When Brian Duperreault retires from American International Group Inc. at the end of this year, he ‘ll be leaving the same company he joined as a trainee in the early 1970s — but a lot has happened along the way.
As the CEO of four very different insurance industry companies, he turned a specialist Bermuda company into a global player, stabilized the world ‘s largest broker as it struggled to recover from government investigations, and launched a startup before returning to turn around the company where he started his career.
For all of the achievements throughout his career, Mr. Duperreault was presented with the Business Insurance Lifetime Achievement Award during the virtual U.S. Insurance Awards event in late September.
Mr. Duperreault ‘s connection with Bermuda started long before he first left AIG to join Ace Ltd., which was headquartered on the island, in 1994. His parents separated before he was born and his mother had gone to Bermuda to be with her best friend, whose husband was stationed with the U.S. military on the island.
Born in 1947, Mr. Duperreault left Bermuda when he was five months old and was raised in Trenton, New Jersey. He attended parochial schools before enrolling at St. Joseph ‘s University in Philadelphia and majoring in math.
Graduating during the Vietnam War, “I had no plans, but I was good at math, so I went to grad school to get my master ‘s, but the Army intervened,” he said. Rather than continuing his graduate studies at the University of Maryland, he entered the army in 1970 and served as a clerk at Fort Knox, Kentucky. While he was in the Army he got married and needed a job when he left the service in 1973.
“I found out there was this thing called actuarial science. I didn ‘t know anything about it, but if you were a math major you had the prerequisites,” he said. He found a book listing companies that had actuarial training programs and one was the National Union Fire Insurance Co. of Pittsburgh, Pa., a unit of AIG. After writing to the company in Pittsburgh, he received a phone call from New York, where the company was actually based, inviting him to an interview.
While he was unimpressed by the down-at-heel offices, he liked the energy at AIG and the camaraderie of the staff, so he took the job.
Starting in the research and development department, his first task was to design a divorce insurance policy to be developed with the National Organization for Women. Aimed at the mother of the bride, it provided an annuity for a woman after the breakdown of a marriage. “We didn ‘t sell one policy, but it was my introduction to AIG and to insurance. AIG was unlike any other company,” he said.
A few months later he was assigned to the casualty department to learn insurance from underwriters. The experience enabled him to witness the evolution of the liability insurance market. “D&O was being developed before your very eyes,” Mr. Duperreault said.
On his return to the actuarial department, he became the company ‘s reserving actuary. “They said there ‘s this thing called the Bornhuetter-Ferguson method, here ‘s the paper and here ‘s the data, start some projections,” he said.
He was running the actuarial department at 30.
In 1981, he moved to technical services and was head of international operations for accounting, claims, actuarial, administration and technology. He oversaw several thousand people, and he traveled globally.
In 1985, he went to AIG CEO Maurice R. Greenberg and said he needed a better understanding of underwriting. “He was good enough to put me in charge of the casualty operations of international and that got me into domestic casualty business in 1987,” he said. During the hard market he developed a $25 million lead umbrella product that helped give AIG a leading position in the excess casualty business.
After gaining the added underwriting experience, he was sent to run AIG ‘s operations in Japan. “That was a great experience, because it forced me to manage differently. You can ‘t turn up in Japan as some hard-charging, New York-trained guy. You have to slow down and listen and read body language,” he said.
When he returned to the United States, he was put in charge of AIG ‘s international operations. “It was one of the greatest jobs you could have in the business,” he said.
By 1994, though, he decided it was time to leave AIG and he was approached to be CEO of Ace, which was formed nine years earlier. Coincidentally, earlier that year he had applied for Bermudian status, based on his birthplace.
Ace was working through problems, including dealing with breast implant claims, but had obtained a public listing the previous year. “Getting a job as a CEO of a publicly traded company does not happen very often, so it was such an incredible opportunity,” Mr. Duperreault said.
With only 55 employees and a limited product line that was focused on D&O and excess casualty, Ace was too narrow and needed to diversify, he said.
