One of history's best-known tontines was launched by King Louis XIV of France in 1696.

Participants each contributed 300 livres and were grouped into 15 age-based tontine classes so they shared longevity with people of similar life expectancy.

The French Crown invested the money and paid a fixed annual income to each class. As members died, their payments stopped, but the total income paid to the class remained unchanged.

With fewer survivors sharing the same income, each surviving member received progressively larger payments over time.

When the last survivor died, the remaining capital belonged to the Crown.

Tontines disappeared for different reasons in Europe and the U.S.

In Europe, government-sponsored tontines gradually gave way to conventional government borrowing. As life expectancy improved, governments found that the lifetime income they had promised was becoming more expensive than originally anticipated, while increasingly sophisticated bond markets offered a simpler way to raise capital.

In the United States, the story was very different.

During the late nineteenth century, tontine policies became America's most popular form of life insurance, helping to fuel the rapid growth of insurers that remain household names today. By the turn of the twentieth century, tontine policies dominated new life insurance sales, eventually reaching 50% of U.S. households and holding 7.8% of the US national wealth.

The problem was not longevity sharing.

The Armstrong Investigation of 1905 uncovered widespread governance failures within parts of the insurance industry, including opaque accounting, excessive commissions, investments in affiliated companies, insider transactions, speculative ventures, excessive loans and discretionary management of policyholder surplus.

The resulting reforms transformed the American life insurance industry and effectively ended the sale of tontine policies.

Importantly, the investigation targeted how insurers managed policyholders' money, not the principle of longevity sharing itself.

The Tontine Trust Fund (TTF) is the world’s first live modern tontine.

Instead of participating in a single pooled fund, every member participates through their own professionally administered irrevocable trust. During the member's lifetime, the Trust continues to hold assets for that member's benefit while providing monthly lifetime income.

When a member dies, the remaining Trust Property is redistributed to the surviving Member Trusts in accordance with the Trust Deed, allowing the original principle of longevity sharing to continue using modern legal and technological infrastructure.