Ryker J. Richardson’s career is on the fast track. With 15 years in the insurance industry, he is assistant vice president and senior staff engineering specialist with FM Global in Johnston, the largest private company in Rhode Island and one of the world’s largest property insurers.
The level of engineering specialist that he has attained typically takes 16 years on average to achieve, and the average age of employees in this position is 53 years old, according to his 40 Under Forty application.
In 1994, after graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a bachelor’s degree in economics, Richardson began his career as an underwriter at Wausau Insurance Co. He returned to school to earn a master’s degree in computer information systems at Georgia State University in 1999, achieving a 4.0 grade point average and becoming an associate in the risk management field, all while working full time as an account manager at FM Global.
After working as a senior consultant and manager for almost two years in 2000-2001 at the accounting firm of Ernst & Young in Milwaukee, he returned to FM Global, in September 2001, where he held the positions of lead business analyst and principal business analyst before taking on the assistant vice president’s role in May 2006.
At FM Global, he has created and led several key initiatives, including the development of an insurance pricing and capacity system, used by all underwriters at the company, and a client-facing engineering system, which has more than 7,000 client users at Fortune 1000-size companies worldwide. He headed up FM Global’s latest product release, RiskMark, a Web-based analytics tool for risk managers, where his leadership reduced the original estimate of completion by nearly two years.
A resident of Dayville, Conn., Richardson credits his wife, Cheryl, as the most influential person in his career. The couple has four children. •
