In late 1999, Vittorio Severino made the switch from the securities side of financial services to the insurance side, joining Hartford Life, one of the worlds largest life and annuity companies, as its chief information officer. It was a very easy decision for me, Severino says. Besides being a leader in its field and rapidly growing, I like the kind of products were dealing with. Instead of such things as derivatives, insurance and annuities are things the average person can understand. For an engineer, its more real and more tangible.
His securities background has been a help in Hartford Lifes groundbreaking hedging project, which recently went live with rave reviews from security analysts. Some of the insurers more popular annuities have features that provide the upside potential of mutual funds without the downside risk of losing capital, protecting that risk with insurance that typically was reinsured. After 9/11, the reinsurance market for those kinds of risks dried up, he explains, and we were faced with dropping a popular and important part of our product. Hartford Life took the unusual step of hedging that risk using the capital markets, something that had never been done by an insurer before.
It requires a lot of computing power. Were doing complex calculations, simulating market behavior, and even simulating customer behavior. Those kinds of calculations are not new to securities firms, but they are to the insurance industry, says Severino. He asserts the day that system went live it had four times the computing power of the next-largest system that Hartford Life had. IBM mainframes? Not hardly. We strung together 64 Intel 3 gigahertz processors in commodity boxes, using mostly proprietary software we wrote ourselves. By the end of 2004, well probably be at one terahertz of computing power.
Although technology wasnt quite up to this level when Severino first got started, he says he began at a great time. This was in the 1980s, he explains, and computers were really coming into their own. I really hadnt had any experience with them until then, and I liked the immediate feedback, the way you could work on something and get results back from the computer and see how it all fit together.
A Good Fit
That fit extended to Severino and his choice of career, as well. When I started engineering school at Columbia University, I really had no idea which area of engineering Id end up in, he says. Many of the courses were theoretical and some esoteric, but I fell in love with computers on the first day of my first course in computer programming, and Ive stayed with it ever since.
After graduating from Columbia with a bachelor of science degree in computing systems engineering, he joined the consulting practice at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), followed by a major project at Shearson Lehman American Express. As soon as I started working on financial systems, I had the same feelings, so I decided to concentrate on that area. What ensued was almost 11 years at J.P. Morgan, where he worked his way up to managing director and co-CIO of global markets, and vice president and global head of technology for the foreign exchange, emerging markets, and commodities division.
Severino subsequently joined a real insurance powerhouse with Hartford Life. At more than $16 billion in 2002 revenues, it is a world leader in several markets. It sells a wide variety of life and annuity products through multiple distribution channels and is the number-one writer of broker-sold annuities in the U.S., for example, and has been for 10 years. It also is the largest annuity writer in Japan, with a 24 percent market share. Japan is an important market for us, Severino explains, with one of the worlds largest economies and an aging population of people who are savers at heart. Now senior vice president and CIO and also a member of Hartford Lifes Senior Leadership Group, Severino heads up a division with more than 1,200 IT professionals spread all over the world.
So in tackling the challenges of a powerhouse that implements powerful technology, what kind of personal automation does Severino himself utilize? I use the same kinds of tools that other CIOs usenotebook, cell phone, etc.but I always choose the one with the simplest user interface. He uses a BlackBerry, for example, because he likes the intuitive interface. His favorite device at home, he says, is the family Tivo (a computer that records TV shows), because it is so transparent to use. Im really looking forward to the convergence of many of these devices, such as cell phones and handheld computers.
As an engineer, he likes to see how it all fits together.
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