Case Study

PROBLEM

Blumont Annuity (formerly Brookfield Annuity Company) approached DES after we had successfully led a number of searches for Brookfield’s other entities, namely BGTF, BAM Infrastructure and BAM Private Equity.

Blumont Annuity is a life insurance company with a primary focus on the risk transfer market, in which buy-out and buy-in group annuity policies are sold to defined benefit plans in Canada. It is wholly-owned by BAM Re. At the time of our mandate, the organization had experienced rapid growth and quickly established itself as a market leader. Our task was to identify candidates who would take a leadership role in building out the “asset management” function to support the diligencing of managers and investment opportunities (private credit and public credit), in addition to overseeing underlying credits and satisfying its OSFI-related regulatory obligations.

APPROACH

We were highly-targeted in our efforts and heavily sourced into the market for referred candidates. With the backing of Brookfield, this role attracted a range of highly-relevant individuals, including those from leveraged finance, credit investments, structured credit, private credit, securitization finance, and private equity funds / secondaries.

The committee shortlisted several candidates, and valued those who brought a combination of strong technical backgrounds in private markets (ie: credit and fundamental analysis and assessing impairment risk (credit ratings/ spreads)), the ability to evaluate credit fund investments and extensive portfolio monitoring experience.