Integrity Marketing Gets $1.2B From Silver Lake

What You Need to Know

The company now works with 420,000 agents and advisors.
Silver Lake will get a seat on the Integrity Marketing board.
Harvest Partners will continue to be the biggest institutional investor.

Integrity Marketing Group — a Dallas-based company that has acquired dozens of life, health and annuity agencies and distributors — said Thursday that it has attracted $1.2 billion in capital from a new investor, Silver Lake.

Silver Lake is a Menlo Park, California-based company that may be best known for its investments in Airbnb, Dell Technologies, Peloton and Twitter.

In 2019, Integrity Marketing described itself as a senior market products distributor. Today, the company says it’s “an omnichannel insurtech leader in life, health and wealth solutions.”

Bryan Adams, Integrity Marketing’s co-founder and CEO, focused in a comment on the new Silver Lake relationship, included in the deal announcement, on efforts to improve digital systems.

“We’ve invested heavily in technology and are constantly working to develop transformative solutions that improve the insurance and wealth management experience for Americans,” Adams said.

Integrity Marketing

Integrity Marketing is a privately held company was founded in 2006. It made a splash in January 2018 by acquiring Neishloss & Fleming, a Medicare plan distributor. The company said at the time that it had about 300 full-time employees and relationships with 120,000 independent agents and advisors.

The company reported in 2019 that, at that time, it had about 500 employees, relationships with 215,000 agents and advisors, relationships with 4 million clients, and plans to make enough sales in 2019 to generate about $2 billion in new annualized premiums.

Today, the company says, it has 5,500 employees, relationships with 420,000 agents and advisors, relationships with 10 million clients, $7 billion in sales per year, and $20 billion in assets under management through RIA and broker-dealer programs.

The Owners

Silver Lake will get a minority stake in Integrity Marketing and a seat on the company’s board, according to the deal announcement.

The Future

Most of the executives from Silver Lake, Harvest Partners and HGGC who commented on the new Silver Lake-Integrity Marketing relationships talked about the role Silver Lake could play in helping the company improve and expand technology.

Adam Karol, a Silver Lake, appeared to show some appreciation for live-human agents, and Integrity Marketing’s ability to buy agencies.

“Integrity is at the epicenter of the U.S. health care and insurance markets,” Karol said. “The amount of data and distribution capabilities that Integrity has assembled in their omnichannel approach is unlike anything in the market today. Their enterprise-scale data assets, nationwide sales distribution network of consumer-focused insurance agents, tech-enabled contact centers, triple-digit growth rates and impressive M&A capabilities have created a unique insurtech platform that we’re excited to help grow.”

Karol’s comment may suggest that Integrity Marketing will continue to nurture and acquire brick-and-mortar agencies as well as upgrading digital systems.