by John Darer CLU ChFC MSSC CeFT RSP CLTC
It seems Patrick Hindert might want to upgrade his reading glasses. The Executive Director of The Settlement Services Group somehow managed to dub the potential bankruptcies of annuity payment servicing companies as “structured settlement bankruptcies” while summarizing Dallas, TX bankruptcy attorney Bruce Akerly’s presentation at the National Association of Settlement Purchasers (NASP) on annuity servicer bankruptcies.
What is Structured Settlement Payment Servicing and Why is Payment Servicing Even Necessary?
- A structured settlement payment servicer, sometime related to a factoring company only comes into play when an annuitant wishes to sell some, but not all, of their structured settlement payment rights.
- Certain life insurance companies allegedly refuse to dice or split payments the entire payment goes to the payment servicing company which does the “slicing an dicing”, takes its cut and pays the annuitant the difference.
- Some payment streams may be very large and diced up into smaller segments to make them mor affordable for smaller investors
The co-author of the alleged “seminal text” on structured settlements stated:
“Structured Settlement Bankruptcies – Bruce Akerly summarized his recent (2009) paper titled “The Impact of an Annuity Servicer’s Bankruptcy on the Annuitant and Structured Settlement Purchaser“. Akerly’s conclusions:
“The annuity payments received by a structured settlement servicing company, as well as the servicing agreement itself, become property of the bankrupt estate”; and
“It may be possible to draft provisions in the servicing agreement to anticipate some of the consequences of the servicing company entering bankruptcy and perhaps lessen the impact on all parties.”
As the structured settlement industry has already seen with the Scott Rothstein saga, mislabeling by the press, or “one off on the subject matter” beat writers, has a potentially deleterious effect on public perception of structured settlements given that the misinformation will be indexed on the Internet for some time to come.
I have documented their activities in several contemporaneous blog posts. Some examples.
- Martha Neil’s Contribution to Settlement Confusion – Structured Settlements 4Real®Blog June 14, 2011
- Scott Rothstein Structured Settlements Misconceptions Debunked – Structured Settlements 4Real®Blog February 1, 2012 Last update November 13, 2025
Watch John Darer’s two part Legal Broadcast Network video podcast on Structured Settlement Servicing, which includes an interview with Bruce Akerly. Darer’s interview with Akerly occurred in October 2009, the month prior to the presentation of the paper that Hindert commented on.
Postscript Unfolded in 2024 (15 years Later)
As they say you can lead a horse to water, but…
SuttonPark Nightmare Archives – Structured Settlements 4Real®Blog
Last updated February 14, 2026
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