Its acquisition of Fireman’s Fund’s business in April, 2015 provided ACE Ltd. with an idea of what’s involved in integrating two leading high net worth insurance businesses.
Frances D. O’Brien is now using those corporate insights along others she has garnered from 36 years in the business as she heads the integration of ACE Private Risk Services with that of its former competitor, Chubb Personal Insurance, to create the new Chubb’s high net worth business unit for the U.S. and Canada.
According to the division president for North American personal risk services for the new Chubb, the Fireman’s Fund experience along with the time between the July announcement and the mid-January closing on the ACE-Chubb deal provided a safety net of sorts, supplying guidance and time to plan the integration of $5 billion in wealth insurance accounts and more than three decades of history and relationships.
“So we’re bringing together three great companies,” O’Brien said in a recent interview with Insurance Journal, adding that the new entity gets to benefit from the best that each one of them has to offer. “We’ve had time to plan.”
To gauge the extent of the endeavor, Insurance Journal asked O’Brien how many people are involved in the integration strategy. “Who’s not involved?” she quipped.
“There’s actually some excitement, particularly with our staff, about the merger because it just brings about the possibility of learning from each other, and collecting all the best practices across the three companies, and being able to bring something even better to our agents. You have to keep in mind that the three portfolios have been around for about 35 years now,” she said.
No Disruption
As for the integration process, the goal is for there “to be as little disruption as possible” for everyone, O’Brien said.
Early on in the acquisition process, CEO Evan Greenberg praised the Chubb agency culture. “We’re going to preserve the agency culture. We’re going to preserve the agency distribution. We’re going to preserve the branch system,” said Greenberg.
Thus preservation of good relations with the combined firm’s 3,500 agents is high on O’Brien’s to-do list.
The communications effort around the integration has been multi-faceted. It began with written communications posted online because “these days communication has to be on-demand,” O’Brien said. They were conscious of the fact that their agents are trying to do business with their customers and need access to the information in that moment to get things done. Sending a newsletter or even visiting, while part of the plan, are not sufficient.
“We spent a lot of time crafting communications to explain, ‘This is how we’re going to do business with you going forward. Here are your contacts. Here are your frequently asked questions.'”
After the closing, the company kicked off a plan to visit or call every branch office and agencies within the first 60 days for the purpose of listening to them and asking, “Are you having any issues? Is there anything that we didn’t anticipate that we need to cover for you? Are there things that we need to be doing differently than how we’re currently working in the marketplace?”
O’Brien said the new Chubb has maintained its relationships with the agencies that did business with Chubb, ACE or Fireman’s Fund.
“We are continuing to do business with agents that currently have an agreement and business with one of the three companies,” she said.