NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Primus Guaranty Ltd. chief executive officer Thomas Jasper, who helped turn the swaps market into a trillion-dollar industry, is leaving the company as it unwinds its business selling credit protection to banks.

Jasper, 62, was replaced by Richard Claiden, the Hamilton, Bermuda-based company's chief financial officer since 2003, Primus said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. The change is part of the company's plan to cut expenses as it wraps up about $14 billion of credit-default swaps it sold to financial institutions that sought guarantees against losses on debt investments, according to the statement.

Jasper leaves Primus two years after the company was shut out of selling credit-default swaps during the financial crisis. Investors lost confidence in the AAA ratings of Primus and competitors who had previously had been able to sell credit protection without posting collateral. The company failed to raise capital to start a new debt-guarantee business and last month agreed to sell an asset-management unit.

"It's all part and parcel of saying: 'What do we really need now to run this company?'" Jasper said in an interview. "I felt it was really time for me to move on."

The company's focus now will be to finish collecting premiums and paying any obligations that arise from the credit- default contracts it sold, Jasper said. Reducing expenses and returning money to shareholders are the other goals, he said.

Jasper, a former Salomon Brothers Inc. banker and a founder of the industry group now known as the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, helped lay the foundation for the swaps market in the mid-1980s. The process involved developing a standard contract for interest-rate derivatives that once took days to negotiate.

The template was later used to create swaps linked to corporate bonds, commodities and stocks. Outstanding swaps and other privately negotiated derivatives contracts stood at $466.8 trillion globally as of June 30, according to an ISDA survey.

Swaps are privately negotiated financial instruments that allow banks and money managers to speculate on or hedge against losses from changing interest rates, debt defaults or other risks to asset values.

"Tom was the Henry Ford of derivatives," Richard Grand- Jean, former managing director of international capital markets at Salomon and now a New York-based managing director at alternative-investment firm Hall Capital Partners LLC, told Bloomberg News in a 2009 interview. "He brought mass production and uniform standards to the market."

Jasper joined Primus in 1999 and built a so-called credit- derivatives product company that sold credit swaps to banks. Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's rated the company AAA, allowing it to trade with banks without having to post collateral backing the contracts.