Jay Fishman was born on November 4, 1952, in the Bronx, New York. His father owned a small printing company and worked long hours so that Jay could go to private school Barnard School for the Boys. Hard work has been highly valued by the family. Jay’s grandmother who came from Latvia reportedly went to the Lower East Side of Manhattan at age 13 to work as a seamstress and send money back to Latvia so the family could later join her.
Jay did not disappoint he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Economics, magna cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania. He later earned a Master’s degree in Accounting from the Wharton School of Business at the same university. He worked as an accountant at American Can Co. Jay moved to the firm’s acquisition unit which led him to a lucrative career direction.
He later worked for merchant bank Shearson Lehman, then with Primerica. In 1992 Premerica acquired a significant part of Travelers and Jay and fellow by the name of Robert Lipp were sent to the company to troubleshoot. Premerica would later acquire all of Travelers and Jay was tasked to lead the firm in 1998.
In 2000 the head of CitiGroup (which Travelers was then a part of) named Jay and Chuck Prince as co-chief operating Officers of Citi, with one of them one day expected to head CitiGroup. Jay later moved out of Citi citing among other factors that there would be others more fit and qualified to run the financial behemoth. He instead became the head of troubled insurance company St. Paul Cos. With his team Jay was able to turnaround the company. Travelers was spun off from Citi in 2004 and in April 2004 Jay led the acquisition of Travelers in an $18 billion, all stock deal. It wasn’t easy start for the new combined company which involved laying off 10 percent of the workforce equaling to 3,000 jobs.
Today the insurance company that Jay heads is known as The Travelers Companies, is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and generated around $27 billion in revenues in 2014.
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