Pacific Life Insurance

Known to many for the whale of a tail that it uses for show and tell in its television ads, Pacific Life has been writing life insurance since May 9th of 1868. The company sells a wide array of life insurance products, annuities, and mutual funds. In addition, Pacific Life provides a variety of investment products and services for businesses (including over half of the 100 largest U.S. companies), pension plan administering companies, and private individuals.

"West Coast" streams out from Pacific Life, but the truth is that the life insurance company operates nationwide; in fact, its subsidiary Pacific Life & Annuity offers life insurance, annuities, structured settlement annuities, and other investment products and services while primarily doing business in New York.

Pacific Life is the primary operating subsidiary of Pacific Mutual Holding Company, which also offers a wide array of life insurance, individual annuities, and other financial instruments including mutual funds.

Pacific Life is a member of the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association (IMSA), which furthers the cause of high ethical standards for the sale of individual life insurance and annuities. This is one reason why Pacific Life receives some of the most outstanding independent ratings in the entire industry.

Pacific Life's Ratings as of 2007 are as follows:

Rating Service Rating Category Rank AM Best: A++ Standard & Poor's: AA Moody's: Aa3 Fitch: AA Weiss Research: A Comdex: 95%

All of the above are among the highest ratings that any of those independent agencies give out.

Leland Stanford, the company's first president (1868-1876), ritually accepted his company's first policy on the first day of business. His life insurance policy would prove to be of great usefulness some years later. Pacific Life also began offering accident insurance in 1885 at the behest of policy holders. Just its second accident insurance policy claim came just 15 minutes after the policy was issued--and the company paid the claim.

Leland Stanford was a California Senator, and during his second term in office was when he founded Leland Stanford, Jr. University--yes, today's Stanford University. He did this to commemorate his one and his only son. Three weeks after the June 21st, 1893 commencement, Leland Stanford died. The Panic of 1893, among other circumstances, left his business matters in terrible disarray. The university was in danger of being closed down as it seemed like there was no money to pay the professors' salaries. However, Mrs. Stanford used the death benefit proceeds from her late husband's life insurance to keep the university going during those troubled times.

In 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression, Pacific Mutual Life's non-cancellable disability policies were draining the company of financial resources in a time when unemployment seemed never-ending and there was scarce cash to go around compared to today. At the behest of Insurance Commissioner Samuel L. Carpenter and with the agreement of the board of directors of Pacific Mutual Life, the insurance company leveraged its business philosophy of giving primary concern to the interest of the policyholders to save the company, and created the opportunity, through mutualization, for each of them to become the owners of the company. Pacific Life was reborn.

Then in 1955, Pacific Mutual Life became the first private enterprise west of the Mississippi to install and make full use of a "large scale electronic data processing system--Univac I." Just as their disability policies had been 19 years before, the Univac I was a double-edged sword for the company. While it made it more probable than ever that not a single one of their numerically increasing policy holders would ever experience a disruption in service, the Univac put new pressures on management to find new qualified employees; and while they were making the transition from old to new, who would help them phase out the old system? The answer was found in Pacific Mutual Life's managers' and executives' wives who volunteered their time under "Project Helpmate". Once again, the insurance company's commitment to the policyholders was proven to be the most important thing.

When Pacific Life turned 100 years old in 1968, then-company President, Stanton Hale, sent a letter out to all of the company's employees. In it he wrote: "Pacific Mutual Life is 100 years old, not totally because of much good fortune, but often times in spite of ill fortune. Growth accomplished with vision and through struggle is honest, strong growth. This is our heritage. It is a rich one-still filled with vision and with promise. It takes work to transform vision into reality."

Today, these feelings still inform the business conducted by Pacific Life.

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