Lincoln Financial Group’s Cornelio Keeps Focus on Straight-Through Processing

Lincoln Financial Group's Charles Cornelio started his insurance career as a lawyer, but he's forged his mark as a technology leader.

Although he doesn't always have the time to fit it in, Charles Cornelio, known to many as Chuck, tries to read one book every month. Novels aren't Cornelio's preference, though -- he generally reads historical nonfiction and has a particular affinity for biographies. In fact, when asked to list a few people who have most influenced his career development, Cornelio is quick to credit a couple of bosses, past and present, but he also points to the likes of Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan. "I try to glean leadership opportunities from the great figures of history, which can still apply to IT," Cornelio says.

Any professional biography written about Cornelio, CIO and SVP of shared services at Radnor, Pa.-based Lincoln Financial Group ($10.6 billion in 2007 revenue), would point out that he led the company through an IT organizational restructuring, a large-scale legacy systems consolidation effort and a series of straight-through processing initiatives that have lifted the insurer into a leadership position in the space. But the biography wouldn't turn to Cornelio's insurance career until sometime in 1988. It wasn't until then that Cornelio — having spent most of the 1980s practicing law and working in the world of mergers and acquisitions — entered the insurance industry via Chubb Life's legal department.

Chubb Life CEO Terry Stone was the first to assign Cornelio to management responsibilities outside the legal realm when she asked him in 1994 to oversee both IT and HR. "In a sense, it was a boss saying, 'Do you want to take a risk?' and my saying 'Yeah, I could do that,'" Cornelio relates.

In 1997 Chubb (Warren, N.J.) sold its life division to Jefferson Pilot, where Cornelio became chief legal officer. That title, however, never fully described Cornelio's role at the Greensboro, N.C.-based life insurer, as he also had responsibility for the company's government relations, internal audit, technology and service functions.

When Lincoln acquired Jefferson Pilot in April 2006, Cornelio left the legal role behind to become CIO at Lincoln. Prior to the merger, Lincoln's IT department had been decentralized; Cornelio was tasked with helping the newly formed company adopt Jefferson Pilot's IT organizational model. "When [Lincoln moved] from a decentralized or federated model to a centralized model, that of course [brought] its own challenges and changes in how you manage the team," Cornelio explains.

In his new role at Lincoln, Cornelio would be responsible for the carrier's IT, customer service, licensing, commissions, claims, facilities, procurement, payroll and office services. The move was particularly significant because it marked the creation of the company's shared services unit. "Those were big changes for Lincoln in terms of culture and how we make sure that we keep IT aligned with its business partners," Cornelio recalls.

Even while these changes were being made, Cornelio was managing a larger transformation of Lincoln's technology shop. Traditionally, Cornelio explains, most of Lincoln's infrastructure and application development was outsourced. "We've made a significant change in strategy to bring the vast majority of those things back inside the company," he says.

The paradigm shift was made, he adds, when Lincoln identified technology-enabled virtues such as speed to market and straight-through processing (STP) as strategic drivers for top-line success. "More of that needed to be directly controlled from within the company," Cornelio relates. "We [also] found ... that on the infrastructure side in particular we could reap significant efficiency improvements and cost improvements."