TIAA-CREF and M Financial Form Partnership

TIAA-CREF Life Insurance Company and M Financial Group announced an exclusive agreement to offer TIAA-CREF Life’s life insurance products to M Financial’s Member Firms and their clients. 

Through this relationship, TIAA-CREF Life will gain access to M Financial’s ultra high-net worth client base, significantly expanding its distribution network. TIAA-CREF Life will also develop a series of proprietary life insurance products that will be sold exclusively through M Financial and its affiliated licensed producers. In addition, TIAA-CREF Life will provide a variety of dedicated resources to support M Financial’s Member Firms, including sales and marketing support, underwriting and policyholder service.

“The core values that permeate M Financial — including their passion for client advocacy, service differentiation, and superior product performance — present our organization with an opportunity to not only partner with an industry leader but grow in a manner consistent with TIAA-CREF’s heritage,” said Tony Garcia, President and CEO of TIAA-CREF Life Insurance Company.

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Merlin Hires Chief Market Strategist

Merlin Securities announced that Rick Bensignor, a former Morgan Stanley strategist and behavioral economist, has joined the firm as Chief Market Strategist.

In this new position at Merlin, a technology solutions provider and prime brokerage services firm, Bensignor will produce behavioral market strategy research focused on a wide variety of asset classes and macro-economic commentary that will be made available to Merlin’s existing MerlinPrime, MerlinSHARP, and Merlin Institutional Group (MIG) clients. Bensignor will report directly to Stephan Vermut, Founder and Managing Partner of Merlin Securities, and will be based in the firm’s New York office.   

Bensignor has worked at Morgan Stanley, Dahlman Rose, and Bloomberg, LP. Within Morgan Stanley’s Principal Strategies Group, he was the group’s chief market strategist. Previously, he had been the firm’s Institutional Investor-ranked technical strategy analyst and oversaw its technical research product for four years. Bensignor also served as the head of technical analysis, futures, and commodities at Bloomberg, managing product development, sales, and marketing. Before that, he was Morgan Stanley’s commodities technical strategist and head of its institutional commodity futures sales desk, which followed his 12-year trading career as a broker and independent trader on the floor of several New York futures exchanges.    

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Bensignor received a B.S. in Business Administration from the State University of New York at Albany with honors.

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