Insurance Giant AIG Cuts Several Sales Offices In Tennessee

American International Group Inc., one of the largest insurance companies in the nation, is closing about a dozen sales offices in Tennessee.

AIG told staff Thursday that it’s making major cuts to its
Financial Network group, one of the company’s sales divisions. AIG Financial Network has 178 offices in 24 states; the company is closing all but four across the country.

A spokesman for the company would not confirm how many people in Tennessee or nationwide are being laid off. He said AIG’s main Tennessee office in Brentwood, which employs more than 900 people, experienced some cuts but was largely unaffected. 

In a statement, the insurance firm says some Financial Network employees will be able to transfer to similar sales jobs outside the company.

The layoffs don’t surprise Josh Stirling
, a research analyst at Sanford Bernstein & Co. who has been critical of the company’s financial decisions. 

“AIG is executing a plan now to cut between a billion and a billion-and-a-half dollars of cost over the next three years,” he says. “What the company is now doing … is a very long and arduous process of trying to fix itself, when it’s probably 10 to 20 years behind a lot of its competitors.”

The company also plans to cut up to 400 senior-level jobs,
according to Bloomberg News, and activist investor Carl
Icahn
has been pressuring AIG to split up into three separate companies to lower its cost.