MetLife Completes St. Paul Unit Integration

The company, a subsidiary of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., based in New York, was purchased for $600 million. With the purchase came more than 2,700 independent agencies and brokerage firms who have been added to the company's roster, and close to one million auto and homeowners policies.

Today, the company reports it has independent agency and brokerage firm affiliations of around 4,200.

The company said the integration makes MetLife Auto & Home the ninth largest provider of personal lines insurance through independent agents in the country.

Commenting on the integration process, Catherine Rein, president and chief executive officer of MetLife Auto & Home, said that the integration process was both a pleasant surprise and an education for MetLife.

The company, she said, added some very talented people from St. Paul to its staff and learned to adjust its underwriting for some risks it was not that familiar with.

Ms. Rein said the company was glad to learn of the high quality of the people who came into MetLife through the acquisition. She noted some have moved up within the company and MetLife has been pleased with "the amount of support and advice the company received from agents."

One unexpected outcome for MetLife was that instead of integrating one company, it ended up integrating three.

Mike Davidson, vice president and senior officer of MetLife Auto & Home Independent Agent Division, explained that the company had to not only integrate the St. Paul but also incorporate some of the St. Paul's acquisitions including USF&G from 1988.

Bob Lundgren, the vice president who oversaw the integration process, said MetLife, in three years, integrated several different companies and 30 separate processing systems, plus making regulatory filings, which was an enormous task in that period of time.

"We knew it was going to be hard, but it was harder than we thought it was going to be," observed Ms. Rein. "We completed our strategic and financial goals on time, but not without a lot of hard work."

MetLife also benefited from technology advances and support people St. Paul had in place when the purchase was made that Mr. Lundgren said had leapfrogged the company's own technology development.

For its underwriting, the company learned about some new exposures, such as dealing with the damage from hailstorms and similar type of weather risks it had not dealt with before.

The company learned to readjust its risk exposure and reinsurance program to handle both catastrophic and minor events that will occur over a period of years, said Ms. Rein.

In all, the acquisition has made MetLife Auto & Home "a much stronger organization" and a company that will continue to expand, Mr. Davidson said.

"We intend to keep growing," Ms. Rein emphasized.