Lockton Cements a Global Partnership

Kansas City, Mo.-based brokerage Lockton announced in April the formation of Lockton Global, a partnership formalizing relations between it and 30 international brokerage companies.

By Dan Reynolds

The philosophy behind Lockton's recent global partnership is to create a network of leading brokerages in different countries, all of which could bring to bear local expertise.

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John Lumelleau, Lockton's chairman and CEO (pictured above), told Risk & Insurance® during an interview at the Philadelphia Westin hotel during the annual convention of the Risk and Insurance Management Society Inc. in April that the formalized relationship involved the leading privately held brokerages in each country represented by the partnership.

"We want to make sure that we have only one partner per country," Lumelleau said. "That was an important aspect of our due diligence and the architecture of our partnership," he said.

Some of these companies Lockton has worked with for years and some of them are newer partners, Lumelleau said.

"If we had to go out and find 30 new companies to build a trust level in and get to know, that would have been a very tall assignment," Lumelleau said.

Partners in Lockton Global attended a Lockton-hosted dinner at the Downtown Club in Philadelphia which was addressed by Lloyd's chairman John Nelson during RIMS week. Partners in attendance at the celebratory dinner included Columbia-based Corredores Colombianos de Seguros, whose president Juan Mario Acevedo Padilla was at the dinner and Panama-based Padeco Seguros, which was represented by Executive Vice President Stavros Costarangos. Representatives of Latvia-based MAI Central and Eastern Europe and Vanbreda Risk & Benefits, which is based in Belgium were also in attendance.

The new partnership's board includes Jean-Paul Chapellier of Paris-based Diot, Vanbreda's Mark Leysen and Ricardo Rosenthal of Makler, which is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The formation of Lockton Global is a major step in an evolution into international brokering that began when Lockton acquired the assets of Alexander Forbes International Risk Services in 2006. That $170 million transaction created a company with about $600 million in revenue.

Lockton recorded revenues of $836 million in fiscal year 2011, which ended in April 2011. Lumelleau said he expected substantial growth from that number in fiscal year 2012.

"We will grow in a very healthy fashion this year," Lumelleau said.

Strategically, the Lockton Global partnership represents a strategy of aligning brokerages that wish to stay privately held against the global network of the much bigger, publicly traded companies like Aon, Marsh and Willis.

Lumelleau said that Lockton Global is really a marriage of like-minded companies, and it wasn't a case where his company was competing with its publicly traded competitors to cement relationships with these other, privately held brokers.

"I cannot speak to our big competitors' policies or strategies but I think they see themselves as complete," Lumelleau said.

"Like Lockton, the partners want to stay private and independent so I think it was very easy for them to envision what we are articulating and again, having known so many of them for so long, it was an easy discussion," Lumelleau said.

June 1, 2012

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