Finance History | Principal — Seven Hundred Fifty Dollars Each Behind the Des Moines Bank
· 1879-7
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Finance History | Principal — Seven Hundred Fifty Dollars Each Behind the Des Moines Bank
kevin
People treat Principal as a glass campus on High Street that always ran 401(k) books.
The first company had no paid staff.
On 1 July 1879 Edward Ames Temple organized The Bankers Life Association in Des Moines to sell inexpensive assessment life insurance to bankers and the clerks who worked for them.
Temple, born in Lebanon, Illinois, in 1831 and raised in territorial Iowa, had watched a widow collect from a clergy mutual that kept almost nothing for overhead. He wanted the same arithmetic for bank employees.
He and fellow banker Simon Casady each put in seven hundred fifty dollars in 1879 money. The first board included Phineas M. Casady, Dr. George Glick, M. S. Smalley, and B. F. Elbert. Temple bought the first policy.
Bankers themselves were the early sales force. There was no salary for the officers at the start. The association shared a back room in the Des Moines Bank Building before taking its own rooms at 211 Fourth Street in 1882, when John A. Tibbs became the first paid employee.
Temple drew his first annual salary of three thousand five hundred dollars in 1888. By the year of his death in 1909 the association reported about four hundred million dollars of life insurance in force and some thirteen million dollars of assets.
Two years later the board converted the assessment society into Bankers Life Company, a mutual legal-reserve insurer. The name Principal Financial Group arrived in 1985. The art-deco house at 711 High Street opened in 1939 and remains the operational headquarters; 801 Grand, which the company also owns, is the taller neighbor on the same campus.
The mechanism was an assessment cap and almost no surplus to distribute. Temple refused to turn the book into a dividend machine while he lived. The conversion after his death is what let the Des Moines association become a listed retirement and asset manager.
Photo: Richc80, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
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