Met Life Hires Stock Advisors

Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., America’s second-largest life insurer, said Monday it hired Goldman Sachs & Co. and Credit Suisse First Boston to advise it as it considers ways to sell stock to the public.

Met Life hired the bankers within the last several weeks after interviewing about half a dozen candidates, according to Met Life spokesman Kevin Foley.

Like several other mutual, or policyholder-owned insurers, Met Life says it needs to sell stock to help lure executives with option plans and to pay for acquisitions as it vies with banks and other financial institutions for customers’ dollars. Hiring investment bankers lets Met Life begin “a more systematic examination of what our options are in exploring a restructuring of the company,” Foley said.

Robert Benmosche, Met Life’s chairman, has said he favors taking the company public in some form, though he has yet to decide on the best way. His options for Met Life, which became a mutual company more than 80 years ago, include a full switch to ownership by shareholders or selling part of a subsidiary to investors.

Met Life is “months away” from deciding, according to the Oldwick, N.J.-based rating firm A.M. Best Co., which first reported the hiring of Goldman Sachs. “There is no timetable” for a decision, though the “necessity for us to act is still there,” Foley said.