Manny Padilla is the 2026 president of the Risk & Insurance Management Society and vice president, risk management and insurance at MacAndrews & Forbes, a holding company with a portfolio of businesses ranging from banking services to biotechnology. He joined the New York-based company in 1992 after a spell at Kemper and service in the U.S. Navy. He is also an adjunct professor at the St. John’s University Maurice R. Greenberg School of Insurance, Risk Management and Actuarial Science and a member of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary. He recently spoke with Business Insurance Editor Gavin Souter about his path into risk management, his goals for RIMS and the skills risk managers should develop. Edited excerpts follow.
Q: How did you get into risk management?
A: I was on an aircraft carrier in the U.S. Navy off the coast of Yemen. It was an 18-hour day, and at 2 a.m., I was called back to fix an item that had been breaking. I got up there, fixed it, and then I asked my supervisor, “Does it get any better?” because I was fielding a reenlistment situation at that point, and my supervisor said, “Absolutely not.” So, I read between the lines and thought, “I’ve got to do something different.” I went up to the ship’s library and looked at Barron’s book on colleges. I got to the letter C and came across this thing called the College of Insurance. They had a program called the Cooperative Education Program, where a company would sponsor you and pay two-thirds of your tuition. You would work for them part-time, then go full-time after you graduated, which resonated with me. What really sealed the deal was when I reviewed the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which said the highest-paid jobs in that period were actuaries, and the College of Insurance specialized in developing actuaries.
Q: What are you looking to achieve at RIMS in the next year?
A: A lot has to do with momentum. The risk management profession in general is experiencing a lot of momentum. Management teams and boards are recognizing the value and the importance of risk management. It’s no longer just the insurance person in the corner. It has value, it has purpose and has importance, particularly when we’re looking at some of the big-picture items, which are to protect the assets of the corporation, to develop resiliency and to sort out all the complexities that are happening today.
Expectations are very high for risk management professionals. I think we’re in the right place at the right time to drive innovation, growth and profitability for our organizations, not just through simple risk transfer.
Q: So how do you build some of that momentum?
A: This year, our big motto is “Invest in Yourself.” You need to be in the right mindset. You need to not only understand the professional issues, but also be a strategic thinker, so you have to devote time to sharpening your leadership skills and to listening to others’ opinions and discerning what is going to work.
Q: We’re in a transitioning market; what can risk managers do to manage that?
A: For me, it’s more of the same; it’s just happening faster, with companies coming into or leaving the marketplace. When I first started, more companies were leaving the marketplace because they had overextended themselves. Change has always been happening in our world; it’s just a question of how we deal with it.
There are indicators of what’s happening in the industry, and in some cases it’s financial, in others it’s technological. The technology issue is the one that I’m more interested in, primarily because you don’t really know who you’re doing business with. This being a relationship business, it’s really important to know how your insurers will respond, because you’re protecting your balance sheet.
All we’re looking for as risk managers is a healthy, fair and sustainable marketplace. We need pricing that reflects actual loss experience. We fully understand an underwriter having a book of business that specializes in a variety of different exposures, but we all pay to balance that book, and some of us are highly successful in managing our risks and some of us are not.
Q: What experiences that you had in the Navy and in the Coast Guard have been useful in risk management?
A: In the military, a form of risk management is practiced. It may not have been called risk management in the past, but in the Coast Guard, risk management is front and center; there’s even a certificate in risk management. It really has to do with the whole concept of communicating with each other. We need to understand where exposures are coming from and we need to respect all opinions.
When you have a military operation, you have a hierarchy, but even in hierarchical models you have an openness of raising your hand and saying, “Have we considered this? Have we considered that?”
Everyone’s judgment or comments are valuable, and the ability to listen to an alternative approach or something thereabouts is probably the most important thing.
Q: What skills do risk managers need to start developing?
A: We need to keep up with the technology and understand what it is and what it is not. The one major benefit that I see on an immediate basis is the ability to manage data more efficiently and see more patterns than you would have in the past.
I recently did an assignment where I took data and then basically did a Monte Carlo simulation, which I would never have done in the past. Then you speak with your actuaries and your underwriters and your service providers to give you that credibility and when you have that credibility, you’re able to make more credible decisions.
You’re also able to identify the burning costs and develop how much in limits you need, how much in deductibles should be sustained, and compare your arguments with the underwriters’ arguments.
On the AI side, I haven’t yet seen AI being our underwriters. I’ve seen information managed much more efficiently. I’ve seen a bunch of questions that are more industry-based, or type of exposure-based that have been very enlightening, because while I haven’t had that particular issue or that particular focus, somebody else did, so it helps us develop a better story when we sit down across with underwriters and pitch our company.
Based in New York, Stephen Freeman is a Senior Editor at Trending Insurance News. Previously he has worked for Forbes and The Huffington Post. Steven is a graduate of Risk Management at the University of New York.