CFO Intelligence Magazine – Winter 2024
Diana H. Pereira
Pension mark CFO
CFO Diana H. Pereira Positions Pension mark for Continued Expansion
About a year after CFO Diana H. Pereira joined Pension mark Financial Group (Pension mark) — a Santa Barbara, Calif. based retirement and financial planning registered investment advisor supporting more than $76 billion in assets across its network — she found out that the company was in talks to be acquired by Tinton Falls, N.J.-based World Insurance Associates LLC. Fortunately, the best practices that Pereira — a veteran finance officer with M&A, investment management and other experience — had set up helped to position Pension mark for the transition to World, one of the nation’s fastest-growing insurance brokers. “Although the World deal was not on the table at the time I joined Pension mark as Corporate Controller (she was promoted to CFO in February 2022), our CEO Troy Hammond supported
my recommendations to invest in NetSuite, a cloud-based ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), and Boomi, a system that maps to our custom commission engine built in Salesforce, which allows us to connect various systems through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, or software systems),” she says. “My team and I worked to migrate our financial system to the cloud-based environment, which resulted in a system that was more robust than World’s, at least in my opinion. Our parent is now working to implement a similar system…