Fortis Spinoff Raises More Than $2 Billion

The units spun off through the IPO now operate as Assurant Inc., a company with headquarters in New York and an official domicile in Delaware. The companys shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AIZ.

The prospectus for the offering shows that the health insurance and employee benefits businesses accounted for $3.4 billion of Assurants 2002 revenue and $232 million of its $517 million in pretax income.

Assurant also has businesses that sell property-casualty insurance, credit insurance, debt protection administration, funeral insurance and other products.

The prospectus suggests that Assurants individual health insurance might be particularly well positioned to benefit from the recent enactment of the federal health savings account law, which makes accounts that resemble the old Archer Medical Savings Accounts available to any taxpayer who buys a high-deductible health insurance policy: 16% of the individual medical policies that the company sold in the first 3 quarters of 2003 included an MSA.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Life & Health/Financial Services Edition, February 13, 2004. Copyright 2004 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.