Donna Blank has led financeoperations since joining NFP in 2008. The New York-based companyprovides benefits, insurance and wealth management services tocompanies and high-net-worth individuals. NFP, with $982 million in2010 revenue, has weathered the economic hardships of the last twoyears to emerge with a new reporting structure that reflects thecompany's strategy going forward.

T&R: One of the recent initiatives at NFPhas been a change in reporting structure. Why was that an importantmove?
Blank: The financial crisis for us coincided witha time when the company was becoming more mature. NFP is arelatively young company, started in 1999. So the way we respondedto the crisis, in addition to reducing our leverage and disposingof non-performing assets, was to change strategy from being aconsolidator of small brokerage firms to a much more client-centricbusiness. We reorganized into three operating segments. One segmentfocuses on the corporate client, the middle market executives whowant to buy corporate benefits for their employees. The next is theIndividual Client Group. This group includes the business that hadbeen the genesis of NFP, the life insurance business with a focuson high-net-worth individuals. There is sometimes crossover betweenthe executives served in the Corporate Client Group who also, asindividuals, want to buy life insurance. And then we have a newsegment, which had always been part of the business, ourbroker-dealer and registered investment adviser. This business,called the Advisor Services Group, was initially developed as autility for the rest of our business, but we decided it had reallyreached the stage where it needed to be on its own and startbuilding scale by itself.

So given that change in the focusand the strategy of the business, it made sense to show thefinancials separately for each of those business lines. The goalthat I focused on, in particular, was to have financials thatprovided a clear road map for understanding the underlyingeconomics of the business, especially given the change in thestrategy. We adopted some new metrics that were similar to thoseused by peer companies. We adopted adjusted EBITDA, which had notbeen something that we had ever used before but that otherinsurance brokers reported. This metric seemed like a good way tostart translating the company for the market. It provides insightinto our relative size, as well as the kind of margins that we havein the business.

T&R: Did you need to restructure thefinance operation to capture this?
Blank We needed to rethink some of our processesand get much better at allocations of shared spending. We thoughtabout our expense base and where shared service expenses belongedby segment. Because the first segment disclosure we had was for thefirst quarter 2010, the process of revamping the 10-Q was almostlike doing a 10-K again. We had to give much more disclosure thanwe would ordinarily in a quarterly document. We had to rethink howwe were describing the business, which was really a team effort.Finance had much more interaction with the business in putting thattogether than it had in the past, so to that extent there was achange. It was really a team effort with finance, legal, thebusiness side, everybody thinking about the clearest way todescribe the company and its operations.

T&R: How did investors react to thechanges?
Blank: Investors definitely have liked the change.It had been challenging to try to explain trends in the businesswhen we weren't providing a separate P&L for our differentkinds of businesses. The margins and the whole expense structurelook very different between the different segments. The newreporting format really gave us the ability to start explainingthose differences. The equity analysts have all adopted and, Ithink, like the new disclosure. It's a bit of a challenge to getthem to change their models, but we are plugging away at thateffort. It makes the company that much easier to understand onceyou break apart the different businesses.

T&R: It's not always easy for finance towork with legal and other departments. How did you manage thatprocess?
Blank: I think all the parties recognized theimportance of this change and the roles they had to play. We hadone lead from legal and one lead from accounting who togetherreally spearheaded the effort. People were engaged. We got the wordout fairly early. We got people to understand the importance of thechanges. Everybody was enthusiastic about it because theyunderstood the advantage that explaining the business along segmentlines would provide. It was not necessarily a fun experience, but agood outcome.

T&R: What's ahead for NFP?
Blank: We're feeling that we are well-positionedfor this kind of unpredictable economy. Our biggest business, theCorporate Client Group, has shown a lot of resiliency and stabilityin the face of the economic challenges and some growth in 2010,hopefully leading to growth in the future. All of our businesses,in fact, showed revenue growth in 2010. The most volatile part ofour business, life insurance, has been the most affected with thedownturn. Now that there is more clarity on estate taxes, at leastfor a short period of time, we are hoping to see some activitythere. When businesses are volatile on the downside, I think thereis opportunity on the upside, although you can't bank on it.

For our newest segment, the broker-dealer, we are recruitingexternally and building that business from just a utility withinthe company, to being a bigger independent broker-dealer,recruiting outside advisers and growing the margins and revenueswith scale.