Liberty Benefit Insurance Services 

It agreed to accumulate two brokerages within the past week after a two-year hiatus from deals, and a baron says it wants to require further advantage of the consolidation of the insurance industry.

"We will still check out some acquisition opportunities that have good geographic fit and size," says David Pruett, the president of BB&T's insurance arm, which has 100 agencies in 10 states.

Its primary targets are firms on the East Coast or in certain parts of California that have a minimum of $5 million to $10 million of annual sales, he says.

The Winston-Salem, N.C., lender - one among the few banks with big insurance operations - was among the foremost aggressive buyers of small and enormous insurance firms until late 2009, purchasing 85 of them in about 15 years. Then it hit the brakes whilst the most important bank involved in insurance, Wells Fargo & Co., kept buying insurance firms. On Wednesday the San Francisco depository financial institution announced its fourth such purchase this year: ISU Stetson-Beemer Insurance of Reno, Nev.

 

BB&T had been pursuing its latest deals - Liberty Benefit Insurance Services of San Jose, Calif., and Atlantic Risk Management Corp. of Columbia, Md. - for a short time, but the owners had been reluctant to sell at rock bottom of the market, Pruett says.

"Would you sell your house today if you did not have to? Business owners are an equivalent way," he says. "Our quiet time wasn't intentionally. We made no decision to mention we're not getting to buy anything at this point. The timing wasn't right for the companies we'd been most aggressively pursuing."

The insurance market has been handling soft demand and low prices for about four years, Pruett says. But well-run firms are finding they will fetch an honest price.

BB&T didn't disclose what proportion it purchased Liberty and Atlantic.

Its last acquisition was its November 2009 purchase of a Fort Myers, Fla., insurance outfit, consistent with Bloomberg News data. (That excludes its private-equity division's acquisition of a petroleum equipment seller in early 2010.) BB&T's last bank acquisition was the August 2009 purchase of the failed Colonial Bank of Montgomery, Ala. It reportedly bid on Royal Bank of Canada's Raleigh, N.C., franchise, which PNC Financial Services Group Inc. has agreed to shop for.

Industry experts peg capital concerns as one more reason for BB&T's deal restraint.