Lincoln packs boardroom as new CEO takes helm with focus on restructuring plan

Lincoln National Corp has built out its boardroom to grease an ongoing leadership transition that comes just as a new efficiency and restructuring programme goes into high gear, officials said Tuesday (February 15).

An ongoing shift to a new CEO shows “a seamless transition, exactly as we had expected,” CEO-elect Ellen Cooper (pictured) said of taking the baton from outgoing top executive Dennis Glass.

Cooper tapped an insider to take-up the new post of chief investment officer “enabling me to delegate all investment responsibilities and really focus on the transition,” Cooper told an ongoing insurance sector conference hosted by Bank of America Securities.

The group likewise crafted the post of Chief Strategy Officer so that “as we continue to execute on all aspects of strategy, we will be thinking about building the business of tomorrow,” she added.

That largely frees Cooper to implement the efficiency and restructuring programme Spark that she spearheaded, with its $260 to $300 million savings target to 2024.

“It’s so much more than an expense saving programme,” Cooper told the conference. A year-long strategic process took on processes and customer experiences throughout the organisation before taking every idea through a cost-benefit analysis and into financial forecasts, she claimed.

“We are now about six months into the implementation; we have high confidence we will deliver on the numbers we communicated,” Cooper said. Expect acceleration in digital capacities and process automation.

Headcount reductions won’t require much or anything by way of pink slips. “We expect to handle the bulk of this through normal turnover,” she said.

Lincoln National will not abandon its guaranteed product business like so much of the industry is doing. The group values its reputation in third party distribution channels, likes its record on profitable pricing to date and suspects that cost of eventual successful re-entry would be formidable.

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