Tipsord Re-elected Chairman Of State Farm Board

June 13–BLOOMINGTON — After a year of radical change at State Farm, the chairman of the board remains the same with President and CEO Michael Tipsord re-elected to the post this week.

Tipsord’s re-election and the re-election of several other members of the board of directors were made at the Bloomington-based insurer’s annual meeting.

Tipsord joined State Farm in 1988. He was named chief financial officer in 2004, chief operating officer in 2011 and president in 2015. He succeeded longtime CEO Ed Rust Jr. later that same year. Tipsord was elected chairman of the board of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company in June 2016.

In addition to Tipsord, there are 10 other directors on the board. The three re-elected include: Dan E. Arvizu, senior advisor with Emerson Elemental; Allan R. Landon, former chairman of the board and CEO of Bank of Hawaii Corp.; and Gary L. Perlin, former chief financial officer of Capital One Financial Corp.

Others serving on the board, whose terms were not up for re-election this year, are: Christopher C. DeMuth, distinguished fellow, Hudson Institute; W. Steven Jones, professor of organizational behavior and strategy, University of North Carolina; W. H. Knight Jr., professor of law, Seattle University School of Law; Vicki A. O’Meara, president and CEO, Analytics Pros, Inc.; Paul T. Stecko, director, former chairman and CEO, Packaging Corporation of America; Pamela B. Strobel — former executive vice president and chief administrative officer, Exelon Corp.; and John D. Zeglis, former chairman of the board and CEO, AT&T Wireless

As part of a massive restructuring that the company says will better serve its customers, State Farm is selling its 89-year-old original headquarters building in downtown Bloomington and closing other facilities across the U.S. over the next four years.The restructuring has included shifting employees around the country and laying off hundreds of others.

The realignment has included the company’s information technology divisions, which the company now calls enterprise technology, claims, administrative services divisions and State Farm Bank.

The cutting of 890 non-management analyst IT positions in Bloomington earlier this year was followed by a job fair State Farm hosted last month to fill 200 to 300 full-time jobs, mostly entry-level positions, in Bloomington. The new jobs are mostly customer service positions in its claims and State Farm Bank divisions.

The company has released little information publicly about the job losses.

The Bloomington-based workforce remains about 15,000, according to State Farm. The company has about 65,000 employees across the U.S., including 23,000 employed at the hubs in Georgia, Texas and Arizona.

State Farm property-casualty companies reported a pretax operating loss of $1.7 billion for 2017, but the company’s net worth increased to $97 billion.

A combined $6.5 billion underwriting loss on earned premiums of $63.9 billion in 2017 was the major contributor to the 2017 operating loss.

Investment and other income of $4.8 billion helped offset the underwriting loss to reduce the overall operating loss.

Contact Maria Nagle at (309) 820-3244. Follow her on Twitter: @Pg_Nagle

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