players W

investing in...

hen employees create an innovation so good, why not just give them their own company to market it? That's essentially how se2, a subsidiary of Security Benefit, came into being. The vote of confidence its executives received in launching the company seven years ago is how they strive to treat their own employees today.

"We want everybody to be part of working solutions and making decisions at all levels," se2 CEO Dave Keith said. "It's all about empowerment."

Keith says it was around the year 2000 when Security Benefit executives asked him and several other employees to create an operating model and technology platform to lower the company's operating costs, allow faster introduction of new products to the marketplace and increase flexibility to meet growth demands. Once developed, Security Benefit realized it had a tool unique to the financial services industry. Keith and his team made a presentation to senior management and se2 launched in 2005 with eight employees. The name se2 (which Keith’s then-14year-old son came up with) stands for “service end to end.� The company not only assists in developing the technology for launching new products, it follows up with the support for the back-end processing on them. It didn't take long to see how valuable their concept was. The company almost immediately landed its first client, Goldman Sachs. "We put together what we thought was

Dave Keith, CEO of se2 continued on pg. 30 28

Fall 2012

TK...Topeka's Business Magazine