Philippe Donnet, the French-born head of Italian insurance giant Generali, moved in 2023 to silence some big shareholders who tried to oust him the previous year for not being ambitious enough on the acquisitions front – with a €2.3 billion deal to acquire European assets from Boston’s Liberty Mutual.
The catch was mainly made up of Liberty’s Spanish and Portuguese operations. But it also included the former Quinn Insurance business that Liberty had snapped up out of administration in 2011 and failed to do much with.
[ Zurich to buy Generali’s Irish insurance unit RedClick for €337mOpens in new window ]
While there were questions from the outset about Generali’s real interest in Ireland, these appeared to be dispelled when the Italians went about rebranding the local business as RedClick, featuring the group’s signature red colour.
“We are excited to engage with new customers and bring renewed competition to the Irish market, shaped by our robust and sustainable business model,” Generali said in a press release at the time.
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It didn’t take long to wear off. A year after the revamp, it emerged last September that Generali was working with investment bankers from Bank of America on a “strategic review” of the Irish unit – culminating with the announcement on Monday that it would be sold to Zurich Insurance’s Irish business for €337 million.
The price looks a bit frothy, according to industry observers, at about 1.5 times RedClick’s gross written insurance premiums (GWP) for 2024 compared to the general rule of thumb of 0.8-1.2 times GWP for the property and casualty market. It is believed that the underbidder, Intact Insurance Ireland, previously known as RSA Ireland, came in well below Zurich’s offer.
Still, there are significant potential synergies. 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.
Could the deal start a wave of consolidation in the sector? And would that be positive or negative for customers?
As of 2024, the largest player in the market, German-owned Allianz Ireland, had a 17.5 per cent share of all premiums written in the Republic, according to the latest figures from Insurance Ireland. France’s Axa, previously the largest, had a 17.2 per cent slice of the action (but remained by far the market leader in motor, at 27.5 per cent). UK-owned Aviva had 12.8 per cent.
The big three had a combined 47.5 per cent share, while the top five, also including FBD and Zurich, accounted for 67 per cent of the €4.5 billion of business written by the 17 general insurance members of Insurance Ireland.
There is an argument that consumers would – perhaps counterintuitively – be better off with a smaller number of larger insurers, especially in a relatively small market like the Republic.
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“If you look at any large-scale business in Ireland, from utilities to telecoms and banking to supermarkets, they are much more consolidated than the insurance sector,” said Diarmaid Sheridan, an analyst with stockbrokers Davy.
The industry has also had to deal with an increase in capital demands and regulation in recent times, he said, which has added to the cost of doing business. This ultimately affects pricing, all else being equal, in terms of claims costs and the stage of the insurance cycle.
A combination of Zurich and RedClick would have a market share of 14.3 per cent on day one – usurping Aviva for the number-three spot. It would match Zurich’s market position in the Irish life and pensions market.
Some industry followers said this week that Zurich 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.
However, others say that Zurich has a real chance of improving its pricing through the combination, particularly in motor insurance.
That’s because RedClick has a lot more data – and better pricing models – on younger, higher risk drivers than the Swiss insurer, a legacy of its origins as Quinn Insurance. Zurich has better data on other segments of the market, according to industry veterans.
In the absence of good quality data, insurers will naturally add to the price of premiums for market segments they are less familiar with – if they are willing to quote at all. This has been particularly evident since the Irish sector went through a painful multiyear period of losses in the middle of the last decade.
While insurers in the UK, for example, have access to long-standing open systems for claims data across the industry, Insurance Link in Ireland is essentially just a tool to check individuals’ claims histories and guard against fraud.
And although the Central Bank of Ireland-run National Claims Information Database has been publishing useful periodic reports on premiums, claims and profitability across various insurance lines since 2019, the information is very high-level and of limited value to an insurer trying to price risk.
The absence of open-access industry data places the onus on individual firms’ own models – and the quality of those models is limited by their own scale. It adds to the argument for consolidation.
Having made it to the final two bidders vying for RedClick, Intact Ireland is clearly signalling its interest in regaining market share.
The owner of the 123.ie direct-to-consumers insurance brand was once the largest insurer in the State, before the company – then known as RSA Ireland – was rocked by an accounting scandal in 2013. It has languished in sixth position in recent years, with a 7.6 per cent market share in 2024.
But it’s hard to pinpoint obvious targets.
