Executive Compensation

Thrivent Financial for Lutherans takes a market-based competitive pay approach to compensating its executives. In addition to being a tax-exempt organization, it functions as a Fortune 500 life insurance provider, operating in the regulated, complex and competitive environment of the financial services industry.

Thrivent Financial recruits its executive talent from the financial services industry. In the interest of attracting and retaining its talent, Thrivent Financial uses market-based competitive compensation practices.

Compensation Philosophy

Thrivent Financial’s executive compensation philosophy aims to be competitive with comparably complex insurance and financial services organizations. To determine competitive pay for its executives, Thrivent Financial uses the Diversified Insurance Study, which provides customized data based on a peer group of 11 mutual and 17 stock companies in the financial services industry. The relative size of the peer companies is taken into account when determining pay. Companies included in the study:

Base vs. Variable Pay

In general, while our base pay is competitive with companies in our peer group, our total compensation levels (which include short and long-term incentive awards) are generally conservative when compared to market data.

Short and long-term incentive awards are part of variable compensation which comprises 50 to 75 percent of executives' total compensation. Variable compensation is based on overall short and long-term Thrivent Financial performance measures and varies from year to year. This emphasis on both short and long-term incentive pay helps motivate and align leaders to operate in the best interests of the membership.