Data Steward

Compliance Jobs Report: aug. 28. The Compliance Jobs Report is back, after another vacation last week! This week Radical Compliance has a personnel shakeup at Nordea; new hires at Pacific Life, Wellsky, BNY, and more; exits at Wendy's and Molson Coors; and two intriguing moves at the Justice Department. Numerous promotions to note; job leads are in pharma, gambling, and beer; and Meme of the Week goes out to Dolly Parton. Radical Compliance gather the Jobs Report news items from LinkedIn, press releases, and wherever else Radical Compliance can find tips - and thank you to everyone who sends them in, you make the Jobs Report possible! If you have any gossip to share (even confidentially) email me at [email protected] or find me on LinkedIn. Compliance Jobs. This week Radical Compliance begin in Finland, where Nordea Bank has announced plans to merge its compliance and risk teams into one unit. Mark Kandborg, an 18-year veteran of the bank and chief risk officer since 2022, will keep that title and assume leadership of the integrated team. Nahale Ståhl Hallengren, currently head of group financial crime compliance, will move up to chief compliance officer at the start of next year and report to Kandborg. Jamie Graham, Nordea's chief compliance officer since 2021, decided to leave the bank (and the Nordic region) for personal reasons but will continue as a senior adviser until spring 2027. Pacific Life has hired Tom Oldham as chief compliance and ethics officer. Oldham joins PacLife after 14 years at Mutual of Omaha, where he most recently had been chief compliance, ethics, and privacy officer since 2023. Melissa Clawson is leaving Wendy's, where she has been chief audit executive since 2017. No word on what Clawson is doing next, but she did tell everyone to "stay tuned for where I land and begin my next adventure," which of course Radical Compliance will do. UPMC, the hospital system affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh, has hired Rick Blair as vice president of compliance, effective next week. Blair joins UPMC from Blue Shield of California, where he had been senior director of ethics and compliance since last year. Cryptocurrency platform Binance has hired two compliance executives from Crypto.com to strengthen its compliance program. Antonio Alvarez will serve as deputy chief compliance officer, reporting to Noah Perlman; Alvarez had previously been chief compliance officer at Crypto since 2020. Duncan DeVille will join as global head of financial crimes compliance, a title he also held at Crypto. Shari Singleton has been hired as director of compliance at Children's Health, a large pediatric hospital system based in Dallas. Singleton comes to Children's after seven years at Parkland Health, where she had most recently been director of compliance investigations. The World Bank has hired Yuko Keicho as auditor general. Keicho previously worked at the Asia Development Bank for five years, where she was also auditor general; and she serves on the standards committee for the Institute of Internal Auditors. Swiss IT services firm SITA has hired Adam Rommel as group head of compliance, trade, and ethics. (A rather telling sign of the economic times that trade is now grouped with ethics and compliance!) Rommel had previously been working at TD Synnex for five years, most recently as director of ethics and compliance for the EMEA region. Leah Ramos has left STO Building Group, a privately owned collection of construction firms based in New York City, where she had been chief ethics and compliance officer since the start of 2026. Ramos had been with the firm in other compliance and audit roles since 2017. No word on what she might do next. Spectrum, a subsidiary of Charter Communications, has hired Amber Nash Hall as vice president of compliance. Hall comes to Spectrum from Cox Enterprises, where she had been chief compliance and privacy officer since 2024. Justin Alfano has joined BNY as global head of enforcement and investigations. Alfano previously worked at Deutsche Bank for 11 years, most recently as global head of investigations. Healthcare technology firm Wellsky has hired Shannon Jones as senior compliance manager. Jones joins WellSky after two years at Elevance Health, where she had been a senior program manager (of compliance, one presumes). American Express just tapped Laura Catterick as chief risk officer for the United Kingdom. Catterick comes to Amex from U.K. Finance, a financial services firm in London, where she had been director of resilience and cyber. Melissa Lempa is leaving her job as director of ethics and compliance at Molson Coors after six years