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effrey D. Thiemann is pursuing his passion one year into his job as president and CEO of Portico Benefit Services (formerly ELCA Board of Pensions) by transitioning the ministry into a resource for well- ness, retirement planning and health- care reform.
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Before the Portico board of trustees chose him to replace John Kapanke, who retired, Thiemann, 53, an ELCA pastor and former trustee, was impressed with the min- istry’s cost-containment discipline (members’ health-care coverage expenses are kept below the national average) and its 2003 switch toward a focus on wellness rather than dis- ease management.
Jeffrey D. Thiemann
“The shift to the wellness model had a [positive] impact on our costs and on the well-being of our congre- gational leaders,” Thiemann said. Portico’s 50,000 members com- prise ELCA pastors and paid congre- gational staff, as well as churchwide, synod and seminary employees and their families. The nonprofit had $6.1 billion in assets under management as of Dec. 31, 2011, mostly in members’ retirement funds, and operates as a self-insured health insurance provider for 35,000 of its members and their dependents.
By Sandra Guy
Portico chief touts ministry transition
Thiemann spent a first career as a strategic business consultant, a CEO of a tech startup in Silicon Valley and before that, as a Hewlett-Packard general manager. He has a computer science engineering degree from the Mas- sachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s General Manager Program for Executive Education in Boston. But Thiemann felt the call to ministry and recognized a need for his skills in the church. He grew up in the Phil- ippines and in Ethiopia as the son of missionaries and was always active in the church. In 2005 he was ordained after graduating from Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, Calif. He and his wife, Pam, are parents to four children and have one grandson. One of Thiemann’s first projects at Portico was to partner with Ernst & Young to offer members free finan- cial planning guidance and a readiness report calculating
16 The Lutheran •
www.thelutheran.org
expected monthly incomes in retire- ment. Only 16 percent of employers nationwide offer such retirement guidance to their employees, accord- ing to a Charles Schwab report. “It is so important to me and to this church that our congregational leaders are well-educated about their financial well-being and have the tools to achieve it,” Thiemann said. “If they are not in that spot, they are not effective leaders in talking about stewardship and generosity.” Ernst & Young reported it had never experienced such quick accep- tance of its financial guidance, show- ing the huge need among Portico members for such insights, Thie- mann said. The company averages 900 calls a month and has conducted a retirement assessment for about 1,000 members (Portico pays on a per-member, per-month basis). As part of its work, Ernst & Young has agreed not to “pitch” paid products.
Thiemann is also excited about Portico’s ongoing collaboration with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., which has given health risk assessments to more than 70 percent of participating members. Some ELCA seminaries asked for alternatives to Por-
tico’s traditional health coverage, so Thiemann recom- mended to the ELCA Church Council a high-deductible alternative as a pilot in 2013 to seminary employees. In September the council approved the pilot plan, which will go into effect Jan. 1, 2013, for participating seminar- ies (Luther, St. Paul, Minn., and Pacific Lutheran Theo- logical Seminary, Berkeley, Calif.). The biggest priority, Thiemann said, is “customer inti- macy—the need to expand our understanding of what our members need.”
That philosophy applies even as Portico faces poten- tially losing an estimated 15 percent to 20 percent of total members to state-run health-care exchanges that will pay thousands in yearly subsidies to help low-income people buy medical insurance when health-care reform is fully implemented. “We want to help our members make the best possible decision,” Thiemann said.
COURTESY PORTICO BENEFIT SERVICES
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