Executive Closeup
CFO to CIO Transition
Hired in October 2000 as CFO of Kingsway General Insurance, Claude Smith has been tapped for the role of VP and enterprise CIO for parent company Kingsway Financial (Mississauga, Ontario). Smith's No. 1 short-term challenge is to implement an enterprisewide system to connect Kingsway and its subsidiaries.
Through acquisitions and internal growth, Kingsway Financial has expanded from a premium revenue of U.S. $384 million in 1999 to U.S. $1.97 billion in 2003, according to Smith. Kingsway Financial currently has nine P&C subsidiaries, six in the United States and three in Canada. "As these companies were acquired, they all came with their own IT, which left us with basically nine sets of computer systems," Smith says. "Looking at that, the company realized there would be advantages to looking at an enterprisewide solution that all the subsidiaries could use, as well as providing data processing for lines of businesses that some companies hadn't participated in before."
Kingsway Financial is currently evaluating proposals from vendors for what Smith describes as "a system with considerable scalability to meet the company's continuing rapid growth." To fill his new role, Smith says that Kingsway was looking for business leadership. "We have good IT people throughout the organization, so the technical strength is [already] there."
Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio
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