The insurance media is never short of stories about new mergers, acquisitions and partnerships. With so much consolidation taking place, it’s easy to think these deals are done once the ‘ink’ is dry on the Press release, when in fact, for the teams involved, the real work is really just beginning.
Sharing first-hand insights into the post-M&A integration process, Sam Keep, went behind the scenes of The Clear Group’s acquisition of Centor Insurance & Risk Management in 2022. Then a director at Centor and now acquisition partnerships director for the group, Keep was heavily involved in the integration process.
Looking back, he noted that “there wasn’t an awful lot of change to begin with, it was very much business as usual”. The message being delivered both internally and externally was one of continuity and making sure that the business continued to run smoothly and efficiently. The first major change was earmarked early on, he said, as Centor’s lease on its existing office space was coming to an end about a year on from the Clear acquisition.
That change-up saw the team move into Clear’s office in July 2023, which is when the rest of the changes started to kick in. “We spent the next year and a bit preparing for a full integration where the Centor brand and team would fully integrate into Clear,” he said. “That full integration concluded in October 2024. So, it has been a journey but a really well-organised one.
“When we started the actual integration process, an integrations director from Clear oversaw the process. We had monthly steering committee meetings with key stakeholders from within Clear and our senior management team. That gave everybody a great opportunity to input into the process. We also had focused project groups within our teams so that Clear fully understood how our teams were working, and was able to identify anything that would need to change and make those changes as smoothly as possible.”
Reflecting on the process and what was easier than he first anticipated, Keep emphasised the truth at the heart of any major shake-up – people tend to dread change and expect it to go wrong. For instance, he said, Centor had its own bespoke broking platform while Clear had recently undergone a transformation project bringing all its businesses on to one platform. The integration would inevitably include migrating to that platform, and there were concerns about how much of a challenge that would prove.
As it turns out, he said, it was a smooth process because the right foundations were laid early – including a dry run of data extractions, significant testing, and comprehensive training for all staff members on the new system. When the go-live date came, “everything just worked and it went live successfully.”
Another area that might have reasonably been assumed to be a cause for concern but which ended up being more of an opportunity than a challenge was around the impact the integration had on the people involved. “Normally, you’d expect that with an integration, that people alignmnent piece to be a challenge,” Keep said. “But when we moved into the Clear offices, we then carried on trading as a separate entity for more than a year until we fully integrated.
“We took the decision, very deliberately, when we moved into Clear’s offices, that we wouldn't sit just as a team just because we were still trading separately to Clear and still needing to collaborate across all our functions. We decided that we'd sit our team members with their Clear counterparts. So, when we came to full integration in October 2024, those teams had already spent more than a year sitting alongside each other, which made the whole transition a lot smoother than it perhaps would have been otherwise.”
As to what was more challenging than initially anticipated, Keep noted that what most people who haven’t been part of an integration don’t realise is the sheer amount of change involved. Centor was quite a small brokerage, he said, with 55 staff and it ran as a tight-knit ‘family’ with a fantastic record for staff retention. Meanwhile, Clear is a very fast-growing business which has been roughly doubling in size every three years which made it a very different environment.
The two businesses have strongly aligned core values, he said, among them a focus on customer service and creating a great internal culture, but certainly initially, the team’s mindset had to shift in order to be comfortable with the change in strategic direction. “We needed them to embrace that change rather than fearing it, and to help them view it as a real opportunity,” he said. “That meant making sure all of our communication was really consistent.
“We wanted to be absolutely transparent about what was happening, what would change, what wouldn’t change and how we would support our team. We found that keeping the team informed, addressing any concerns or anxieties that they had, and keeping them involved in the integration process was key. That helped to alleviate any uncertainty about the unknown and to build trust in us as a management team.”
It’s critical that businesses undergoing an integration not only keep their staff informed but also involved, he said, and that they create opportunities for them to provide input. It’s by having your voice heard that people feel they’re part of that journey which, in turn, helps them adapt to all the changes.
Offering his top advice for those going through the integration process, Keep underscored the importance of communication. “I think, ultimately, why ours was successful was because of the extent of engagement that we had with our team,” he said. “That is what created a successful transition because we made sure that everyone was engaged and aware of what was happening, and we were able to join that up with the wider integration process.
“That meant fostering a sense of unity and a shared understanding that we all want the same outcome from this. Because this can be a really challenging period with a lot of change, so you just need to focus on doing as much as you can to alleviate people's concerns and make them feel like they are included and involved.”
