Cinven Fund 5 to sell specialist life insurance provider, Viridium Group

International private equity firm, Cinven, today announces that the Fifth Cinven Fund has agreed to sell Viridium Group (‘Viridium’ or ‘the Group’), a leading consolidation platform for life insurance companies and portfolios in the German market for an undisclosed consideration.

The Fifth Cinven Fund acquired Viridium (formerly Heidelberger Leben Group) in March 2014 for an enterprise value of approximately €300 million. This transaction created the initial platform for Cinven’s strategy to consolidate the German life insurance market, building on its successful consolidation of the UK life insurance market through its investment in Guardian Financial Services.

At acquisition, Viridium had a portfolio of c. 600,000 policies and €5.2 billion of assets. Over the past four years, Cinven has actively supported the transformation of Viridium into the largest and most advanced life insurance consolidation platform in Germany:

• Cinven has worked closely with Viridium’s management team to consolidate the German market, acquiring Skandia’s Germany and Austria businesses from Old Mutual Group in October 2014 and subsequently acquiring the life insurance business of Protektor Lebensversicherungs-AG in July 2017, renamed to Entis. As a result of these acquisitions, Viridium now manages a combined total of c. 1 million insurance policies and c. €15 billion of assets;
• An advanced, modular and scalable IT platform has been developed and implemented in order to integrate large scale portfolio migrations; and
• The management team has been further strengthened with appointments of a new Chairman, CEO, COO, CIO and Chief Actuary to enable the Group to capitalise on, and subsequently integrate, market consolidation opportunities.

Cinven has a strong track record in the Financial Services sector, particularly in life insurance consolidation. In the UK, Cinven successfully realised its investment in Guardian Financial Services to Admin Re in 2016. In Italy, Cinven is currently executing a life insurance consolidation strategy through its investment in Eurovita, which was formed through the acquisitions and subsequent combination of ERGO Previdenza, Old Mutual Wealth Italy and Eurovita Assicurazioni.

In Germany, Cinven’s other current investments include STADA, the European manufacturer of prescription generics and over-the-counter pharmaceutical products; and Synlab, the European clinical laboratory services company. This transaction follows Cinven’s successful German realisations in the past 18 months including CeramTec, the global manufacturer of high performance ceramics (March 2018); HEG; the European provider of hosting and domain services to consumers and SMEs (April 2017); and SLV, the lighting manufacturer and distributor (January 2017).