No Irish insurer has been around the blocks quite like RedClick.
The household and business coverage provider – formerly known as Liberty Mutual Ireland and, before that, Quinn Insurance – went through another rebrand 18 months ago, with its latest owner, Italy’s Generali, plastering its orangey-red corporate colour and the RedClick name across the business.
It is now set for another makeover, with news on Monday that Zurich Insurance’s Irish unit has agreed to buy it for €337 million. If the company was a human, it might be lying on a therapist’s couch about now.
But there are reasons to believe Zurich’s distinct blue brand colour is going to stick, after others have come and gone.
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Following the court-ordered seizure of the original business from the Quinn family in 2010, its subsequent owner, Boston’s Liberty Mutual, could not have come into the market at a worse time, as it went through an extended period of turmoil and loss-making.
At the time Liberty arrived in 2011, local management team were spouting about moving the business from number seven to number one by market share. By the time it exited, the business was number nine.
Generali made all the right noises about its interest in Ireland in 2023 when it was set to inherit the Irish unit as part of a wider €2.3 billion deal that included Liberty’s operations in Spain and Portugal.
It didn’t last long.
A little over a year after the deal went through in early 2024, and months after the rebrand to RedClick, Generali called in consultants from Bank of America to carry out “strategic review”. Is there a more ominous euphemism in the corporate world?
Under Zurich, which already has an almost 10 per cent share of the general insurance market by premiums, RedClick, with a 4.5 per cent share, will have its most stable owner ever. But it will be at the cost of the business becoming indistinguishable from its owner, as Zurich pursues a full integration.
While Zurich will be hoping to use the deal to spur a period of growth, it will be lucky to hold on to all of RedClick’s existing business in the near term, as competitors seek to capitalise on the natural disruption that accompanies any integration.
Zurich has more than 1,000 employees in Ireland, spread across three offices in Dublin and one in Wexford, spanning general insurance and life and pensions operations. RedClick has about 400 staff in offices in Cavan, Enniskillen and Dublin.
It is hard to see all those locations – and roles – surviving the tie-up.
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