Updated Jan. 25th with Hartt’s new job.
Hartt to take ‘early retirement’ after 21 years at NJ regulatory agency
Dec. 7, 2021 —
Key state insurance regulator Peter Hartt, who helped spearhead life insurance solvency oversight and expanded group supervision of Prudential Financial, will be ending his long career with the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance at the end of the year.
Hartt will be joining Randall & Quilter Investment Holdings Ltd. as U.S. head of compliance and regulatory affairs. The dividend-paying non-life insurance group is domiciled in Bermuda, owns surety and other property casualty companies in the U.S. and Europe and buys discontinued books of non-life business and non-life (re)insurers and captives in run-off. It owns and manages both active and run-off businesses, often dissolving them, and also has operates as a fronting business, or conduit for capital providers in the insurance and reinsurance sphere.
Although he began his tenure at the Department in June 2000 as a public information officer. Hartt served as director of the division of insurance at the department during a critical time in state and federal relations involving solvency regulation.
Hartt served as the state insurance representative on the U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Council from September 2016 to September 2018, a period when the Council was considering designating and de-designating large national life insurers as systemically important financial institutions. FSOC voted to remove the last insurance SIFI, New Jersey-domiciled Prudential, a month after Hartt left FSOC, based on work and findings he and other members contributed to the process.
Hartt also led the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ Financial Stability Task Force and led on the initiate developed by state regulators to more broadly oversee and monitor life insurers’ financial health. He worked with global supervisory partners in developing international capital standards for large group insurers and on resolution issues as well, for orderly unwinding of assets.
Colleagues during his time on the insurance regulatory national stage were happy to praise his work in bringing understanding of the expanding state insurance solvency oversight system to his work on FSOC .
“He was extraordinarily important for his work on FSOC, the right person at the right time,” said Eric Cioppa, Maine insurance superintendent and the current state insurance FSOC representative. Cioppa said Hartt was instrumental in establishing the macroprudential initiative at the NAIC, and contribute d a lot in this and other areas of oversight. He called Hartt a credit to the NAIC and FSOC.
Tom Workman, the FSOC’s current presidentially appointed independent member with insurance expertise, whose tenure overlapped with Hartt’s in 2018, praised Hartt’s work. Workman said his FSOC colleague served with great knowledge, patience and grace at a critical time. This would have been during fraught deliberations on removing Prudential’s SIFI designation, when the state insurance regulator on the Council would have a strong voice but not a vote in deliberations.
Prudential was the largest U.S. insurance group in the U.S., the largest nonbank SIFI, and the last to lose its designation as such. Minutes of FSOC meetings show Harrt supported the de-designation of Prudential. Hartt was preceded at FSOC by John Huff and Adam Hamm, both former NAIC presidents.
Hartt became assistant director of the division in 2002 and acting director in 2011, according to an online bio The New Jersey state Senate confirmed him as director back in 2014.
No word yet on what Hartt will be doing next but look for more news in the new year.
FSOC grew out of the 2008-2009 financial crisis as pat of the Dodd-Frank legislation of 2010, to better oversee insurers’ and other financial institutions and mechanisms’ vulnerabilities in solvency and interconnectedness and to strengthen stability of the financial system.
WASHINGTON INSURANCE RIDER 