Over the next several years, the company expanded its products and locations, and made a series of acquisitions. In 1999, it completed the transformational acquisition of Cigna Corp. ‘s property/casualty business. At the time, Ace had grown to 600 employees, but Cigna added 9,000 employees around the world.
“It was very risky,” Mr. Duperreault said. Cigna had underwriting problems, particularly on its domestic business, and old-year liabilities, which were covered by a reinsurance arrangement in the purchase agreement, and Ace had to leverage its balance sheet to finance the deal, he said.
Having transitioned the leadership of Ace to Evan Greenberg, who joined the company in 2001, Mr. Duperreault retired in 2006 at age 57. “I did think I was retiring. I didn ‘t think I ‘d go back into a full-time CEO job,” he said.
Mr. Duperreault went on to do some board work and became more involved with nonprofits, but while traveling to an insurance industry golf event in 2008, he said, “God spoke to me on the way and told me I was going to be CEO of Marsh McLennan.”
Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc., which was in serious financial and reputational difficulties after it was the subject of former New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer ‘s investigation into insurance industry practices, approached him to lead the company a few months later.
Running a brokerage presented different challenges than managing an insurance company, he said. “You had to manage the people not the balance sheet.”
He relied heavily on Dan Glaser, now CEO of the company, to manage the retail brokerage operations while Mr. Duperreault concentrated on turning around other units and improving expense management.
While at Marsh McLennan, he was named the first chairman of the Federal Advisory Committee on Insurance in 2012. Again confident in his successor, he left Marsh McLennan at the end of that year.
In 2013, he chaired the Spending and Government Efficiency Commission in Bermuda, but the experience at Marsh McLennan had renewed his taste for running a company, and after meeting with capital providers he agreed to be the founding CEO of Hamilton Insurance Group in Bermuda in 2014.
He developed a business plan and in the next three years grew the business internationally, including establishing operations at Lloyd ‘s of London.
“I had a full-time job that I really liked, but I did tell them when I first joined that there ‘s only one reason why I would leave and that ‘s if AIG asked me to join,” Mr. Duperreault said.
In 2017, that happened. The insurer, which had had five CEOs over the prior decade and had faced numerous struggles since the financial crisis, brought him back to turn around its operations.
Mr. Duperreault brought in new leadership, examined the company ‘s underwriting and overhauled its practices as part of a years-long turnaround effort. He also expanded the business through acquisitions, including buying a reinsurer.
He brought in his eventual successor — Peter Zaffino, whom he worked with at Marsh McLennan — and stepped down as CEO earlier this year. He will retire as executive chairman at the end of the year.
“I feel very, very good about where AIG is right now. It ‘s got the right business plan, the right strategy, the right person and the right people in place,” he said.
Although he entered the industry without much forethought, it has been an excellent place to develop a career, Mr. Duperreault said.
“The world of insurance is such a great world because we are involved in every aspect of life. You have to be aware of so many different things, and you have to be a people person. It was so much fun,” he said.
His interpersonal skills and technical expertise have made him a great person to work with and for, said Don Kramer, founder, chairman and managing partner at Bermuda-based ILS Capital Management Ltd. Mr. Kramer previously founded Tempest Reinsurance Ltd., which Ace acquired in 1996.
“He ‘s been so good at dealing with people. They love to hear him and listen to him and work with him, and he ‘s been honest and straight,” Mr. Kramer said.
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ABOUT THE AWARD
The Business Insurance Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes an individual whose outstanding contributions have had a lasting impact on the insurance and risk management sector. The 2018 honoree was Maurice R. Greenberg, chairman and CEO of C.V. Starr & Co. Inc. Mr. Greenberg and the 2017 honoree, Patrick G. Ryan, chairman and CEO of Ryan Specialty Group Holdings Inc., were also the first inductees into the Business Insurance Hall of Fame in 2018 and were joined by 2019 honoree Martin P. Hughes, executive chairman of Hub International Ltd., and 2020 honoree Kevin Kelley, retired vice chairman of Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. ‘s Global Risk Solutions business.
