York RSG Purchases Avizent. But Avizent Might Just Keep Its Name.
By Lonce LaMon - January 5, 2012
York Risk Services Group (York RSG), based in Parsippany, New Jersey, purchased Avizent just before Christmas.
Avizent has three offices in California which handle workers’ compensation claims. One is in El Dorado Hills, which is in the greater Sacramento area, another is in Anaheim, and the third is in Irvine where Longshore & Harbor Workers’ claims are handled.
There are no plans as yet for changing the Avizent name to York. Anne W. Ellis, the Director of Marketing and Communications, told adjustercom by phone today, “As of right now we have no immediate plans to change names. We’re looking at branding strategies.”
York within the last decade purchased Southern California Risk Management Associates (SCRMA) in late 2006 and Gregory Bragg & Associates in July of 2008. Both of those companies are now called York RSG and no longer use their old names at all. But “Avizent is a national TPA which is larger than the others,” Anne continued, “so we’re being very thoughtful about the branding strategy. Our policy has typically been to identify acquired companies somehow as York, but we don’t exactly know how that is going to be ordered—a name change, a tag line, or what.
Therefore, Avizent may keep its name forever and simply have “a member of the York family” as a possible tag line. So for right now, it’s still Avizent.
Ritchie Vener, the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of York, said today to adjustercom by phone, “We want to specialize in certain market areas and not try to be everything to everybody. So this particular acquisition helped our customers that do workers’ compensation in pretty much the middle of the country where we didn’t have a lot of offices.”
Vener explained that even in workers’ compensation they tend to be very specialized. York goes after the mid-market companies. They focus in five areas. Public entities. Programs businesses. Alternate risks, which are captives and pools and risk retention groups. Corporate risk management. And specialized loss adjusting.
“The one where Avizent fits in mostly is typical corporate risk management--for self-insured or high deductible corporates. We have some big customers but primarily we focus on the middle market.”
Avizent is based in Dublin, Ohio, and has over 50 locations operating from coast to coast.
“We don’t want to be the biggest,” Ritchie Vener expressed when this writer mentioned the growth of competitor Sedgwick. “We’re never going to be the biggest. We just want to get really good at the stuff that we do.”
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