New York Life has announced the appointment of Senior Vice President Mark Madgett to its Executive Management Committee, effective immediately. Mr. Madgett will assume the role of Head of the Agency Department on January 1, 2016.
The Executive Management Committee is comprised of New York Life’s senior executive leadership and assists the CEO in setting policy for the company.
Chairman and CEO Ted Mathas said, “Mark is a New York Life veteran who began as an agent and became one of our top field managers. For the past year he has been here in the Home Office working closely with Mark Pfaff and making excellent contributions. Mark will be joining an extraordinarily strong leadership team. We look forward to having Mark’s enthusiasm, field experience and knowledge as a regular part of our deliberations on the Executive Management Committee.”
On January 1, 2016, Mr. Madgett will succeed Mark Pfaff as head of the Agency Department, which manages the company’s field force of 12,000 licensed agents in cities and towns across the country. New York Life’s career agents recently recorded an 11 percent increase in sales of individual recurring premium life insurance for the first three quarters of 2015. These strong results reflect growth across the company’s full suite of permanent life products, every geographic region and in the cultural markets, all backed by one of the industry’s largest networks of local agents.
When Mr. Madgett assumes the leadership of the Agency Department, he will begin reporting to New York Life President John Kim. Mr. Pfaff, an executive vice president, is retiring from the company at year-end 2015 following 30 years of distinguished service
Mr. Madgett, 54, joined New York Life as an agent in Colorado in 1986. He moved into sales management in Denver in 1992, rising in the ranks to managing partner of New York Life general offices in the state of Washington beginning in 1998. Mr. Madgett moved to the company’s Home Office in Manhattan in September 2014, where he has been working closely with Mr. Pfaff in managing the Agency Department.
Mr. Madgett received a Bachelor of Science degree in business from Saint Mary’s College of California in 1983.
Mr. Mathas expressed appreciation to Mr. Pfaff for his three decades of service to New York Life, including ten years as head of Agency. “Mark has had a tremendous career with New York Life, as an agent, as a manager in the field, and as a Home Office executive. His tenure as head of Agency has been nothing short of remarkable. Under Mark’s leadership, New York Life’s career agents have kept us at the front of our industry in providing policyowners and customers with the solutions and service they need for the protection of their families. His competitive intensity and personal integrity guiding the daily activities of our career agents, has led to outstanding growth in our productive agent force, up 42 percent since 2005, when he took over the leadership of Agency.”
