PIB Group, the insurance brokerage owned by the venture capital funds Apax and Carlyle, has announced the purchase of five new brokerages in Spain, bringing its Spanish investees to 14, with income from commissions and fees of 30 million euros and a staff of 326 workers.
The group, led by Martín Navaz in Spain, has already become the fifth largest insurance brokerage in Spain, with intermediated premiums of 300 million euros, only behind the large international firms: Aon, Willis, Marsh and Howden .
The new acquisitions of PIB are the Iddeas group, formed by the Lansegur, Noceda and Instituto de Desarrollo Asegurador brokerages, with offices in Bilbao, Galicia and Madrid. In this city it has also acquired the Aguirre Villa-Coro brokerage and in Castellón the Sánchez Consultores firm.
Navaz explained that the firm has already signed preliminary purchase agreements with nine other brokerages, which are in the process of due diligence (a review of assets and accounts by auditors) and which have yet to be approved by the General Directorate of Insurance. These purchases, which he expects to close in the coming weeks, will provide the group with 17 million euros in annual income from commissions and fees, with 170 million euros in brokered premiums and a staff of 132 people.
PIB Group is a British firm that, with the resources of venture capital funds, has designed a build-up strategy, that is, the purchase of companies to create a pan-European brokerage with the acquisition of medium-sized companies. Since its founding in 2015, the group has acquired a hundred companies, 20 of them in 2023. Currently, PIB Group is present in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and the Channel Islands. It invoices 400 million euros a year and has a staff of 3,700 people.
Navaz, president and founder of Confide, a Barcelona brokerage that has been integrated into the group, explained that the concentration of the sector is driven by the new regulatory requirements of the EU, in areas such as data processing or cyber risk. “Many medium-sized companies consider that adaptation will entail great complexity and high costs, and they consider that it is preferable to integrate into a large group.”
The firm includes the directors of the companies it buys in the shareholders of the parent company, and has committed to a respectful integration of the workforce. “The business is growing at a rate of 10% annually, so any redundancies that may exist in some administrative area can be absorbed in other areas such as customer service,” he assured.
The group has completed the corporate integration of its first acquisitions, into a company called PIB Group Iberia, and is concentrating its workforce in two headquarters in Madrid and Barcelona.
PIB Group is specialized in insurance intermediation for companies. The firm, explained Navaz, is especially strong in employee insurance (the offer of pension plans, life or health insurance that companies offer to their workers), an area that has been reinforced to manage the new company employment plans. promoted by the government. It is also important in the area of credit insurance, agricultural insurance, jewelry aviation, professional liability and public administration insurance, an area in which it manages, for example, insurance against medical claims from the Servei Català de la Salut.
