BULLETIN
January 4, 2022
Western National Announces Upcoming Retirement of Rich Kalina, Chief Underwriting Officer; New Management Roles
In spring 2022, Rich Kalina, Senior Vice President and Chief Underwriting Officer, will be retiring. Rich has led underwriting operations at Western National for nine years. We are grateful for his contributions to our Group, and we congratulate him on his upcoming retirement. With this leadership transition, we are realigning and reorganizing two key areas at Western National: Product and Underwriting. To read more about this realignment, click here to view our press release.
There are a few roles changing at our Group that are related to Rich’s retirement and succession plan for Underwriting, and we wanted to call those roles out specifically to our agency partners:
- Jeff Couchman, formerly Senior Vice President – Marketing & Agency Sales, has been promoted to Executive Vice President – Underwriting & Sales. In this new role, he will oversee the underwriting, sales, marketing, and business development functions.
- Pattie Harris, formerly Senior Vice President – Personal Lines and Product and Data Management, has been promoted to Executive Vice President – Product and Operations. This newly formed Product and Operations Department will include Operations for Personal and Commercial Lines, Data and Analytics, Product, and the addition of a new Product Implementation Team.
- Dan Anderson, formerly Vice President – Commercial Lines Underwriting, has been promoted to Senior Vice President – Underwriting. In this new role, Dan will oversee the Commercial Lines (Central and Western Regions) and Personal Lines Underwriting teams.
We are excited about this reorganization, and we look forward to building on our past successes in the year ahead. Thank you for your continued partnership in the service of our mutual policyholders.
