Travelers Companies

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The Travelers Companies, Inc.
Type	Public (NYSE: TRV)
Founded	Incorporated as St. Paul Fire & Marine in 1853. Merger of The St. Paul Companies and Travelers Property Casualty Corp. in 2004
Headquarters	St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
Key people	Jay Fishman, Chairman & CEO
Industry	Insurance, property & casualty insurance, risk management
Products	Insurance policies are contracted and sold primarily through independent agents or an insurance broker.
Revenue	$24.4 billion USD (2005)
Employees	~32,000 (2006)
Website	www.travelers.com

The Travelers Companies (NYSE: TRV) is the second largest underwriter of commercial property casualty and personal insurance in the United States. The company is headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota and has major operations in Hartford, Connecticut.

The company has field offices in every U.S. state, plus operations in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada and Mexico. In 2005, the company reported revenues of US$24.4 billion and total assets of US$113.2 billion.

Travelers, through its subsidiaries and approximately 14,000 independent agents and brokers, provides commercial and personal property and casualty insurance products and services to businesses, government units, associations, and individuals. The company offers insurance through three segments:

• Personal Insurance, which includes home, auto and other insurance products for individuals
• Business Insurance, which includes a broad array of property and casualty insurance and insurance-related services in the United States
• Financial, Professional & International Insurance, which includes surety, crime, and financial liability businesses which primarily use credit-based underwriting processes, as well as property and casualty products that are predominantly marketed on an international basis

[edit] History

Top: The familiar umbrella logo of the Travelers, used until its spinoff from Citigroup. Bottom: The logo the The St. Paul used prior to the merger with Travelers.

The main predecessor companies of Travelers are the St. Paul Companies and Travelers Property Casualty Corporation.

The St. Paul Companies was founded in 1853 in St. Paul, Minnesota, serving local customers who were having a difficult time getting claim payments in a timely manner from insurance companies on the east coast of the United States. It barely survived the Panic of 1857 by dramatically paring down its operations and later reorganizing itself into a stock company (as opposed to a mutual company). It soon spread its operations across the country. In 1998 it acquired USF&G, known formerly as United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company, an insurance company based in Baltimore, Maryland, but was forced to downsize by almost half due to a competitive marketplace.^[1]

Travelers was founded in 1864 in Hartford, Connecticut. Along the way it had many industry firsts, including the first automobile policy, the first commercial airline policy, and the first policy for space travel.^[2]

In the 1990s, it went through a series of mergers and acquisitions. It was bought by Primerica in 1993^[3], but the resulting company retained the Travelers name. In 1995 it became The Travelers Group^[2]. It bought Aetna's property and casualty business in 1996.^[4]

In 1998, the Travelers Group bought Citicorp to form Citigroup.^[3] However, the synergies between the banking and insurance arms of the company did not work as well as planned, so Citigroup spun off Travelers Property and Casualty into an independent company in 2002^[5], although it kept the red umbrella logo. Three years later, Citigroup later sold Travelers Life & Annuity to MetLife.^[6]

St. Paul Travelers logo used until February 2007

In 2004, the St. Paul Companies bought Travelers and renamed itself St. Paul Travelers. This lasted until 2007, when the company acquired the red umbrella logo from Citigroup and readopted it as its main corporate symbol, and changed its name to simply The Travelers Companies.^[7][8]

[edit] Advertising

In 2006, the company introduced a new brand advertising campaign, including four television commercials. One of them featured a man walking down a steep San Francisco sidewalk who trips and knocks over a table of items at a garage sale. The man and the items roll down the street, forming a ball which gathers garbage cans, pedestrians, construction materials, motorcycles, light poles, and other oddly-shaped items, in a manner very reminiscent of the cult video game Katamari Damacy.^[9][10] The creators of the ad say it is simply based on the snowball effect, they've never heard of the game, and that the resulting similarity was a surprise to them.^[11]

In 2007, the company introduced a new ad campaign featuring its newly reacquired red umbrella logo.

[edit] References

1. ^ St. Paul Travelers profile, New York Times, powered by Vault. Accessed March 1, 2007.
2. ^ ^{a b} Citigroup history - Travelers
3. ^ ^{a b} Primerica Financial Services history, Citigroup. Accessed March 2, 2007
4. ^ Aetna Completes Previously Announced Sale Of Property/Casualty Operations To Travellers, Aetna press release, April 2, 1996
5. ^ Citigroup Announces Completion of its Spin-off of Travelers Property Casualty, Citigroup press release, August 20, 2002
6. ^ MetLife Completes Acquisition Of Travelers Life & Annuity, MetLife press release, July 1, 2005.
7. ^ St. Paul Travelers to return to former Red Umbrella logo, St. Paul Travelers press release, February 13, 2007
8. ^ "The Travelers Companies, Inc.", "TRV" and Travelers Red Umbrella Now Official, Travelers press release, February 26, 2007
9. ^ Video of the Travelers Insurance commercial
10. ^ Real-life Katamari in Travelers Insurance ad, Zach Stern, September 25, 2006
11. ^ Travelers ad imitating Katamari: just coincidence, Zach Stern, September 28, 2006

[edit] External links

• Company home page
• History of Travelers (via its former parent, Citigroup)

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