ClearLife was started by Mark Venn in late 2007. Mark had spent three years building a life settlements business within Mizuho International and wanted to explore the opportunities for providing advisory services for the life settlements market. A reunion with some former colleagues led to Mark talking to Chris about building “Bloomberg for life settlements” – a platform that would allow for communication between market participants and create a common language to express value and risk. Chris joined Mark in August 2008 and set about building what would become ClariNet. In early 2009, Thierry joined the team and brought his experience of web development to the project.
We released ClariNet LS into production in June 2009 and secured our first subscriber – an affiliate of a major US private bank – later that year, followed by a rapidly growing investor in mid-2010. The slowdown in alternative asset markets occasioned by the financial crisis led to some challenging times in the next couple of years, but we kept our focus and continued to add to Clarinet LS’s functionality and worked hard at promoting it at trade shows and conferences. We count several well-established investors in our subscriber base and we continue to add new subscribers and develop ClariNet LS’s “network effect” for the life settlements market. As at August 2018, investors value, trade and manage over US$30 billion in face amount of life settlements using ClariNet LS and we continue to add new subscribers to the platform on a regular basis.
In 2015, we began working on opportunities to take some of the experience we gained from ClariNet into other asset classes. One of these initiatives is our lifetime mortgage platform, ClariNet LM, which came about through discussions with the actuarial team at a major international accounting practice. ClariNet LM represents a departure from the approach we took with ClariNet LS in that it is offered as either an Excel-based desktop solution or a web-based, fully integrated valuation and risk analysis platform. We have a vision for how the lifetime mortgage market will develop as it matures and we look forward to expressing that vision through enhancements to ClariNet LM.
We operate a “virtual office”, with team members working from home. The flexibility this offers makes it easier to serve our customers, who are located across the globe from Australia to the west coast of the United States of America.
You can find more information on our team leaders below.