DPL Financial Partners

David Lau is the founder and CEO. Lau spent over 15 years on the carrier and distribution side of insurance — including leadership roles at Allianz Life and Jefferson National — before launching DPL in 2016 to solve the fee-only annuity gap for RIAs. He has publicly described the firm as a technology-forward solution to a structural compliance problem.

DPL charges its advisor members a flat annual membership fee plus small per-contract fees when annuities are placed through the platform. It does not take distribution margin or carrier commissions. The firm's compensation structure is designed to maintain a neutral, fiduciary posture that aligns with how fee-only RIAs bill their own clients.

Confirmed carrier partners include Nationwide, Lincoln Financial, and Pacific Life, among others. DPL negotiates commission-free variants — sometimes called 'fee-based annuity suites' — that strip out distribution costs and offer lower total all-in fees suitable for advisory portfolios.

No. DPL is a technology and product-access platform, not a registered investment advisor. Its members are the approximately 5,000 RIA firms and fiduciaries that use the platform. DPL provides product access, carrier research, and compliance infrastructure; the member advisor retains full authority over client recommendations and portfolio construction.

The platform offers a multi-asset insurance shelf including fixed indexed annuities, registered index-linked annuities (RILAs), single premium immediate annuities (SPIAs), deferred income annuities, and multi-year guaranteed annuities (MYGAs). The common thread across the product set is the removal of embedded commission loads.

Eldridge, the holding company founded by Todd Boehly, is a disclosed investor. DPL has completed multiple venture funding rounds, with proceeds supporting carrier partner expansion and platform technology development.

DPL serves as a market-access layer between fiduciary RIAs and annuity carriers. By aggregating thousands of independent advisory firms into a single buyer group, it extracts institutional pricing structures that individual RIAs cannot negotiate alone. The firm positions itself as infrastructure, not advice — it does not compete with RIAs for client relationships.