on those, it’s super important. We want to continue to do that, but it’s the ones that we’re not. And when you think about there’s opportunities, there’s contracts that we’re not purchasing, and if we had additional capital on our balance sheet, we would be able to take advantage of those opportunities and it would be a creative day one. It’s the type of thing that you would see a positive impact to our balance sheet by having more capital to it. So, we have a number of ideas and options and process right now so that we can continue to address that and increase the capital on our balance sheet.
Wilma Burdis: And then I guess just one last one. If you could talk a little bit about the pipeline for additional carrier relationships without naming any names, but just — talk about the there.
Jay Jackson: And that’s continuing to grow. I think that, there is a significant carrier that we work with now. There are more that we’re in deep conversations with and we will continue to see that interest. As we attend conferences and, and speak to them directly, what we’re finding is that there is a real need for this and they’ll continue to be one. The challenges from the carrier’s perspective is that they’ve kind of looked at our industry over time. Maybe they haven’t had the best experience or the highest level of opinion of our industry historically. And we’re set ourselves out to change that, and by being a publicly traded company in our industry, I think gives us a significant advantage in those conversations because as we’re working through governance committees at carriers, that’s one of the key things they look for.
Transparency, regulatory, are we able to manage and manage this transaction in an is a transparent as possible way? And also, being subject to the same type of regulatory that many of these carriers are at a public level not just at a state regulatory level. So, those conversations are going very, very well. We are advancing those conversations very quickly. I think in the last six months, it’s moved exponentially, and we think over the next year, it will move even quicker as there’s been more opportunities. And by the way, what’s important about those carriers is that this is a mutually beneficial transaction all the way back to the policy holder. And in the sense that as we know, policy holders typically have very high lapse rates, and this allows them to treat their policy like equity, and then potentially that policy gets lapsed and they can use that capital for other means.
From the carrier’s perspective, this is a really positive impact on their legacy liabilities, their balance sheet. And so, when you start to measure all of these positives, the carriers are starting to look at this and say, this needs to be one of the many things that they do in managing their legacy liabilities. But it went from, this is something we’ll think about to now, it’s a top two or three items.