Date Set for Woodall’s FSOC Confirmation Hearing

NU Online News Service, July 20, 3:15 p.m. EDT

WASHINGTON—The Senate Banking Committee has scheduled for Tuesday a confirmation hearing for Roy Woodall, nominated to be the independent insurance member of the Financial Stability Oversight Council.

According to industry sources, the hearing for Woodall will be held in conjunction with the hearing for Martin Gruenberg, nominated to be chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

It is unclear whether the process to put Woodall on the FSOC will be completed before September, given the few legislative days remaining this summer.

One or both houses of Congress plans to take off three weeks for the summer recess, which gets underway in about six weeks.

Sam Gilford, spokesman for Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., chairman of the committee, confirmed the hearing date.

Woodall was nominated for the post June 28 by President Obama, who was under pressure from members of Congress to name the independent insurance member of the panel as quickly as possible.

Woodall served as Kentucky's insurance commissioner from 1966 to 1967. He recently retired as the senior insurance policy analyst at the Department of the Treasury, a post he held from 2002 to 2011. From 2001 to 2002, Woodall was an insurance consultant for the Congressional Research Service.

Previously, he served as president of the National Association of Life Companies (NALC), and upon NALC's merger into the American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI), he served as ACLI's managing director for issues and vice president/chief counsel for state relations.

Insurance industry officials have been pushing for appointment of an independent member with insurance expertise to the FSOC because the new agency will have authority to designate an insurer as "systemically significant" under the Dodd-Frank financial services reform law.

That would allow federal regulators (in addition to state regulators) to examine an insurance firm. It would also give federal regulators the authority to impose higher capital standards on a systematically important financial institution, or "SiFi."

Analysts and industry officials have projected that MetLife, the largest life insurer, as well as American International Group and Prudential Insurance, are likely to be among the first insurers cited as SiFi by the new body.