Sun Life Financial Inc. has announced a handful of executive changes reflecting a reorganization that is meant to recognize the opportunities to market the company’s products and services better internationally.

Sun Life Canada president Kevin Dougherty will take on the newly created role of president of Sun Life Global Investments, the new brand for the platform under which the firm’s Canadian and U.S. asset-management units operate.

Dougherty’s new mandate will be to “leverage” the company’s wealth-management expertise globally, says Michel Leduc, Sun Life’s vice president of public and corporate affairs in Toronto.

“Traditionally, our businesses and products have risen from jurisdiction to jurisdiction according to local regulation and tax rules — factors of that sort,” Leduc says. “Increasingly, there are aspects in which we see products more and more globally, particularly on the asset-management side.”

The Sun Life Global Investments brand becomes the business unit under which Sun Life subsidiary McLean Budden Ltd. and McLean Budden Funds Inc. reside. The unit also has a roughly 36% stake in CI Financial Income Fund.

Sun Life Global Investments will also include the firm’s U.S. asset-management business, Massa-chu-setts Financial Services which led Sun Life Financial’s third-quarter results. The parent firm posted a $577-million profit in the quarter ended Sept. 30, with $68 million of that arriving via the MFS unit.

Dougherty’s platform will grow, but Leduc says it’s too soon to know how Sun Life Global Investments will be staffed and how it will be structured. “It will be staffed with internal talent,” he says.

The cross-border marketing and sales push applies across Canada and the U.S., but also in India, China, Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia, notes Leduc.

On the insurance side of the business, Robert Salipante, president of Sun Life Financial U.S., will oversee the company’s international variable-annuity centre, which was also part of the announcement. The demand for annuities products in the U.S. — Sun Life alone has reached the US$1 billion in sales — has made the country a leader both in sales and the development of new features for the product, including the guaranteed minimum withdrawal benefit.

The GMWB appeals to boomers who are heading into retirement and who want their income guaranteed. Leduc says the major trends related to an aging population — increasingly longevity as well as an individual’s increasing responsibility for financially supporting his or her own retirement — are universal: “They’re in some of the emerging markets, as well. India is young, but China is an aging population.”

The yet-to-be-assembled centre will manage the financial and strategic process of transferring product types and features from one market to the next, noting the life extension of the GMWB. “This centre will make sure that when we have these winning solutions, we can export them much quicker,” Leduc says

In October, Sun Life said it was aiming to extend its GMWB to a lifetime benefit, an announcement that came two weeks after Toronto-based Manulife Financial Corp. changed its product to do the same.

Dean Connor, who is currently executive vice president, will replace Dougherty as president of Sun Life Canada. Connor joined the firm more than a year ago from Mercer LLC, the global consulting firm, at which he held a number of positions that culminated in the role of president of the Americas, including its Canadian, U.S. and Latin American operations.

Finally, Tom Bogart, executive vice president and general counsel for Sun Life Canada, is taking on additional responsibilities as chairman of the subsidiaries Sun Life Insurance (Canada) Ltd. and Sun Life Assurance Co. of Canada (U.S.).

Apart from the appointments, the changes primarily indicate a name change, led by the development of the Sun Life Global Investments brand, according to an analyst who has covered the company since it demutualized in 1999. As well, the changes formally bundle together the firm’s asset-management units under a name that fits the platform, although the units have been together legally since 2005. IE