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May 17, 2018 at 06:39 PM
The board of the American Council of Life Insurers has picked Susan Neely, a longtime association executive who helped start the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to be its next president.
Neely will succeed Dirk Kempthorne as the head of the life insurer group this summer, the ACLI announced today.
(Related: ACLI: Dirk Kempthorne to Succeed Keating)
The ACLI is a Washington-based group that represents an industry that generates about $986 billion in premium and annuity consideration payments per year and manages about $6.8 trillion in assets.
Kempthorne, the outgoing ACLI president, previously had served as the mayor of Boise, Idaho; as a U.S. senator from Idaho; and as head of the U.S. Department of the Interior under former President George W. Bush.
Kempthorne took over at the ACLI aboard as the life insurance industry was just starting to recover from the effects of the Great Recession that started in 2008, and to understand how the Obama administration might implement the Dodd-Frank Act.
Neely, the incoming president, has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa and a master’s degree in public administration from Drake University, according to her LinkedIn entry.
Early on, she was the press secretary for Terry Branstad, the governor of Iowa.
From 1994 through 1996, she was senior vice president of public affairs at the Health Insurance Association of America, one of the two health insurer trade groups that later merged to form America’s Health Insurance Plans.
