Genworth Financial names Jerome Upton CEO and Angela Simmons CFO as Thomas McInerney retires. October 30, 2026 Jerome Upton Genworth Financial, Inc. (NYSE: GNW) has announced a leadership transition that will see President and Chief Executive Officer Thomas J. McInerney retire on December 31, 2026, after 14 years leading the Richmond, Virginia-based financial services company. The Board of Directors expects to appoint Jerome Upton, currently Genworth's Chief Financial Officer, as President and CEO effective January 1, 2027. Upton is also expected to join the company's Board of Directors, while Angela Simmons, currently CFO of Genworth's Closed Block, is expected to become Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. McInerney will step down from the Board upon his retirement, concluding a tenure marked by efforts to strengthen Genworth's financial position, address challenges in its legacy long-term care insurance business, return capital to shareholders and develop its CareScout business. "During his tenure, Genworth significantly strengthened its financial foundation, delivered substantial value to shareholders, and advanced a vision for the future of the company in CareScout," said Melina Higgins, Chair of Genworth's Board of Directors. "The Board is confident that Jerome will carry this strong progress forward." Upton has been with Genworth and its predecessor companies since 1998 and has served as CFO since March 2023. Over nearly three decades, he has held executive leadership positions across finance and operations in multiple business lines and geographic markets. As CFO, Upton has worked closely with McInerney on Genworth's financial and operating strategy, including initiatives to strengthen the company's balance sheet and support its long-term business priorities. "I am grateful for the Board's confidence and honored to lead Genworth in this new chapter," Upton said. "Over the past 28 years, I have developed a deep appreciation and understanding of our people, our businesses, and the customers who depend on us." Simmons, who joined Genworth in 2002, brings more than two decades of experience in corporate finance, capital markets, financial reporting and controllership. She has served as CFO of Genworth's Closed Block since 2020, overseeing financial activities associated with the company's legacy insurance operations. Previously, Simmons served as Controller for U.S. Life Insurance and spent more than a decade leading Genworth's Securities and Exchange Commission reporting function. Her experience includes managing financial reporting requirements and supporting the financial sustainability of the Closed Block. The leadership changes come as Genworth continues developing its businesses focused on long-term care planning, caregiving services and insurance. Through its CareScout, Genworth and Enact brands, the company provides financial products and services addressing the needs of aging individuals and their families. Genworth is also the majority owner of Enact Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: ACT), a publicly traded U.S. mortgage insurance provider. The company traces its history back more than 150 years and operates as a publicly traded holding company headquartered in Richmond.

How enterprises are modernizing applications for an ai-ready future. Cloud-native infrastructure can improve performance and access to AI features, but some workloads are best left where they are. Alexander Slagg is a freelance writer specializing in technology and education. He is an ongoing contributor to the CDW family of magazines. For most enterprise businesses, there's a lot more to application modernization than simply migrating everything to the cloud. Some systems are too valuable to replace, some workloads aren't worth the expense of re-engineering, and some technologies need to evolve on a different timetable. Take Genworth Financial, for example. The Richmond, Va.-based company is taking a pragmatic approach as it modernizes its technology environment, embracing cloud-native infrastructure where it can deliver new capabilities while continuing to operate certain mature workloads in its own data centers. However, as it built out platform functionality for CareScout, a provider of long-term care support services that Genworth acquired in 2008, it determined that a cloud-native infrastructure was the right foundation. "We've been pushing ourselves hard to be as technology enabled and human-delivered as possible to give customers more options through the digital experience," says Genworth CIO Morris Taylor. "To do that, we have to be more modern in the way that we offer certain capabilities and services. And being more modern, those capabilities need to run in the cloud." Genworth's approach reflects a reality facing many mature enterprises: While cloud is often a critical tool for modernization projects, that doesn't necessarily mean abandoning everything that came before. Enterprises evaluate infrastructure app by app. As a mature business, Genworth still operates its own data center resources for certain operational workloads. Its embrace of cloud-native infrastructure is relatively new, growing from the expansion of its digital properties over the past few years, including CareScout. Today, Genworth operates with a multicloud strategy, using Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to support its cloud footprint. "Some technology is just not worth the expense to modernize and force-fit into our cloud services," Taylor explains. "We're very intentional with our closed-block business as to what things we think are cloudworthy or cloud-valuable. A good example is our data environment. We run our data environment in our data center today. But we are investing in a more modern technology solution that will be hosted in the cloud, and we will run all of our data in the cloud eventually." For growth-focused CareScout, however, Genworth has built an architecture that is cloud-based, making it quick and easy to add new services as the company expands its long-term-care service offerings. "Running off a cloud-hosted solution makes it easier to snap in new services," Taylor says. "Also, from an OPEX perspective, it enables us to spin up things when we need more, and spin down things when we need less. That is a really powerful feature that helps us manage the operating expenses relative to the platform." A broader change is underway in how organizations think about modernization, says Ashish Nadkarni, vice president and general manager of enterprise infrastructure at IDC. Businesses aren't just deciding which applications should move to the cloud. Today, they're often considering how the infrastructure supporting those applications can position them to take advantage of technologies that may not have been part of the original