Roles & Responsibilities — Beacon Index Advantage

1. Why This Document Exists

New product development at an insurance carrier spends capital and scarce specialist capacity long before it produces a single policy. The pricing actuary modeling a rider is not available for in-force experience work while she does it. That is the real cost of an NPD program, and it is why this one is governed by a board rather than by a sponsor.

An org chart shows the thirteen teams. What it cannot show is the thing that actually determines how decisions get made here: who is in the room, who has a vote, and who deliberately does not.

The two seats without votes, and why they are different.
⚠ C. Tyrrell chairs the Gate Review Board and does not vote (decision record D-11). He is seated from the PMO and owns gate integrity and evidence quality — which is precisely why he must not rule on the evidence he assembled. ***The person who controls what the board sees cannot also be the person who decides what it means.***
⚠ D. Pemberton, Chief Risk Officer, attends every gate as a non-voting observer — but with an unrestricted right to record a dissent in the gate minute, escalated to the Executive Committee within five business days. ***A recorded dissent does not block the decision. It makes the decision permanently attributable, which is a different and often stronger control.***
One has no vote because he is too close to the evidence. The other has no vote because he is deliberately outside the decision and must still be able to object on the record.

2. The Gate Review Board

Five voting seats, two non-voting. ⚠ Quorum must include the Chief Actuary and the General Counsel & Chief Compliance Officer — a gate cannot be decided without the two functions most able to stop it.

Seat	Holder	Owns at the gate	Vote
Executive Sponsor	G. Marchetti, Chief Product Officer	Product viability, portfolio fit	Voting
Chief Actuary	N. Adeyemi	Pricing, reserve adequacy, assumption integrity	Voting — quorum-critical
General Counsel & CCO	B. Lindqvist	Filing, contract forms, suitability, market conduct	Voting — quorum-critical
Head of Distribution	R. Castellanos	Volume assumptions, channel capacity	Voting
Chief Financial Officer	J. Whitmore	Capital, hurdle rate, funding release	Voting
Chief Risk Officer	D. Pemberton	Enterprise risk	No vote — dissent right
Chair	C. Tyrrell, NPD Program Manager	Gate integrity, evidence quality	No vote

⚠ Seats are held by role, not by individual. A member may send a delegate, but only one holding written authority. That rule exists so a gate is never quietly decided by whoever happened to be free that morning.

3. What the Chair Actually Owns

Removing the vote does not reduce the role; it relocates it. The chair owns everything about the gate except the decision, and that is a substantial and specific list:

The decision package — that entry criteria are genuinely met before a gate convenes, rather than convening and discovering they are not.
Evidence quality — that what the board is shown is complete, current, and not selectively assembled to produce a preferred outcome.
Gate conditions — issuing them, tracking them, verifying closure. A condition that is issued and never verified is worse than no condition, because the record says it was handled.
The minute — including any CRO dissent, recorded whether or not it is welcome.

⚠ The uncomfortable implication, stated deliberately. A chair who assembles the package, controls what is shown, and also votes has effectively decided the gate before it convenes. ***Removing the vote is not ceremonial modesty — it is the only thing that makes the other four responsibilities trustworthy.***

4. The Delivery Organization

Thirteen teams, each with a lead, and each owned at board level by a functional executive. ⚠ That second column matters more than it looks: every team has a route to the board that does not run through the program, which is what stops the Program Manager becoming the sole channel between the work and the people deciding its fate.

Team	Lead	Board owner	Owns
Actuarial — Pricing & Product Development	S. Ravichandran	N. Adeyemi	Rider pricing, assumption setting, profitability modeling
Actuarial — Valuation & Financial Reporting	T. Brennan	N. Adeyemi	Reserve methodology and reporting treatment
Legal & Compliance	A. Nkemelu	B. Lindqvist	Suitability, market conduct, contract language
Regulatory Filing & Contract Forms	P. Hollingsworth	B. Lindqvist	State filings and the filing calendar
IT — Annuity Administration Platform	V. Sandoval	G. Marchetti	The largest single build (10 people)
IT — Illustration & Quoting	E. Kowalczyk	G. Marchetti	Illustration engine and quoting accuracy
Product Management & Design	D. Falkner	G. Marchetti	Product construct and feature set
Operations — New Business & Policyholder Services	L. Marchand	G. Marchetti	Issue, service, and the operational readiness case
Investments — ALM & Hedging	M. Delacroix	J. Whitmore	Hedging strategy and asset-liability fit
Data, Reporting & Analytics	F. Osunde	J. Whitmore	Reporting infrastructure
Distribution & Wholesaling	H. Kirkpatrick	R. Castellanos	Channel readiness and wholesaler enablement
Product Development PMO	K. Iyer	C. Tyrrell (Chair)	Plan, evidence assembly, gate logistics

