New York Life

Our mutuality means we are fully aligned with our policy owners, not with outside investors or Wall Street. This policy allows us to focus on delivering lifelong value to our clients, including sharing our success with eligible participating policy owners through non-guaranteed dividends, which we've paid for 169 consecutive years. What mutuality means for you: We’re focused on the long term, and our interests are always aligned with those of our policy owners. Our financial strength provides peace of mind now and in the future. Since 1854, we’ve paid dividends every year. We’ve been meeting our obligations for over 175 years, in good times and bad.

New York Life was founded as a mutual life insurance company in 1845, its creators resolute in their conviction that the company would exist to serve its policy owners’ “long-term best interests.” The best way to achieve such an outcome was to make the company answerable only to those policy owners, not shareholders. Almost two centuries later, mutuality remains a cornerstone principle, having withstood the test of time and multiple, guarded explorations into other company structures. Perhaps the most intense of those explorations began in the 1990s when many of the company’s largest competitors — some of them comparable in age — demutualized to access capital growth available through stock off erings. Throughout New York Life’s history, mutuality has been a priority. One of its earliest advertisements called out mutuality’s benefi ts: “One of the peculiar advantages of attending assurance with this Company is, that all the assured share annually in its profi ts, and are interested in its success.” In 2008, Chairman and CEO Ted Mathas, formalized the company’s commitment to mutuality, making it, along with career agency, life insurance, and fi nancial strength, one of the company’s interdependent foundational strategies. For 175 years, mutuality has remained a constant, guiding the company and our policy owners to safe harbors in times of turbulence. In any climate, mutuality remains our true north.