Arch Capital Names Christine Todd CIO | Chief Investment Officer

Christine Todd

Insurance firm Arch Capital Group has named Christine Todd as it chief investment officer, effective June 7. Todd will oversee the investment strategy for the firm’s $26 billion investment portfolio and will succeed W. Preston Hutchings, who is retiring from Arch Capital later this year after more than 15 years at the post.

Todd will be responsible for setting the company’s investment strategy and managing the day-to-day operations of its investment portfolio. She who will report to Arch Capital Group CEO Marc Grandisson.

“Christine is a dynamic and strategic investment leader with the experience and expertise to help bring our strong investment team into the next era,” Grandisson said in a statement. “Her deep understanding of the insurance industry, her ability to lead and develop teams, and her strong ability to collaborate across an organization make her a welcome addition to Arch and to our executive leadership team.”

Grandisson also thanked Hutchings for putting together “a world-class investment team that produced excellent results for our shareholders amid an evolving economic landscape and numerous financial stresses and challenges.”

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Todd was most recently head of US fixed income for asset management firm Amundi US, a position she held for a little over two years, and prior to that was president of municipal bond manager Neighborly Investments for just over a year. Before joining Neighborly Investments, she was president of Standish Mellon Asset Management Company for more than 22 years, and before that was vice president of investment management firm Gannett, Welsh & Kotler for over six years.

Todd is a chartered financial analyst, and earned a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and an Master of Business Administration from Boston University.

Before joining Arch, Hutchings was senior vice president and CIO at RenaissanceRe Holdings Ltd. from 1998 to 2005, and senior vice president and CIO of Mid Ocean Reinsurance Company Ltd. from 1995 to 1998. He started his career as a fixed-income trader at JPMorgan’s New York, London, and Tokyo offices. He has a bachelor’s from Hamilton College, and a master’s in jurisprudence from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes scholar.

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Tags: Amundi, Arch Capital Group, chief investment officers, Christine Todd, CIO, Marc Grandisson, Standish Mellon, W. Preston Hutchings

New York state legislators have introduced a bill that would require the state teachers’ retirement system to divest from fossil fuels.

The Teachers’ Fossil Fuel Divestment Act would force the $120.5 billion New York State Teachers’ Retirement System (NYSTRS) to divest any stocks, securities, equities, assets, or other obligations of companies on an exclusion list of coal and oil and gas producers.

According to a recent report from activist group Divest NY, NYSTRS has more than $300 million invested in companies with substantial coal reserves. The report said the pension fund owns stocks in 36 companies on the Carbon Underground Coal 100 List, which identifies the top coal and oil and gas publicly-traded reserve holders globally, and ranks them by the potential carbon emissions content of their reported reserves.

The fund even increased its investments in 24 of those companies by a total of 6.2 million shares as recently as the last quarter of 2020, the report said. This includes adding of 1.1 million shares of Chinese coal company Shaanxi Coal Industry Co., which has one of the largest coal reserves in the world that is estimated to have more annual carbon dioxide emissions than the US.

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“We are all being called on to play a role in reducing our collective greenhouse gas production,” said Assemblywoman Anna Kelles, one of the sponsors the bill, according to Spectrum1 News. “Continuing to invest in oil and gas companies and companies that are based on significant coal production and consumption no longer makes fiscal sense.”

Under the bill, any company on the exclusion list may request that the retirement system board remove them from the list based on “clear and convincing evidence” that they are not currently a coal producer or an oil and gas producer.

The bill defines a coal producer as any company that derives at least 10% of its annual revenue from thermal coal production, or accounts for more than 1% of global production of thermal coal, or whose reported coal reserves contain more than 0.3 gigatons of potential carbon dioxide emission. And it defines an oil and gas producer as any company that derives at least 20% of its annual revenue from oil or gas production, or accounts for more than 1% of global oil or gas production, or whose combined oil and gas reserves contain more than 0.1 gigatons of potential carbon dioxide emissions.

In a sponsor memo accompanying the bill, the backers of the legislation said that that the majority of fossil fuel producers are not adapting their business models to take into account the changing energy market, and are instead investing billions of dollars in exploring and extracting new reserves and creating “stranded asset risk,” which they said could lead to a rapid and significant loss of value.

“Attempting to beat the market by holding these investments until the last possible moment is a high-risk strategy that could result in the loss of investment principal,” the memo said. “Being too early in the avoidance of the risk of permanent loss is much less of a danger than being too late.”