Name: Catherine A. Rein
Occupation: President and chief executive officer of MetLife Auto & Home, which is based in Warwick and has about $1.5 billion in annual sales.
Backround: Before taking this job on March 1, Rein served as a senior executive vice president/business and corporate services for Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. in New York City. She has been with MetLife for 14 years. Before that she was vice president and general counsel for The Continental Group, Inc., and worked as a New York attorney.
Education: Graduated from The Pennsylvania State University and the New York University School of Law.
Age: 56
You started out as a lawyer?
Yes. I went to NYU, then I practiced law in New York, in one of the Wall Street firms. Then I came to Continental Can Company in Connecticut, which was a packaging company that also owned insurance interests, and oil and gas exploration interests, and all sorts of things. This was back in the ’70s when companies thought they should own lots of businesses. It’s not fashionable any more but it was then. And so I was staff attorney there and worked my way up to become general counsel. I was general counsel for five years, then the company was taken over – as many companies were in the ’80s. Then I went to MetLife as head of the human resources department, for a great dramatic career change which turned out to be great fun.
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Was it a major switch to go from law to being in an insurance company?
It was interesting. I went from being in a packaging company to being in an insurance company, and I went from law to being a head of human resources. And a lot of people used to ask me, wasn’t this a dramatic change going from law to human resources? I said not nearly as dramatic as going from a stock company to a mutual company; because MetLife was and is a mutual company, which has a very different dynamic. And as you know we are about to become a stock company, so it took the system 14 years to catch up with me.
Is there any trepidation on your part about making that switch again?
No, not at all. I’m looking forward to it. Over the years the differences in the two kinds of companies have changed a lot anyway.
Going to human resources from law, was that a change in interests?
No not at all. Actually when I left Continental, I had been general counsel for five years. One of the problems was I got to be general counsel very young. And I knew at some point I was going to have to make a change into the business side, even if I had stayed in the same company; because you just can’t have the same job for 25 years without getting pretty stale, and without hearing the people behind you start saying, ‘Get out of the way so I can get promoted too.’ So I knew I was going to have to make some kind of career change. And when I was forced – because my company was forced – to make a career change I said, ‘okay now is the time.’
But the problem is, when you make a career change like that, it’s like when you get out of college. When you make a career change all of a sudden you say, ‘Gosh I could do a lot of things.’ It got very hard to figure out what I wanted to try to do. So the way I handled it was I said, instead of trying to look for a job I’m going to look for an industry that I think is very exciting and interesting. At the time, back in the ’80s, when I did this the two really hot industries were financial services and high tech. Since in those days I didn’t even know how to turn a computer on, I said, ‘Oops I better look at financial services, I’ve got a fighting chance here.’ At the time also I was on the board of Bank of New York, so I knew something about financial services and, as I said, Continental had a life insurance subsidiary.
So I started interviewing with MetLife. I knew I wanted to be in the company and I wanted to get into a line job, so I could actually get a chance to have something to do with running a business, instead of being just a staff person. I liked MetLife, MetLife liked me, but we couldn’t figure out a job. Then all of a sudden one day, the human resources job came open. I said, ‘No way do I want to do human resources; you know I’m a lawyer.’ But it was a job and I wanted to get in the company, so I said okay I’m going to take this job. And if I don’t like it, as long as I make up my mind in two years, I can go back to practicing law and nothing horrible would happen.
Did you consider that a step down?
Right. Well, lawyers are very arrogant. So I said in two years I’m going to decide if this was a dumb decision or not. Somewhere around year three I realized I forgot to check in year two. So I said to myself, gee I must be having a good time.
But in the meantime I also had an opportunity to take on a lot of other staff departments. I tell people, and it’s true, I have a low boring point. Having no two days alike is my definition of a great job. So having six or seven different departments, which are all different from each other – I mean I had the elevators, and food services reported to me, and purchasing, the people answering the phones, and the lobbyists – so I had a lot of variety and that was exciting. It was also good training for me, ultimately for this job, because I had seen all different parts of the business. When the opportunity came up this year to finally get my chance, after 14 years, to run a business I was thrilled.
Is it unusual for someone from human resources to become CEO?
To become the CEO of any company, you have to have a wide variety of experiences. In our company it would be more common, I think, for someone who’s in a financial job, although my predecessor, Dan Cavanagh, he started out in technology. So we came different paths, but both of us had broad experiences doing a lot of different things.
I had the impression people with a numbers background are insurance CEOs.
Well, in our industry also a lot of lawyers have very high level positions, because this is such a heavily, heavily regulated industry. I’m sure the fact that I had a legal background didn’t hurt.
Now that you’ve got the job, what are you going to do?
Folks around here know the answer, they know exactly what I’m going to say: growth. What we’ve got to do is grow. We have a very good company here, we’ve got a terrific management team. And we have excellent financial results for the company, so now what we want to do is more. MetLife is going public. One of the things any stock company wants to have is profitable revenue growth, so that people want to buy their stock compared to somebody else’s…. The first day I got here we started our first sales campaign.
What’s the sales campaign’s focus?
We sell through the life insurance agents of MetLife, who are career agents; we sell through independent agents; we sell through the mail; we sell using our telephone operators, who work in our call centers; we sell through employers at the work site. So we challenged the management of all our distribution systems to exceed their sales goal. If they can do that then they’ll win this month’s contest. One of the strengths of our company is that we have very different distribution systems that reach out to potential customers in different ways; so we don’t want to get in their way and tell them how to do it, because they know how to do it.
Does the change from mutual to stock company affect how you deal with customers? Is there more to explain now?
No I don’t think so. I don’t really think that our customers knew whether we were a mutual company or a stock company. It’s more relevant in the way we price our products, the way we share the profitability of the company with our mutual policyholders. But I think with regard to customers, the kinds of things we have to be focused on are customer service, competitive prices, easy access when people have accidents to getting their claims adjusted. I don’t think that’s going to change.
There was a round of job cuts and budget reductions recently; how did this affect MetLife in Rhode Island?
Rhode Island is an important state for MetLife, not just for MetLife Auto & Home. As you know we have a big call center here. We also have individual business offices here, this is a state we like. When we chose Rhode Island as one of the places to put our call center, we had something like a 100 call centers. We consolidated to only five locations and Rhode Island was one of the five locations. It (budget cuts) was not a major factor here.
Personally what do you think of Rhode Island? Have you found someplace to live?
I decided the first thing I needed to do was learn my job, so I’m living in the company apartment. But I had to bring some of my knickknacks with me, because I didn’t want to feel like I was living in a hotel. And I brought my plants.
The exciting news is my number one nephew got transferred to Springfield, Massachusetts. He was in Alabama before. My parents, the first thing they did when they learned I got the job, was call up AAA and get a TripTik to find out how to get up here. Everybody is looking forward to coming and exploring this state. My family lives in Pennsylvania, they’ve never been here, so they’re all excited. So I have to learn quickly, so I can be a tour guide. I know how take them to the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, now I’ve got to take them around to (Rhode Island’s) exotic sites.
