Experts & Advisors
Pete Pearlman
Managing Director

485 Lexington Avenue, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10017
+1.212.818.1555 Main
+1.908.892.3898 Mobile
Pete Pearlman is a Managing Director at Ankura based in New York. He has over 35 years of experience working in the financial services industry, focusing on the life insurance sector. He has experience across the insurance operational lifecycle including marketing/sales, client onboarding, billing and collections, claim adjudication, contact center, and account maintenance. He specializes in business strategy and transformation, remediations, reconciliations and compliance, and sourcing/third party risk.
Experience
Pete’s professional experience includes:
Business Strategy and Transformation
- Redesigned the back-office operations of five separate business units within a Fortune 100 financial services firm which yielded over $50 million in annual savings.
- Stabilized a disability claim operation by implementing efficiencies and improved workflow to enable a 20% increase in throughput. Served as interim manager of the organization.
- Identified root causes of massive time and cost overruns for a troubled underwriting technology implementation. Designed the roadmap to remediate the program and led the execution.
- Implemented a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Center of Excellence for a Fortune 100 life insurance enterprise across operations, technology, and information security. Led the execution of training, RPA software loading, and testing and monitoring of the business case results, achieving the promised savings.
- Conducted an operational review of an investment management trading platform to address potential FINRA violations. Documented process flows and existing controls, identified control gaps, and documented standard operational procedures to address findings.
- Served as the program manager for a top five domestic life insurance company to engage their beneficiary base, enhance engagement opportunities with beneficiaries post-claim and pre-claim, and expand the population for whom they could offer an expedited claim payment process.
- Managed the transfer of personnel and assets and segregated data, systems, and physical work environments for a client that sold four separate property and casualty business units to three buyers.
- Designed interactive daily dashboard reports for the CEO as part of multiple projects that supported a client’s efforts to convert from a mutual company to a public stock company.
- Managed several projects for an insurer selling their healthcare business unit including separating the business unit from the client’s general ledger, preventing the client’s internal feeds from hitting the general ledger of the new owner, creating a billing mechanism that captured over $70 million in fees for post-transition services, and developing accounting procedures to track the expenses that met GAAP and statutory rules.
Remediations, Reconciliations, and Compliance
- Executed a reconciliation of client invoices/payments as required by ERISA regulations including developing the methodologies to calculate the reconciliations and distribute $14 million to over 300 clients.
- Validated several years of accounts receivable balances for a top five group life insurance client by translating/mapping data from the client’s mainframe system into a database and recreating complex pricing calculations. Assisted in the analysis to determine if a remediation was required.
- Reconciled eight years of incorrect interest payments for a client’s retained asset accounts from their Individual life, group life, and annuities products. Created reporting to facilitate the remediation to policyholders.
- Investigated potential privacy breaches by reviewing policies and procedures of all parties involved and observing operations to identify gaps and authored the final report.
- Conducted a compliance review of the retirement services unit of a Fortune 100 financial services firm to ensure compliance to investment company rule 38a-1 and investment advisor rule 206(4)7.
- Managed the discovery and response to more than 200 subpoenas and exam requests from over 30 regulatory bodies to support the chief regulatory officer of a leading U.S. financial services company.
- Coordinated the implementation of a global anti-money laundering product for a Fortune 100 financial services client.
Sourcing/Third Party Risk
- Conducted a gap assessment of an international bank’s third-party management policies and procedures against federal reserve standards (SR13-19).
- Assessed and redesigned the vendor governance program for the largest business unit within a Fortune 100 financial services firm, allowing the function to comply with enterprise standards, prepare for regulatory review, and serve the needs of the various business partners.
- Implemented appropriate controls over private data during the escheatment process between a client, their escheatment vendor, and the states receiving the escheated funds and supporting information.
- Outsourced a 40-person premium billing function including documenting the as-is process and retooling the function to improve efficiencies, developed training materials, onboarded and trained new staff, set up facilities in new location, and coordinated all technology setup.
- Coordinated an RFP for a new stock transfer agent for the shareholder services division of an international financial services firm.
- Education
- BS, Finance, Spanish Minor, Lehigh University
- Certifications
- Project Management Professional
- Lean Six Sigma Sensei
- Affiliations
- Project Management Institute