DIVING INTO DEMUTUALIZATION.

• Position: Interview

MetLife is one of a number of major insurance companies that have or will be demutualizing -- converting from mutual to public ownership. In an interview, MetLife's CFO, Stewart Nagler, discusses the process and its implications.

Insurance companies are clearly a fixture of the Old Economy. Many are still doing business much as they did 50 years or more ago, with a network of company agents selling a variety of time-tested products keyed to actuarial tables.

But the industry is beginning to undergo fairly dramatic change, responding to new technologies and changing demographics. Perhaps no change is more revolutionary than demutualization -- the transition from a mutual form of ownership, where the company is nominally owned by policyholders, to a public company owned by stockholders. In the past few years; some of America 's insurance giants -- Prudential, John Hancock, Mutual of New York and MetLife -- have announced or completed a demutualization. It's a complicated, drawn-out procedure that involves approval from insurance regulators and policyholders.

While life as a public company can be far more complicated, access to capital and corporate partners can be far easier. And insurance companies also find themselves facing a new, daunting level of competition from diversified companies able to combine banking, insurance and brokerage operations under financial services legislation signed into law last year.

Financial Executive asked Stewart Nagler, vice chairman and chief financial officer of MetLife and an FEI member, to talk about the demutualization and its ramifications, both for MetLife and for the industry in general. MetLife completed the process earlier this year, and began trading as MET on the New York Stock Exchange on April 5.

Nagler, who has been a MetLife director since 1997, has been CFO since 1993. He joined MetLife in 1963 as an assistant actuarial analyst and became an officer of the company in 1969. In 1978, he was appointed senior vice president and head of the company's pensions department. He was promoted to executive vice president in 1983, and to senior executive vice president in 1986.

Nagler has a bachelor's degree in mathematics, sum ma cum laude, from Polytechnic University in New York. He is a fellow of the Society of Actuaries and a past chairman of its pension committee, and is also a member of the American Academy of Actuaries and a past member of its board of directors.

Q. How long had MetLife been...