“What Benmosche did was get employee’s morale on track,” Patrikis said. “You needed someone to punch back.”
He also reinstated the dividend and reduced debt. Benmosche sold units including American Life Insurance Co. in 2010 and International Lease Finance Corp. last month.
No Anvil
“I don’t think it was a coincidence that this announcement was made at the first board meeting held post-ILFC close,” Charles Sebaski, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, said in an interview. “This was the last leg of non-core assets that had to be dealt with, and now he can hand over a clean entity. He doesn’t walk out the door with an anvil over the new CEO’s head.”
The insurer’s market value is about $80 billion, compared with $148 billion at the end of 2007. The employee count is down 45 percent in the six years ended Dec. 31 to 64,000.
Hancock has sought to build relations with regulators, including the Federal Reserve, which helped bail out the company. The central bank will oversee AIG because it was deemed a systemically important institution, and Hancock said in 2011 that his company was working to become “Fed ready.”
He reiterated last month his embrace of the supervision, in contrast with MetLife CEO Steven Kandarian who has spoken out against what he sees as the risk of over-regulation.
‘High Standards’
The Fed does “a good job of helping us coordinate our message to the other regulators, also, importantly, to rating agencies,” Hancock said at an investor conference in May. “We’re being held to very high standards there and we welcome that.”
Hancock was raised in Hong Kong and attended Oxford University, where he earned his bachelor of arts degree in politics, philosophy and economics, AIG said in the statement.