Heffernan Insurance Brokers has entered into a new partnership between its Life Division and Lion Street, a national network of firms specializing in advanced life insurance and wealth planning for high-net-worth individuals and business owners, effective August 1, 2026.
The partnership gives Heffernan's Life Division access to Lion Street's broader network for complex planning needs, including business succession, executive benefits, tax-efficient wealth transfer, asset protection and corporate-owned life insurance strategies. Through the Lion Street affiliation, Heffernan has specifically partnered with Adeo Partners and Oakmont Group, two firms with offices in San Francisco and Houston that together bring more than 40 years of collective experience in advanced life insurance planning and describe their practice as focused on some of the country's most complex planning cases.
Steve Brandel, director of the Life Division at Heffernan Insurance Brokers, said the partnership pairs the firm's existing client relationships with a deeper bench of technical expertise. "By combining our client-focused approach with the advanced planning expertise available through Lion Street and its partners, we can provide greater resources and more sophisticated solutions for the individuals, families, and businesses we serve," Brandel said.
Lion Street operates as a national network of independently owned firms rather than a single advisory practice. Member firms share access to carrier relationships, an in-house broker-dealer, and specialist resources for advanced planning cases that most brokerage life divisions do not have the scale or case volume to develop in-house.
The network is owned by Integrity Marketing Group, one of the more active consolidators in the life insurance and wealth distribution space in recent years, which acquired Lion Street and has continued expanding its footprint through additions including ASE Private Wealth.
The specific strategies that become accessible through this kind of arrangement - premium-financed life insurance, private placement variable life and annuity products, irrevocable life insurance trusts, and split-dollar executive benefit structures - require specialists who concentrate almost exclusively on those transaction types. A broker who encounters one or two cases a year cannot develop the carrier access, technical depth, or deal experience that makes those strategies executable for clients. Plugging into a network like Lion Street is a more efficient path than attempting to build that capability independently.
The move comes as the pool of clients who need this kind of advanced planning has been expanding quickly. The US added more than 440,000 new millionaires in 2025 - over 1,200 per day - according to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2026, driven largely by equity market gains, business sales, and other liquidity events.
Insurance specialists have noted that a meaningful share of these newly wealthy individuals carry coverage designed for an earlier, less complex stage of their financial lives - often without realising it. A business owner who sells a company and moves from a $3 million estate to a $30 million estate may hold the same term policy they bought when the business was growing, with no adjustment for the estate tax exposure the liquidity event has created, or for the succession planning their operating partners now expect them to have formalised.
That is the gap this kind of advanced planning partnership is designed to address. The prompt for a broker to ask whether a client's existing life insurance programme still reflects their current balance sheet is any significant wealth event: a company sale, a liquidity round, an inheritance, a property transaction that substantially alters net worth. Clients who have experienced one of those events in the past 24 months and have not reviewed their life insurance coverage since are the natural starting point for this kind of conversation.
The Heffernan-Lion Street arrangement is one example of a model that is becoming more common as the high-net-worth client base grows faster than most mid-sized brokerages can build internal advanced planning capacity to serve it. Rather than competing for HNW clients by investing in specialist hires and infrastructure over several years, firms are increasingly affiliating with networks that already have the technical depth, carrier relationships, and regulatory infrastructure in place.
For brokerage life divisions currently referring complex planning cases to outside specialists on an ad hoc basis, or losing those cases to dedicated wealth planning firms, a formal network affiliation provides a more systematic way to serve that segment without the multi-year buildout that building equivalent capability in-house would otherwise require.
