Finance History | 1932 Wynnton Road — Forty Thousand Dollars and a License from Columbus

People treat Aflac as a duck and a ticker in the S and P 500.

The company began as a paper insurer in this Georgia city.

On 17 November 1955 John Amos and his brothers Paul and William organized the American Family Life Insurance Company of Columbus.

John Amos had earned about 40,000 dollars in legal fees from gas-pipeline work in Florida. That sum, recorded in the New Georgia Encyclopedia account of his career, became the seed money.

Georgia's insurance department and the absence of a hometown carrier were the reasons he picked Columbus over Jacksonville.

The state issued a license to sell insurance on 28 March 1956.

For the first year the brothers worked from rented rooms downtown. A later local history places those rooms at the northwest corner of 13th Street and Broadway.

In 1957 the firm wrote cancer-expense policies, a supplemental contract that paid cash when a listed diagnosis was made. Payroll deduction, not a retail agency force, was the distribution method that scaled.

The company changed its name in 1964 to American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus.

It listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1974.

The Aflac acronym was adopted in 1990.

Japan became the larger book of business. The listed parent remains headquartered in Columbus.

The tower at 1932 Wynnton Road is a later campus, not the 1955 rented rooms. The sidewalk on Wynnton is the public view of the standing headquarters.

The mechanism is a supplemental policy sold at work, paid in cash, written first in a city that did not yet have its own insurer.

Photo: Gary Dunn, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Aflac tower on the Wynnton campus, 2012.