5. The Two Refusals — Recycle and Cancel

Most governance models have one way to say no. This one has two, and the distinction is the most useful idea in the suite. ⚠ A recycle returns the package without deciding the product. It exists so the Board is never forced into a false choice between approving something unproven and canceling something that may be sound — the two failure modes a single-outcome gate produces.

	Recycle	Cancel
What it decides	Nothing about the product. Only that the evidence is not yet decidable.	The program ends.
Who tables it	The Chair — who has no vote	Any voting member; available at every gate
What the Board must record	The specific deficiencies and the date the package returns	Final accounting within 20 business days to the CFO and Executive Committee
Money	Stage tranche not released; the program draws only on current funding. Any overrun from the loop is a contingency draw requiring Board authorization.	Funding stops immediately; unreleased tranches canceled; unspent funds returned to the capital pool
People	Team continues	Released on a stated date, reassignment through the functional line
Vendors	Unaffected	Committed obligations are settled, not abandoned — termination-for-convenience exercised under the Vendor Management Plan

⚠⚠ Note who holds which lever. The Chair cannot vote on a gate outcome, but he is the one who tables a recycle recommendation — and cancellation is available between gates on a Chair-convened extraordinary session. ***The person with no vote is the person who can call the meeting at which the program dies.*** That is not a contradiction. Facilitation authority and decision authority are different things, and this design separates them deliberately: he can force the question in front of the people entitled to answer it, and he cannot answer it himself.

Why the recycle wording matters. The Board must state deficiencies and a return date. ⚠ A recycle without a stated remedy is a deferral wearing a governance label — it stops the clock without obliging anyone to do anything, and the program drifts while continuing to consume capacity. ***Requiring both halves in the minute is what makes a recycle a decision rather than an absence of one.***

6. What the Program Cannot Decide

Pricing and reserve adequacy. The Chief Actuary's judgment on assumption integrity is not a program input to be balanced against launch date. An assumption the actuary will not sign is not a schedule problem.

Filing and suitability. A product that cannot be filed cannot be sold, and no amount of program pressure changes a state's requirements.

Funding release. Money is released one tranche at a time by the CFO at gates. The program does not draw ahead of a gate, which is the mechanism that makes cancellation genuinely possible rather than theoretically possible.

The test used across this portfolio: if the program can change the answer by asking harder, it was never an independent authority. ⚠ Here the point is sharper than usual: the program manager is in the room for all of these decisions and has no vote on any of them. ***Proximity without authority is the whole design, not an accident of seniority.***

7. How This Compares To the Other Programs Here

Question	Lighthouse (this suite)	Catalyst (AI)	PM / Agile
Where does the PM sit?	Chairs the board, no vote	Not on any board	Chairs, and decides
Who can stop it?	Chief Actuary, GC/CCO, CFO — each alone	Independent Model Validation, unappealably	The sponsor
How is refusal recorded?	A CRO dissent in the minute, escalated in 5 days	A failed validation gate	A declined change request
What is protected?	Capital, and the policyholder behind the pricing	The member behind the model	The delivery commitment

⚠ Lighthouse and Catalyst answer the same question two ways, and the contrast is worth understanding. Both start from the premise that the person who assembles the evidence must not rule on it. Lighthouse keeps the Program Manager in the chair and removes the vote, buying context at the cost of appearances. Catalyst never seats him at all, buying independence at the cost of context. ***Neither is more correct; they are trading the same two goods in opposite directions, and knowing which trade an organization has made tells you more about it than the org chart does.***