Marsh Commercial branch closures underway

Insurance Age understands redundancies of around three figures are on the cards as the former Jelf business undergoes a restructure under Anthony Gruppo.

Marsh Commercial, formerly Jelf, is set to close four of its branches before the end of the year, Insurance Age can reveal.

Its Northampton and Newmarket offices will begin shutting down from mid-December. New Malden is also set to close and one of its Leeds branches will also be shuttered.

It is believed there may be further branch closures in the future.

Insurance Age understands that redundancies in the lower-end of three figures may occur but it is believed Marsh will seek to redeploy these staff elsewhere.

A review of the business and branch structure code-named ‘Project Wolverine’ has now been completed but it is unclear which further branches could be in the firing line.

Marsh declined to comment.

Overlap
Marsh Commercial is made up of three legacy companies including some Marsh branches, Jelf and Bluefin – which Marsh bought in 2015 and 2016 respectively. It is thought that the branches most likely to be affected will be in areas where there is overlap between these legacy businesses.

Insurance Age interviewed Anthony Gruppo in October 2019 following his appointment as CEO. He was announced as Phil Barton’s replacement earlier this year.

At the time, he admitted he would be looking for “efficiencies”.

He commented: “I don’t like to call it redundancies because I think that is so disrespectful to people. I look at it by going branch by branch and assessing what they need to be successful and grow. For some of them, for growth, that could mean consolidation.

“For example, if you have three branches within three miles of each other, that [consolidation] makes sense.”

Community
At the time, Gruppo was also keen to highlight that essential “community” players would be left well alone.

He said in October: “Some branches are such a community play in a remote area that they need to stay there – but they need to be resourced properly.”

One of Gruppo’s first actions was to rebrand Jelf under the Marsh Commercial banner .

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• Topics
• Bluefin
• Jelf Group
• Marsh
• Redundancies
• People
• Commercial
• Broker

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