For Steve Menzies, there is an easy commerce between his leadership in the corporate world and his dedicated philanthropy. A lifelong entrepreneur, Steve’s achievements include the creation of Applied Underwriters in 1994, today a global risk services firm that helps governments, businesses and people manage uncertainty through its business services, insurance, reinsurance, and investment solutions. Among its accomplishments, Applied created a top rated nationwide group of insurers providing tens of thousands of employers and their hundreds of thousands of employees with coverage to become the only such specialist ever to achieve an A+ financial rating. Between 2006 and 2019 Steve was partners with Warren Buffet of Berkshire Hathaway. Having then taken Applied private again in 2019, Steve in 2020 centered all of Applied’s growing global insurance business into Applied Global and its growing merchant banking activity into Credit Global (see cg.com).
Dedicated to positive social outcomes and serious corporate responsibility, Steve has been cited repeatedly for his care for injured workers, for setting high safety standards in the workplace, and giving business owners a financial benefit for their observance of best practices. In 2003, Steve was the first CEO to establish a direct-to-claimant pharmacy within his company to monitor the prescription, provision, and use of opioids for injured claimants, recognizing the opioid crisis a decade long before it became a national epidemic.
Steve is equally invested in his employees and takes a personal interest in enriching the communities in which they work and live. Steve is currently developing a new home for Applied’s operations campus in Omaha with room for up to 2,000 of his employees. The 500-acre mixed-use development known as Heartwood Preserve is among the largest urban developments in the United States, and will offer a one-of-a-kind destination for all Omaha residents to live, work, shop, and enjoy many recreational and cultural facilities the development will offer (see heartwoodomaha.com).
Steve has long recognized the importance of philanthropy and is deeply committed. Steve is Chairman of The Steve Menzies Global Foundation, which solves complex social problems facing people across the globe (see boldthinkers.org). Steve’s foundation works to uncover the root of a problem – problems that others are unable to perceive, or, just find too difficult or too overwhelming, such as international conflict resolution. He serves on numerous boards in the performing arts including two of the world’s leading cultural institutions, the Santa Fe Opera and the San Francisco Opera where he is Vice Chairman.
Beginning in 2021, Steve formed a partnership with Pope Francis for Steve’s foundation to create and to manage a number of new global foundations under Pope Francis’ patronage that will promote the teachings set forth in the second Papal Encyclical, Laudato Si’, and that will address what Steve perceives as a worldwide social crisis induced by the misuse of technology (see stfrancisday.org).
Recently, Steve was awarded the Free Enterprise Award by the Insurance Federation of New York, and the Bold Entrepreneur and Humanitarian Award by the Chamber of Commerce. For the exemplary work he has done on behalf of injured workers, and for his provision of insurance in inner city neighborhoods, he has also been presented with the St. Vincent De Paul medal, the highest award of the College of Mount St. Vincent, the Guarini Medal from John Cabot University of Rome, Italy, and recognized by numerous insurance and financial entities, including top acclaim in the insurance and financial services industry’s leading publications.
Steve is a graduate of Columbia University in New York with an engineering degree in mathematics.
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