there. Lempa hasn't said where she's going next, but she did encourage others to apply for her old job; the role is listed in its Open Req Orders section below. American Physiatry, a healthcare firm in New Jersey, has hired Brian Colonna as chief compliance officer. Colonna comes to the physical rehab firm from PACS, a medical staffing business, where he had been associate chief compliance officer. Susan Hardel just turned up at Kikoff, a payments firm based in San Francisco, where she is head of compliance. Hardel was last seen at Chime, another payments firm, where she had been senior director of business controls until earlier this year. In Boston, Kamy Niroomand has been hired at GE Appliances as senior director of compliance and integrity. He comes to the company from Inari, a biotech research firm in Beantown, where he had been head of compliance, privacy, and security. And personnel news from the venture capital world! Jerry Sanchez has left his job at VC firm New Enterprise Associates, where he had been chief compliance officer since 2022, to join K5 Global as chief compliance officer and senior counsel. Moving up the ladder. Sebastiaan Biesheuvel has a new role at Dutch chipmaking giant ASML, moving from chief ethics officer and head of business integrity for AI to head of ethics and business integrity for Asia. Law firm Arent Fox has promoted Joanna Matuszkiewicz from senior paralegal for export and customs compliance to director of compliance and regulatory audit. Radical Compliance has a few promotions at Johnson & Johnson to note this week: * Paul Csuha from senior trade compliance analyst to trade compliance operations lead; * Angelo Silva from senior manager of third-party risk management to director of the same; * Nancy Sobeh, from EMEA healthcare compliance manager to global healthcare compliance assurance manager. TD Bank has moved Lamedra Brooks from vice president for default management in the bank's mortgage division to vice president for controls in TD's shared services division. Regulatory stuff. Two moves to note this week in regulator world! First, the U.S. Justice Department has tapped Marnee Rand to be chief of the Corporate Enforcement and Compliance Unit within the Criminal Division. This means Rand is the one in charge of assessing corporate compliance programs during corporate criminal investigations, although her unit and the whole White Collar Enforcement section have been marginalized by the Justice Department's new Fraud Enforcement Division. Rand is a veteran prosecutor within the department and had previously been acting chief of the Fraud Enforcement Division's corporate enforcement section. Second, Patrick Gushue has left his job at the Justice Department, where he had been acting director of the department's whistleblower rewards program, to take a new gig as an enforcement attorney at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Not sure who is therefore running the whistleblower rewards program now; if you happen to know, feel free to leak it to me at [email protected]. Vendors & service providers. Scott Moritz, a long-time financial crimes and forensics investigator who has run his own White Collar Forensics firm since 2022, has merged his firm into EisnerAmper, where he will now be a managing director. Moritz worked at FTI Consulting and Protiviti earlier in his career. Evan Sopenoff has left his job at Citibank, where he had been senior vice president of regulatory engagement for digital assets; to join Deloitte, where he is a manager in the firm's digital assets practice. Open Req Orders. Eli Lilly is looking for a senior director of global ethics and compliance. Job is based in Indianapolis, with a salary range listed at $154,000 to $226,000. Molson Coors is hiring a director of ethics and compliance. Job is based in Milwaukee, Wisc., with a salary range listed at $149,000 to $196,000, plus bonus, stock options, and $23,000 "average spent on benefits per employee," which is appreciated but also a reminder of how painfully expensive healthcare costs are in the United States. Atlantis, the casino and resort in the Bahamas, is looking for a director of internal audit. Job is based on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, a place that lives up to its name; but salary range is undisclosed. Compliance Meme of the Week. That's all for this week's report. As always, if you have a tip or want to brag about your new job, promotion, career milestone, or anything else, email me at [email protected] or find me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to give credit to the many hard-working people here in its corner of the business universe.

