Aon to Buy Wealthspire Parent NFP for $13.4B

Aon announced today that it has agreed to buy NFP, the parent of Wealthspire, from Madison Dearborn Partners for $13.4 billion in stock and cash.

Aon included NFP’s role as a wealth and retirement plan advisory firm in the deal announcement headline. In the body of the announcement and during a conference call with securities analysts held to discuss the deal, Aon executives focused mostly on NFP’s property-casualty and employee benefits brokerage services.

NFP is the 13th largest U.S. insurance broker, according to Fitch Ratings. The firm’s wealth management and retirement plan advisory businesses will generate about 17% of NFP’s 2023 revenue. The businesses have about $50 billion in assets under management and $400 billion in assets under advisement, according to an Aon conference call slide deck.

If 17% of the deal price covers the cost of acquiring the wealth and retirement businesses, then Aon is valuing those businesses at about $5,100 per $1 million of assets under management or advisement.

Greg Case, Aon’s CEO, said during the conference call that he sees the NFP deal as a way to get Aon’s risk management content and data analytics tools into the hands of midsize businesses.

“The need is massive,” Case said, saying midsize companies need help coping with issues such as cybersecurity, medical cost inflation, supply-chain risk and climate change.

What it means: The proposed Aon-NFP deal shows that selling a financial services distribution firm is still possible, in spite of recent increases in interest rates and talk about cautious capital markets.

The players: Aon is a Dublin-based insurance broker that reported $467 million in net income on $3 billion in revenue for the third quarter.

NFP is a financial advisory and insurance brokerage firm that was founded in 1999 with backing from Apollo Global Management. Jessica Bibliowicz, the president and CEO, used acquisitions to turn the company into a public company.

Madison Dearborn Partners, a Chicago-based investment firm, acquired NFP for $1.3 billion in 2013.

Filings with the Secuirities and Exchange Commission show that NFP’s retirement arm has about 2,075 ordinary individual clients, 890 high-net-worth individual clients and 2,197 institutional clients, with an average of about $287,000 in assets per ordinary individual client, $446,000 per high-net-worth client and $34 million per institutional client.