Thrivent CEO is not afraid to bring her authentic self to work — or make hard decisions

As a child, Terry Rasmussen's father once dared her to ride her horse into their farmhouse just outside Carlisle, Minn.

"I did — much to my mother's chagrin. She screamed," recalled the chief executive of Thrivent Financial in deadpan fashion.

Rasmussen, who just hit her fifth year milestone at the helm of the financial services powerhouse, has spent a lifetime taking unusual paths and surprising people along the way.

The onetime dental hygienist and tax-trial attorney is the first female CEO of Minneapolis-based Thrivent and one of 53 women to head a Fortune 500 company (along with fellow Minnesotans, Best Buy's Corie Barry and Land O'Lakes' Beth Ford). Next year, she takes over as chair of the 48-year-old American Council of Life Insurers.

While Thrivent is not publicly traded, it qualifies for the Fortune 500 because it is a fraternal benefit organization, meaning its "members" have shares. It started as a Lutheran organization. But in 2013 the nonprofit expanded to serve all Christians and now has 2.3 million members who purchase a mix of insurance, annuities, financial planning, retirement and investment services.

Rasmussen is quick to point out that clients and employees also work with Thrivent on philanthropic and community causes, donating $238 million to various efforts in 2022. That do-gooder mentality is seen as a feather in the cap for Thrivent, which today manages $162 billion in assets and is on a mission to grow.

"We have to add value [and] make sure we have a bigger impact in our communities," she said.

Rasmussen, who took opera singing lessons in order to better project her speaking voice in board meetings, joined Thrivent in 2005 after 15 years rising up the legal ranks at Ameriprise. She succeeded Thrivent's CEO Brad Hewitt in 2018 and has since been busy reworking the company and trying to modernize it.

"I'm trying to get us refocused on our core business. We are really doubling down on financial advice," she said. When Rasmussen took the helm, she told the board, "We need to focus and remember that at the core, we are a financial services company, and we are really good at it."

That mantra drove hard decisions.

In 2019, Thrivent shut or sold noncore businesses such as its marriage counseling subsidiary, a unit that wrote sermons for pastors and the business that tried to sell insurance and annuity products online to first-time buyers.

She reduced staff (via voluntary buyouts) by 430 positions, slashed $40 million in operating costs, queried clients about their needs, launched Thrivent's first national ad campaign, and built a new $125 million headquarters building.

Looking toward the future, she brought in new C-suite leadership.

If her mission these past five years had been to refocus a company that had gotten a little fat and unfocused, Rasmussen's next five will be to grow sales and modernize operations even more, so Thrivent can compete in the digital age.

That's no small task. Thrivent and its predecessors — Lutheran Brotherhood and Aid Association for Lutherans — have been around for 121 years. It competes daily with Ameriprise, Securian, Fidelity, Metropolitan Life, Prudential Financial, banks and countless other players in the industry in the Twin Cities and around the country.

In 2023, life insurance sales growth was anemic, but investments under management rose. Capital surplus and insurance reserves rose from $16.6 billion to $17.2 billion. This year dividends, fee reductions and credits to members are on path to hit a record $542 million.

Reimagining a ship with 4,000 employees is not easy, but former and current associates and employees say she's up for the challenge.

Don't be misled by her unpretentious nature, they say.

Rasmussen is well-known for regaling visitors with stories about her horselike dog, her hairless Rex "grandkitties," a love of art, annual sugar cookie exploits and heartwarming tales about Thrivent clients.

Yet this down-home farm girl has a legal mind laced with chutzpah and the courage to follow through on what needs to be done.

"She's just 100 percent real," said Gretchen Cepek, general counsel of Allianz Life Insurance Co. of North America, whom Rasmussen mentored over the years, insisting Cepek join the board of the prestigious Association of Life Insurance Counsel (ALIC) to network with industry stalwarts and become a power-wielding executive herself.

As ALIC president in 2015, Rasmussen changed the rules, ending exclusive memberships and admitting less-seasoned insurance executives for the first time, Cepek said. Rasmussen shook up decades of "ceremony" when she created networking programs that recruited, admitted and mentored women and minorities for the first time.

Thrivent Chief Legal Officer Paul Johnston, who has worked with Rasmussen for 25 years at both Ameriprise and Thrivent, credits Rasmussen with "driving" change at the ALIC and taking similar actions at Thrivent.

"She is really pushing Thrivent, challenging it to bring what Thrivent can to a much more diverse client base," one that stretches beyond the company's traditional Midwestern and Lutheran roots, Johnston said.

Appealing to a more diverse client base and broadening Thrivent's reach is what's behind Thrivent's new "Follow Your Heart" ad campaign and its determination to use technology to tap new members and better serve old ones.

"Just look at all the things you can do these days. You can buy a house just using your phone," she said.

She is crisply aware that when many young people need financial advice, their first move isn't to talk to an adviser "face to face." It's to click on a phone app, she said.

If successful, tomorrow's Thrivent will cobble together the right mix of human and technology tools to grow Thrivent's businesses while at the same time fine-tuning services so clients can choose "in person" financial guidance or help through a digital tool.

But getting that technology just right is critical, Rasmussen said.

Any technology must be responsive, fast and easy to use — demands Thrivent struggled to meet during the early days of the pandemic when all services had to be remote, employees acknowledged.

To up Thrivent's game, Rasmussen broadened her executive team, adding consumer technology, communications and retail pros from places like Huntington Bank, Target and Principal Financial Group.

"We are delivering on a new operating model where we can deliver much faster," she said.

So far, her team hired more than 100 new virtual financial planners to augment Thrivent's existing network of roughly 2,000 advisers who meet clients in person. Her managers are upgrading systems so customers can use phone apps and Thrivent's website more easily to buy mutual funds, insurance products, or sign up for company- and client-sponsored community projects.

The new effort is starting to pay off. Customer retention and referral rates are up.

"We're starting to see sentiment improve from our current clients and our advisers," said Brett Brunick the customer-service digitization pro who joined Thrivent in 2021 after years at Target and TCF Bank (now Huntington Bank).

"We're seeing some channel shifting towards our digital experiences versus [members] analog writing checks and calling the [customer call center]," he said.

That shift could have taken five to 10 years. "But Terry never wavered in the vision," Brunick said.

"When I met her, she had such conviction on what I had already experienced in banking and in retail," he said, working toward responding to clients quickly with technology like at Target, Amazon and banks.

"I really love Terry, because Terry plays the long game," he said.