Doug Wolff to Succeed Mike Kiley as Security Benefit CEO

What You Need to Know

Transamerica has a new individual life and annuity president.
Lincoln Financial has named strategy and M&A executives.

Security Benefit Corp. is making a change at the top.

The Topeka, Kansas-based annuity issuer says Mike Kiley, the chairman and CEO, will pass the CEO title to Doug Wolff in June.

Kiley is planning to continue to serve as the company’s chairman.

Wolff has been the president of the company’s Security Benefit Life arm since 2011.

Security Benefit was founded in 1892. Guggenheim Partners, a private equity firm, acquired control over the company in 2010, in the wake of the 2007-2009 Great Recession.

Security Benefit brought Kiley in to turn the company around.

While Kiley was the CEO, Security Benefit worked to be an innovator in the annuity market. The company was the first to use custom index account options in non-variable indexed annuities, and it was one of the first companies to offer fee-based annuities through RIAs.

The number of employees increased to about 2,000, from 500 in 2010.

Assets under management increased to $50 billion, from $10 billion, over that same period.

Eldridge Industries, an investment firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut, acquired control of Security Benefit in 2017.

Wolff said in a comment that he has confidence in the people Security Benefit has in place and plans to continue the company’s trajectory of growth.

Transamerica

Transamerica — a Baltimore-based arm of Aegon ——has hired Jamie Ohl to be president of its individual solutions division and a member of the Transamerica management board.

Ohl will take over from Blake Bostwick.

Lincoln Financial

Lincoln Financial Group has added two executives to its new chief strategy office.

Jim Tierney is now the senior vice president for strategy at Lincoln, and Darrel Tedrow is the senior vice president for mergers and acquisitions.

Tierney has been the Radnor, Pennsylvania-based company’s vice president for distribution and marketing technology. He has also worked for Nationwide and for Hartford Financial.

Tedrow has spent the last two years at Worldlink International Ministries. Before that, he was head of M&A and corporate development at Lincoln.

He has been working for Lincoln and predecessor companies since 2004.