In 2001, the financial services giant ING gave $2.8 million to the University of Connecticut business school to brand a financial services center and a faculty position in Storrs with its name.
But still facing a need for more new actuarial workers and financial talent, six years later the company is looking to further expand its presence at the school.
Steve Hoskins, executive director of the career center at the UConn business school, places both undergraduates and business school students in internships and jobs. He said the Dutch financial firm and the school are negotiating new possible promotions, including ING-sponsored speakers and panels, or appearances by ING employees discussing opportunities and their experiences at the company.
“They’ve come in and said ‘We are very excited about opportunities to hire your students,’” Hoskins said.
There are many connections between ING and UConn, as there are between the school and other top local corporations like The Hartford, Aetna, UTC and CIGNA. Robert J. Crispin, who received his MBA from UConn in 1975, is president and CIO of ING Investment Management. And along with the sponsorship of the school’s financial center, an ING gift created a faculty position, the ING chair professor, currently filled by V. Kumar, a marketing and customer relations research expert.
Talent Pool
Like other financial firms with large employee bases in the area, ING’s growth in Connecticut — headquarters for its U.S. retirement operations — is contingent on its ability to find and hire new talent.
ING is betting big on being able to do that here, by way of a new $100 million headquarters it is building in Windsor. The firm has about 2,000 employees in Hartford currently, but will have room for 2,500 in Windsor, and the top local executive, Kathleen A. Murphy, has indicated she expects the company to add more.
The question is whether it will be able to. Susan Winkler, executive director of the insurance and financial industries cluster group — which aims to bolster the industry locally, has made the workforce her primary focus since being hired last December.
“There’s a need for all levels of talent, but actuarial and underwriting in particular,” she said.
UConn is one of the places the companies are looking for answers, and the school is meeting that demand in part by accepting more students. Hoskins said the last two classes of the business school averaged about 50 graduates, but that it expects to put out 90 this year, including many more with a finance focus, a “major puller” for company recruiters.
And more students seem to be staying in-state after graduating. Hoskins said that in the last two years he’s “seen a higher percentage –- probably 60 or 70 percent –- staying in Connecticut.”
That suits local companies, who are looking for quality help right away.
“They actually want these individuals to come out of the program with experience that will be beneficial to the company,” he said, regardless of whether graduates go to work on strategy, investment banking or underwriting.
Sponsorships, gifts and the name recognition that come with them are another part of the relationship UConn shares with local companies, just as with other business schools in the country. In partnership with General Electric, UConn opened “edGElab” in Stamford in 2001, a 12,000 square-foot research facility where company executives, UConn faculty and students collaborate on work for GE. Three years later the school opened the SS&C Technologies Financial Accelerator in downtown Hartford, in tandem with the Windsor-based IT firm.
ING Catching Up
So while lots of the big firms are looking to get their names in front of UConn students, some have had more luck than others. Hoskins said that Aetna, for instance, had 13 interns from the business school in the summer of 2005; it has since hired 12 of them and has another batch of interns this year.
But he said a total of only five to seven business school graduates have landed at ING over the past two years. It is not listed among the school’s top employers on UConn’s Web site, though The Hartford, CitiGroup, Travelers and eight other companies are.
But Kumar said his marketing research, with ING’s name attached, has brought the company tremendous prestige.
“We have produced research that is unmatched worldwide in terms of research publications and awards,” he said.
“Every publication that we write [for] and every award we win has ING’s name on it. So the brand recognition is there.”