MassMutual Ascend tops $2 billion in RIA annuity sales as advisors warm to income products. Ten years after entering the fee-based annuity market, MassMutual Ascend says nearly half its lifetime sales came in the past two years alone - but barriers remain among fee-only advisors. AUG 13, 2026 MassMutual Ascend, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mass Mutual wth a focus on the RIA channel, is celebrating a milestone in the growing adoption of advisory annuities. MassMutual Ascend has crossed $2 billion in lifetime advisory annuity sales, a threshold the insurer says reflects a broader shift in how registered investment advisors think about guaranteed income inside client portfolios. The Cincinnati-based insurer said the figure was built on relationships with more than 1,700 investment advisor representatives across nearly 1,000 RIAs that now write annuity business through the platform. What stands out in the numbers, the company said, is the pace of adoption in the past two years, with roughly $900 million of its advisory annuity sales coming through the door in 2025 and 2026. "Ten years ago, we entered this space with the belief that annuities would become an increasingly important part of advisors' retirement planning conversations," Joe Maringer, senior vice president and national sales manager at MassMutual Ascend, said in a statement. "This milestone is evidence of that momentum." MassMutual Ascend traces the milestone back to 2016, when it launched what it describes as the industry's first advisory fixed-indexed annuity - a product built specifically for advisors operating under a fee-based, rather than commission-based, model. Since then, the company has broadened its advisory lineup to include fixed, fixed-indexed and registered index-linked annuities, chasing a fiduciary channel that has historically been resistant to insurance products. MassMutual Ascend has also been ranked by LIMRA as the top provider in advisory fixed-indexed annuity sales for eight consecutive quarters, the company said. The case for annuities inside a fee-based practice rests on the fact that a dollar allocated to an annuity can be structured to generate more guaranteed lifetime income than a dollar in a comparable fixed-income allocation; that comes down mostly to how risk pooling happens across a large group of policyholders. Mammoth asset managers like BlackRock and State Street have taken notice over the past few years, placing annuities into the target-date products that end up on the menus made available to countless retirement plan participants. "When these asset managers are acknowledging that fact and bringing annuities in for income and in their own products, that has to speak to the individual advisors and firms who think they can do it themselves," David Lau, founder and CEO of DPL Financial, previously told InvestmentNews. Belle Bielawska, national key account manager at MassMutual Ascend, framed the trend as a shift in how advisors and clients view the category altogether. "As retirement challenges become more complex, we're seeing greater appreciation for the role modern annuities can play and the unique outcomes they're designed to deliver, like defined protection and contractual income, which can be difficult to replicate elsewhere," Bielawska said in a written statement. Despite the RIA channel's prospects as the next growth frontier for annuities, there are still real challenges holding them back. Aside from implementaton bottlenecks and the historical gap in fee-based options, the complexity of annuties has also kept a lid on how comfortable advisors can get recommending them. For fiduciary advisors, it may also be easier to justify other low-cost options when considering their clients' best interest. Matt Clifford, a former Pacific Life annuities strategy leader who now consults for insurance and annuity organizations, also sees a mismatch between how carriers design and roll out new annuity products, and how RIAs approach planning for clients. "Carriers frequently adjust product design and sales capacity to align with shifting economic conditions, capital markets, and internal risk or return objectives," Clifford said in a LinkedIn note. "Over the past two decades, this has driven notable shifts in product focus." In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, he said low interest rates and rampant market volatility, along with more stringent capital reserve requirements for financial institutions, pushed carriers to pivot from variable annuities with guaranteed living benefits to more capital-efficient fixed products. "As interest rates rose sharply in 2022 and 2023, carriers leaned into multi-year guaranteed annuities (MYGAs) and fixed indexed annuities (FIAs), which offered competitive yields, strong consumer appeal, and more favorable spread economics," he said. "These shifts, while operationally sound, create downstream friction as advisors and wholesalers must reorient their positioning, retrain, and reshape client conversations." While firms operating in the brokerage model may be able to manage those frictions thanks to incentives such as commssions and marketing support, Clfford argued those buttons aren't available to RIAs, who "tend to take a longer-term, more stable view of portfolio construction and client strategy. "To close that gap, carriers should work to identify and deeply understand the core financial planning principles RIAs manage to, and build a set of stable, fitting solutions that align with those principles," he said. "Just as important, they must demonstrate a willingness to stand behind those solutions across changing macro and market environments."