Alumni Awards

Deltra W. Hayes is an accomplished financial services executive with over 25 years of experience in strategic relationship management, client engagement, and benefits administration within the retirement and financial planning industries. She currently serves as Vice President, Head of Benefits at Voya Financial, where she leads the enterprise-wide benefits strategy. In this role, Deltra is responsible for the design, implementation, and oversight of a comprehensive portfolio of qualified and non-qualified benefit programs. Her work ensures Voya maintains competitive, inclusive, and cost-effective offerings that attract, retain, and engage employees at every level. She also plays a vital role as a proxy for Voya’s client base, helping shape workplace product offerings to meet customer needs.

Previously, Deltra held several senior leadership roles at Voya, including Senior Vice President, Head of Government & Healthcare Markets, where she was responsible for client satisfaction, retention, and profitable growth for mid-to-mega market clients (assets $74M+). She led a high-performing team of Relationship Managers supporting Advisors and Clients with a multi-product portfolio including Retirement Plans, HSAs, Managed Accounts, and Investment Solutions. She also ensured regulatory compliance oversight for her team of registered representatives.

In her role as SVP, Strategic Relationship Management, Deltra oversaw the daily operations of Voya’s New York City deferred compensation office, managing over 90 employees across multiple functional areas including operations, compliance, education, communications, HR, and IT. She was instrumental in retaining over $2 billion in retirement plan assets and served as National Segment Retention Leader for the Higher Education sector. Her leadership extended to developing performance metrics, producing training and client materials, and executing strategic retention initiatives.

Earlier in her career, Deltra held leadership positions with AIG VALIC, where she served as Vice President of Relationship Management and New Business Development, as well as Senior Relationship Manager and Executive Account Manager. At VALIC, she led business strategies for top-tier institutional clients with assets exceeding $33.1 billion across governmental, healthcare, non-qualified, and higher education sectors. She played a pivotal role in VOYA’s diversity, equity, and inclusion client engagement initiatives and served on the VOYA Tax-Exempt Market Leadership Board.

Deltra holds a Master of Business Administration from Texas Southern University’s Jesse H. Jones School of Business and a Bachelor of Business Administration in Finance from the University of Houston–Downtown. She also maintains several professional designations and licenses, including CRPS®, AIF®, and FINRA Series 6, 7, 63, 65, and 26.

She serves on the University of Houston–Downtown Alumni Association Board and the board of Scholarship America, and is actively involved in community service through Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

Deltra has been married to C. Gabriel Hayes for 40 years and is the proud mother of two accomplished children: Matthew, a graduate of Colorado State University, and Kennedy, a graduate of both Brown University and UC Berkeley Law School.