Newport Beach-based Pacific Life Insurance Company has reason to expect a smooth transition when Dawn Trautman becomes executive vice president of the life insurance division on Jan. 1.
Pacific Life sells life insurance products, annuities and mutual funds and has about $137 billion in assets. It reported revenue of about $8.4 billion in its most recent fiscal year and income of $561 million. It employs 2,139 locally and about 3,300 companywide.
The company doesn’t break out revenue for the life insurance division. It was the top seller of indexed and universal life insurance in the U.S. last year, with $252 billion in policies issued for its recent fiscal year, up 4%.
Trautman will succeed Rick Schindler, who plans to retire in December 2017, serving in an advisory role as the transition proceeds.
“This is something that has been planned for some time,” said Pacific Life spokesperson Steve Chesterman, “and Dawn was a natural choice to succeed Rick.”
Trautman, who was unavailable for this story, will report directly to Chief Financial Officer Adrian Griggs in her new post.
Trautman joined PacLife in 2001 and has worked with Schindler for the past sixteen years, most recently as senior vice president for product and strategy management.
“She’s not coming in from another company or industry” with an agenda to shake up the division, Chesterman said.
Open New Markets
Trautman likely will work to open new markets for PacLife’s insurance products.
She will lead a project, for example, to increase PacLife’s operations in Lynchburg, Va., and hire 300 employees there within the next three years, said spokesperson Tennyson Oyler.
She will build upon the acquisition of a sales platform in June from Genworth Financial, a life insurance company in Richmond, Va., that allows PacLife to sell term life insurance products directly to consumers or through financial advisers.
The new platform broadens PacLife’s client base, which was historically focused on affluent individuals and businesses.
“This new business center in Lynchburg will be an integral part of Pacific Life’s life insurance capabilities,” Trautman said in a company news release.
She also has spearheaded a recent focus on developing mobile technology and infrastructure to reach segments of the population deemed to be underinsured.
Most of those people are millennials—members of the generation born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, many of whom grew up using smartphones, computer tablets and internet services.
Creating mobile apps allows insurance companies to quickly match clients to insurance products, a process that required a few days in the past.
PacLife’s Prime Mobile Platform, for example, allows underwriters to provide a policy and quote to a client during a face-to-face meeting, Trautman said in 2014 to LifeHealthPRO, an online publication covering the insurance industry.
Providing the technology posed a challenge for the company because it needed to create new systems and IT infrastructure to support a mobile platform, she said.
PacLife also is using analytics, as most companies are doing, to learn which products are selling, create new products to meet changing demands, and decide the appropriate channel to contact the target clients.
Background
Trautman’s career started in 1987 with Prudential Insurance Company in Philadelphia, where she worked in the information technology and research departments, gaining experience on policy administration, client services and direct marking systems.
She helped transition Prudential’s group health insurance systems to the Hartford Insurance Group in 1996. Trautman then joined consulting firm Accenture in 1997 to work on systems-integration and business-improvement projects for New York Life Insurance Company’s offices in Philadelphia and Denver.
“Rotating through different jobs early on taught me to ask questions, to learn critical aspects of new areas quickly, and the importance of being able to see a situation from another person’s perspective,” Trautman told theglasshammer.com, a career website for professional women.
Trautman also worked as a consultant for PacLife prior to officially joining the company in 2001 as a program manager working on business improvement. She was promoted to assistant vice president of sales and marketing in 2004 and launched a productivity program to increase efficiency in the company’s sales channels.
She became vice president in 2006, and was promoted to senior vice president of product and strategy management for the life insurance division in 2010.
Schindler will leave Pacific Life after a 46-year career in the insurance industry.
He joined the company in 1990 as a branch manager in Kansas City after working for several insurers.
He was promoted to vice president of the company’s Independent Producer Channel in 2002, and became senior vice president and chief marketing officer of the life insurance division in 2006.
