Melbourne-headquartered Honan Insurance Group – with offices in Australia, New Zealand, and Asia – is far from slowing down in terms of its expansion plans. Having done nine acquisitions this financial year, including Certus Insurance Brokers (CIBNZ) in Auckland, the rapidly growing brokerage is actively looking to expand further in the Kiwi market.
Speaking with Insurance Business, Honan chief operating officer Laurence Basell (pictured) described New Zealand as a “very attractive” market, within which opportunities are presenting themselves following the group’s swoop for CIBNZ in March. In fact, according to the COO, Honan has talked to several interested parties post-deal.
“We had a small New Zealand presence that’s grown significantly with this Certus acquisition,” Basell said. “And, for us, New Zealand is a really critical part of our growth profile. We’ve got really strong Australian presence, a really good presence in Singapore that’s growing really quickly, and then we have our New Zealand presence. That New Zealand presence is now four times the size with Certus, so it’s a significant footprint.
“But more importantly for us, it gives us a much larger base to buy more acquisitions. We really like the New Zealand market… I think having a much larger presence on the ground certainly allows us to look at more acquisitions, but also signals to the market that we’re on the ground and open for business. Certainly, post the Certus acquisition, we’ve spoken to a number of parties about coming on board and what a deal may look like.”
While the larger trans-Tasman business is busy broadening its portfolio, CIBNZ itself is making wide strides.
“The priority is certainly to continue the growth that they’ve achieved in recent years,” Basell told Insurance Business. “I think under Mark [Gustafson], who is the current MD of Certus, they’ve been growing about 25% a year, which is certainly really strong growth.
“The biggest change for Certus is just having additional support around the corporate services function – leveraging our HR team for their annual reviews, leveraging our finance team to help them close off financial year-ends and make sure that their reporting is in line with expectations and standards, and just having more support in that space.
“The business is really good on its own – it’s a really fast-growing business on its own, so we don’t want to come in and blow everything up and stop what they’re doing in terms of that great growth.”
Areas of focus for the acquired business that Honan would like to build on, according to Basell, are corporate broking and the body corporate market.
Meanwhile, as previously announced, CIBNZ is retaining its branding, while Honan’s existing operations in New Zealand will also stay put, with the two entities trading under separate licences.
“We’re still in our infancy in NZ, and so it would be silly to not leverage the presence and the goodwill that Certus has built over the last 20 years since the business was founded,” Basell said. “We certainly want to continue to grow on that.
“Honan NZ will still operate under the Honan brand in New Zealand, and certainly a lot of the global business still feeds through Honan NZ. We’ll continue to work together and trade with both the Certus and Honan names.”
Moving forward, Honan will continue to look for complementary brokers to bring under its umbrella.
“I think the New Zealand market is very attractive,” Basell told Insurance Business. “I think there’s a lot of businesses that will complement us. We’ve had a number of discussions; we’ll continue to have a number of discussions in the market and actively continue to look in the NZ market. So, absolutely actively looking, actively discussing deals, and we’ll continue to do so.”
Basell went on to cite Honan’s deal team, which has been busy amid an intense period of M&A (mergers and acquisitions) activity.
“We’ve got a really strong deal team, and I think we’ve done nine acquisitions this financial year,” Basell said. “One, I think we’re very good at going through the due diligence process. Two, we’ve got flexibility in our offer. We understand that every owner, principal, director, MD has got different priorities and different needs, and we’re certainly willing to be flexible in terms of how we offer deals. So, in terms of the deal-making, we’re really good at doing that and having flexibility across the market, and that enables us to compete with the big players.
“And then we’ve got a really strong post-deal team there to get that integration going on day one. We have a really good understanding of the different systems, the different forces within the market, and being able to get the businesses to leverage off us from day one – whether that’s HR, IT, finance, placement, marketing. Certainly we’ve done enough of these deals now that we know what the quick wins are, and the quick wins to allow the people in the smaller business to leverage off the larger business.
“And we’ve never had a redundancy in any of the acquisitions that we’ve done. It’s all about how do we allow these businesses to grow, and how do they leverage Honan to grow their businesses? That’s always what we’re looking for… So, we’ve done a number of deals and we continue to learn off those deals, but we also continue to refine the value proposition so that they can get the most out of it.”
Honan Insurance Group has been in operation since 1964.
Honan Insurance Group was awarded as the Most Innovative Insurance Companies in New Zealand. Get to know the other winners by reading the 5-Star Insurance Innovators 2023 IB's special report.
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