modernization plan. AI is one increasingly important consideration. "AI is putting a new veneer on the cloud services model," Nadkarni says. "Not only do enterprise applications benefit from it but also some of the up-and-coming AI initiatives that businesses are considering." That makes the choice of cloud platform about more than the immediate workload being migrated. Businesses need to consider how their cloud strategy can support the broader portfolio of applications and services over time. Such was the case with Genworth and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Its investment team took the time to meaningfully implement the technology into its workflows. "We're a large Microsoft shop, so when it came time to explore AI, it made sense to use Copilot," Taylor says. "And as an organization, we now find ourselves in this step-change moment, reimagining our processes and applying AI to them. Copilot and other solutions may be a good fit, depending on the level of sophistication and automation we're aiming for." When it comes to cloud strategy, businesses need to look beyond initial use cases and consider all of their server workloads. They should evaluate cloud providers with horizontal expansion in mind and consider the whole portfolio of services that are available, including AI. "If you are looking at the Amazon ecosystem, for example, you aren't just looking at the first-party services offered by Amazon, but also the marketplace of all the vendors that offer services on Amazon's cloud," says Nadkarni. "It's this adjacency, more than anything, that is important for these companies." Autoplay Full Screen Grid View AdvisorEngine improves database performance by updating surrounding infrastructure. Just as modernization doesn't always mean a cloud migration, cloud migrations don't always require rewriting key applications. Sometimes, the biggest gains come from modernizing everything around them. AdvisorEngine, a Raleigh, N.C.-based company that provides a digital practice management platform for independent investment advisers, took that approach with one of its most important operational systems. "AdvisorEngine runs its critical wealth management workloads in AWS using a highly available, multiregion architecture," explains Tim Gitchel, principal consultant for the company. "Microsoft SQL Server remains a core operational platform for us, while Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides the enterprise storage layer, supporting database performance, high availability, disaster recovery and operational data management." AdvisorEngine wanted a way to improve Microsoft SQL Server performance while minimizing operational disruptions. Rather than rewrite the application, the company modernized the infrastructure beneath it. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP allowed AdvisorEngine to process significantly more work within the same operational windows and scale more predictably. "We use Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP as our shared storage foundation for SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) deployed across AWS availability zones and regions," says Gitchel. "The platform provides the low-latency storage performance required by our transactional workloads, while NetApp supports replication to the disaster recovery environment. NetApp cloning capabilities also allow us to create efficient database copies for integrity checks and other operational processes without placing additional load on production systems." The result was a substantial improvement in both performance and cost efficiency - without having to rewrite any applications. That distinction matters. By modernizing the infrastructure surrounding an established application rather than replacing the application itself, AdvisorEngine reduced implementation risk, accelerated its modernization efforts and extended the value of its existing technology investments. "Cloud modernization does not always require replacing mature systems or rewriting core applications," Gitchel says. "In AdvisorEngine's case, the largest gains came from modernizing the infrastructure beneath the application. By combining self-hosted SQL Server FCI with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, we improved performance, resilience and cost efficiency while preserving the existing application architecture. That reduced risk and produced business value much faster than a full platform rewrite would have."

Bijal Shah appointed Head of Global Capability Center at Orbia in Pune. October 9, 2026 Bijal Shah has been appointed Head of Orbia's Global Capability Center (GCC) in Pune, where she will lead the center's development and operations, with a focus on innovation, operational excellence and supporting the company's global businesses. The appointment was reported by HR Today on October 9, 2026. Shah brings more than 23 years of experience across technology, operations, financial services and global capability centers. Before joining Orbia, Shah spent 16 years at Genworth Financial, where she most recently served as Country Leader for India. During her tenure, she worked on strengthening organizational capabilities, supporting enterprise-wide transformation and leading the company's India operations. Earlier in her career, Shah worked at Patni Computer Systems, later known as iGATE, as a Software Specialist. This role provided her with a technology foundation before she moved into broader leadership and operations responsibilities. Throughout her career, Shah has developed experience in business operations, resource management, technology and organizational leadership. Her background includes building teams, managing large-scale operations and supporting transformation initiatives across global organizations. At Orbia, Shah will focus on developing the Pune center as a capability hub supporting the company's businesses worldwide. Her responsibilities will include strengthening operational performance, advancing innovation and enabling scalable delivery across the organization. Orbia inaugurated its Pune technology hub on October 9, 2025, to expand its global digital and IT capabilities. The center supports areas including digital engineering, enterprise applications, cybersecurity, cloud and infrastructure, data and analytics, and IT operations. Orbia is a global company with businesses spanning Polymer Solutions, Building & Infrastructure, Precision Agriculture, Connectivity Solutions, and Fluor & Energy Materials. Its operations address areas including food and water security, connectivity, decarbonization and the energy transition. Shah's appointment adds leadership experience in technology and business operations to Orbia's Pune capability center as the company continues to develop its global technology and digital capabilities. - Advertisement -