Kamakura Corporation announced that Richard E. Owens, a 25 year MetLife veteran, has been named Managing Director and Chief Actuary at Honolulu-based risk vendor Kamakura Corporation. Mr. Owens, who will be based in New York for Kamakura, will work closely with Kamakuras rapidly growing client base in the insurance, money management and pension fund industries both in the United States and in international markets. Mr. Owens will be heavily involved in helping insurance companies meet a best practice standard in risk management, in addition to overseeing Solvency II compliance for Kamakura clients in the insurance industry.
Previously, Mr. Owens was a Vice-President and Senior Actuary at MetLife where his assignments included 10 years in the Portfolio Management Unit of the Investment Department and 15 years in various actuarial and systems roles on the liability side of the balance sheet. His Investment responsibilities included corporate asset and liability management, the modeling and development of optimal portfolio strategies for the General Account, the understanding and modeling of investment risk including modeling assets for Economic Capital, VaR, Statutory Cash Flow Testing, Asset Adequacy Analysis, RBC C-3, portfolio management, bank ALCO, GAAP Loss Recognition, Financial Statement projections, stress testing and “what-if” analysis. Kamakura Risk Manager was his tool of choice to fulfill these responsibilities. He worked with Investments, Corporate Risk Management and the Lines of Business on a variety of issues including National Association of Insurance Commissioners Risk-Based Capital. In previous assignments at MetLife, Mr. Owens was responsible for Institutional Financial Strategies, which includes Asset and Liability Management and Capital and Risk Management for the company’s Pension and Group insurance business. He held the position as head of the Pensions’ Shared Systems Services unit, and he was responsible for the pricing and financial reporting for the Closeout Annuity product. Before joining MetLife, he had been a group actuary with Home Life Insurance Company in New York.
The lines between all wings of the financial services industry are rapidly blurring, said Kamakura founder and Chairman Dr. Donald R. van Deventer. Rich Owens has been a visionary in bringing a common framework for true enterprise risk management to a very complex financial institution. His insights and depth of industry knowledge will be extremely important to Kamakuras insurance clients in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.
Rich Owens has proven himself as both a strategist in risk management and as a hands on implementation expert, said Warren A. Sherman, Kamakura President and chief operating officer. It is a rare risk manager who is equally skilled at both the design of a risk management framework and its implementation and daily production. He has already made a large contribution to Kamakuras expertise in the life insurance and pension fund industries, and we expect that contribution will be even larger in the future.
Mr. Owens received his B.S. degree in mathematics, cum laude, from St. Joseph’s University in 1977. He became a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries in 1980, is a member of the American Academy of Actuaries and the Academy’s Invested Asset Working Group. He received his Chartered Financial Analyst designation in 1999
D.C.