SVP, Core IT

Crum & Forster Company Overview

Crum & Forster (C&F), with a proud history dating to 1822, provides specialty and standard commercial lines insurance products through our admitted and surplus lines insurance companies. C&F enjoys a financial strength rating of "A+" (Superior) by AM Best and is proud of our superior customer service platform. Our claims and risk engineering services are recognized as among the best in the industry.

Our most valuable asset is our people: more than 2500 employees in locations throughout the United States. The company is increasingly winning recognition as a great place to work, earning several workplace and wellness awards for four years running, including the 2025-2026 Great Place to Work® Award for our employee-first focus and our steadfast commitment to diversity, equity and Inclusion.

C&F is part of Fairfax Financial Holdings, a global, billion dollar organization.  For more information about Crum & Forster, please visit our website: www.cfins.com.

 

 

Job Description

 

Crum & Forster provides specialty and standard commercial lines insurance products through our admitted and surplus lines insurance companies. Operating out of our corporate offices in Morristown, New Jersey, and ten regional offices, we distribute our products through approximately 1,500 authorized retail and wholesale brokers across the United States.

 

C&F has a strong culture developed around a decentralized model, enabling business units to drive innovation with their customers in mind.  We are looking for a dynamic individual to lead Core IT and deliver centralized IT functions with a focus on security, availability, and customer satisfaction.

 

Core IT operates in a federated model providing infrastructure services to a centralized C&F corporate layer and multiple decentralized business divisions selling a wide variety of insurance products.  

The Senior Vice President, Core IT, reporting into the COO, will serve as the enterprise leader responsible for designing and executing the strategy for all Core IT services across a hybrid on-prem / multi-cloud environment. This role will champion transparency, measurable outcomes, and a service oriented operating model aligned to the strategic needs of C&F and its divisions. 

 

What you will do:

 

The SVP of Core IT will lead a large organization of Infrastructure professionals and will work very closely with multiple partners across C&F – including a tight knit collaboration with the CISO. The major areas of responsibility will be:

• Data Center Services – Primary & Secondary Data Centers, multi-cloud environments, and other services such as O365, patch management, and directory services
• Network Services – Enterprise network architecture, firewall management, Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure, database administration, and job scheduling & monitoring.
• Desktop Services – Service Desk, Employee Access Security, and Telecom/Collaboration

The SVP of Core IT will be responsible for ensuring Division Presidents and other senior level executives are up to date on the current state of our services – and will need to engage at a technical level with all levels of staff and management to be successful in this role. Additionally, the SVP will:

• Work closely with the division IT leads to understand their needs and ensure appropriate support that satisfies security and operational objectives
• Work closely with the CISO organization to ensure cyber security needs are fully addressed for the safety and security of C&F’s network and data
• Promote a continuous training culture to help the teams keep current with ITSM, AI, Cyber Security, and other skills as needed
• Develop and manage an appropriate budget; balancing cost optimization without compromising reliability - targeting meaningful reductions in total cost of ownership while improving service levels.

The SVP of Core IT will be responsible for several transformational objectives including:

• Defining, implementing, and continuously refining a transparent IT Service model based on ITIL/COBIT principles, with clearly articulated services, catalogues, and end-to-end ownership. 
• Establishing and enforcing KPI’s and SLA’s to measure and monitor successful outcomes. 
• Driving strategic modernization initiatives including hybrid cloud adoption, network/SD-WAN transformation, infrastructure AI/automation, edge computing readiness, and next-generation data center optimization for resilience, scalability, and sustainability. 
• Ensuring robust disaster recovery, business continuity, and high-availability architecture