Marsh & McLennan Cos., the New York professional services firm, has agreed to acquire Oliver, Wyman & Co., a financial services consultant also based in New York.
The deal, announced Monday, is expected to close on April 7. Marsh & McLennan did not say how much they would pay.
Oliver Wyman would be merged with two of Marsh & McLennan's Mercer Inc. consulting units: Mercer Management Consulting's financial services practice, which focuses on commercial banking and property and casualty insurance, and Mercer Risk, Finance and Insurance Consulting, which provides modeling and risk valuation for insurance companies and government entities.
The combined unit would be known as Mercer Oliver Wyman and would operate as a global financial services consultant firm with more than 600 employees and offices in the United States, Europe, and Asia, the companies said in a press released. It would operate as a business unit of Mercer Management Consulting. Oliver Wyman's chairman, John Drzik, would become the unit's president.
Charles Bralver, a vice chairman at Oliver Wyman, said in an interview that the deal would create one of the largest and most comprehensive financial servicing consultants in the world.
Both Mercer and Oliver Wyman bring different skills and expertise within financial consulting to the deal, and that would make the new unit more competitive, he said. For example, Mercer brings expertise in retail and insurance, while Oliver Wyman brings skills in corporate banking and capital markets.
"We'll win some assignments that someone might have hesitated to give us because we didn't have the end-to-end deliver," Mr. Bralver said.
In addition, Mercer brings access to capital through Marsh & McLennan, which Oliver Wyman did not have as a private partnership, he said.
The new unit would draw heavily from Oliver Wyman's existing management team, Mr. Bralver said, and the deal would not result in any staff reductions. "There are very few redundancies. This is not a cost-driven transaction."
Mercer, based in New York, runs several other consulting units, including Mercer Human Resource Consulting, Mercer Delta Organizational Consulting, Lippincott Mercer, and National Economic Research Associates. It has 15,000 employees and operations in 40 countries.
