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WHOLESALER OF CHOICE It’s been a turbulent two years since David A. Jordan took the helm at Breckenridge Group. He tells IBA how putting teams, carrier partners and retailers first has helped the company succeed
DAVID A. JORDAN’S professional career spans more than four decades, and he’s spent each and every one of those years in the insurance industry. At this point, you’d think the day he began working in insurance would be a distant memory, but that’s definitely not the case. “I always remember the date I started working in the industry. It was Monday, March 17, 1980,” Jordan says, adding that it helps that his first day as a management trainee for an AIG subsidiary called New Hampshire Insurance Company happened to fall on St. Patrick’s Day. Even now, he says, “that day has always stayed with me.” Forty-one years later, Jordan has had only three employers. He was with AIG for 21 years in two different stints, including New Hampshire Insurance Company and Lexington Insurance Company, and then spent eight years at Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company. Afterwards, he worked for W.R. Berkley Corporation, stepping into the leadership role at Vela Insurance Services in 2009, before taking on his latest challenge as CEO of Breckenridge Group in 2019. “I consider it a terrific way to build a career – to have had that kind of stability with employers, but also to have had the constant opportunity to upgrade my skills, take on new responsibilities and challenges, and have the chance to advance my career without having
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to go somewhere else to do that,” he says. And while Jordan got his start in insurance on a whim – after answering an advertisement in the Sunday paper about a trainee program – he’s since developed a real passion for the industry. “The ability of our industry to innovate and create new products and services to answer challenges that the economy presents has been a fascinating one to participate
tion at Breckenridge. A casualty underwriting organization focused on the E&S lines industry, Vela distributed its products exclusively through wholesale brokers. One of the key lessons Jordan took away from his 10-year run at the company was that wholesale brokers are some of the smartest, hardestworking people in the industry. “I had dealings with wholesalers previously, but this was an intense experience, and
“[I’m] a firm believer that all the technology in the world doesn’t replace the human interactions that a wholesale broker brings to the retail agent communities they serve and the carrier partners that are so integral to delivering those solutions” in over all these years,” he says. “I constantly have the ability to learn new things, engage with the marketplace and solve problems for business owners around the country.”
Stepping up Jordan’s time as president and CEO of Vela was critical to him landing his current posi-
it really renewed and increased my appreciation for them,” he says. “When the opportunity came up to join Breckenridge as the leader, to me, it just felt like a very natural evolution of my career.” It was also an exciting time to move over to the distribution side of the business, as the commercial property & casualty marketplace
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09/04/2021 4:03:43 am