top job at Centre Solutions has been long and adventurous. David Fox interviews him about the latest twist in a successful career.

Four years ago, Paul E. Hellmers may have had no desk, no office, and his new employer, Centre Re, may have been uncertain he would work out.

Today, he is running the company.

The Stanford MBA has become the president and CEO of Centre Solutions (Bermuda) Ltd., what was formerly known as Centre Re.

From his roots as a California farm boy, Mr. Hellmers is in some ways a typical answer to the Bermuda company's need to replace outgoing president, David Brown.

It is increasingly the way such companies go. An innovative insurance and reinsurance company, Centre Solutions is the pioneer of finite risk.

But in an age marked by the convergence of the capital markets with the insurance markets, the (re)insurer went to the capital markets to recruit.

Both sides have been cherry-picking from each other in recent years.

Corporations on both sides know they need the expertise of the other to ensure they navigate through an ocean of risk in insurance securitisation. The new man at the helm of Centre Solutions may have had the right pedigree all along.

He was a year ahead of Centre Re founder Steven Gluckstern at Stanford Graduate School of Business, although he doesn't recall ever meeting him.

He was first approached this summer by David Brown about the job, and later independently by Centre Solutions CEO, David Wasserman, and Scott Levine, president and CEO of parent company Zurich Centre Group LLC. None, he believes, knew about the others' advances.

The sincerest form of flattery in business may be duplication. But career-wise, it is when everyone can separately conclude you are the most logical choice for a coveted job. So Centre Solutions' corner office of Cumberland House on Victoria Street was his for the taking from the start.

Centre Solutions is the centre-piece in the jewel-clustered crown of Zurich Centre companies. It is the largest and the most important, comprising several of the key profit-centres.

Paul Hellmers is coming to Bermuda from Centre Solutions' New York office. It will be some weeks before he and his family are finally settled here, and before he can run his continuing New York responsibilities from Bermuda.

He is running Zurich Structured Finance which is involved in real estate transactions. He will retain those capital market-oriented responsibilities.

Structured Finance is acquiring real estate assets, but also credit enhancing certain types of real estate borrowings and insuring mostly tax, but also other, benefits that arise out of certain categories of real estate assets.

"Real estate, as an asset class, generally tends to drop relatively consistent cash flows,'' said Mr. Hellmers. "Most of the time, they can be financed or bid for in the market relatively easy.

"There are times however, if for esoteric reasons, that those cash flows don't wind up migrating to the lowest cost source of capital. It happens for odd reasons, whether they be complicated legal reasons, or performance issues, or promises, or because it is not exactly the right structure.

"Those are the things we try to find, and design insurance products for. We make those transactions more efficient. We basically are getting paid for differences in financing rates, as contrasted with any intelligent pricing for the risk we are taking.

"It's different from classic insurance positions, because we are not being hired by a client to solve their already identified problem. We look in the market at different classes of real estate assets and identify things where there are financial shortfalls, or other dislocations occur.

"We take advantage of those by buying those assets at one price, insuring them, and then maybe re-selling them in a re-packaged form.'' Before joining Centre Re in New York, Mr. Hellmers worked for Morgan Stanley & Co. Inc. for 15 years, more recently as a commercial mortgage whole loan trader, responsible for setting priorities and requirements for capital commitments, pricing new loan originations and portfolio purchases, design of exit strategy, hedging positions and negotiating third party originator arrangements.

He created the business plan for the firm's whole loan trading activity, including trading limits and due diligence/approval protocols. In seven months, he established over $700 million in positions. The firm realised revenue of more than $6.5 million and had an unrealised position revenue of some $7.5 million.

Prior to that he was responsible for all aspects of activities in the fixed income division relating to the commercial mortgage sector.

Over the years he has been a principal of both the fixed income division and the investment banking division, specialising in the real estate debt capital markets group the real estate department, the structured finance group, the capital markets group and the corporate finance department.

The San Francisco resident had never even heard of Centre Re the day in 1994 he lunched in New York with school chum, Bryan Bowers, who was joining the firm in New York.

But when Mr. Bowers started discussing the interesting things Centre Re was involved in, like the real estate-related credit enhancement transactions, Mr.

Hellmers ears pricked up. It was related to some of the work he was doing on the west coast for Morgan Stanley.

"We had been trying to figure out at Morgan Stanley,'' he recalled, "how to do certain tax-exempt credit enhancements. But for a variety of reasons, it was a difficult thing for Morgan Stanley to do. They just didn't have the balance sheet orientation to do it.

"I told Bryan there were huge margins to be had, and that no one had yet figured it out. Investment bankers, I knew, just wouldn't get a handle on it.

"As I talked to him, I realised he was on the threshold of something really neat. And to make a long story short, I hounded him for a job, telling him that he really didn't know how good it could be.

"They finally hired me as a consultant for some incredibly low amount of money, obviously not 100 percent sure they wanted me. For the first couple of months, I didn't even have a desk, and shared a telephone with his secretary.'' It took a couple of months before Paul Hellmers was actually given a full-time job at the company in mid-1995. By 1996, with business picking up sharply, he was made a partner with Mr. Bowers.

That business has now spawned more lines of related business. And he is hoping that his Midas touch will continue to shine under the Bermuda sun.

BUSINESS BUC