Insurance Mergers and Consolidations Continue to Rattle Hartford

Hartford, Connecticut was king when it came to insurance for many years. While insurance is still big business in the city, a lot has changed over the past two decades or more.

A wave of mergers, consolidations and cuts in the 1990s pared the payrolls of Hartford's insurance companies from 55,000 at the start of the decade to as low as 36,000 a few years later. Hartford has long been the insurance capital of the nation, so with the disappearance of one-third of those jobs it was as if the city's identity as well as its industry were in free fall.

But this time, things might turn out different. Earlier this week, the St. Paul and Hartford-based Travelers agreed to merge, and Cigna Corp. agreed to sell its retirement services business, which has 1,200 Hartford workers, to Prudential Financial Inc.Prudential isn't saying whether Hartford will lose any jobs as part of its deal.

But Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez was feeling better Tuesday about the St. Paul merger after making a phone call to the Travelers executive offices down the street. The mayor said that Travelers officials privately assured him that Hartford would gain about 200 to 300 jobs from the merger with the St. Paul Companies, despite the fact that the headquarters is to move 1,000 miles west as part of the $16.4 billion merger.

Hartford has lost out to rivals, foreign and domestic, for one of the sectors of the insurance business that has been growing -- call centers where workers sell or service policies. Less than two years ago, ING North America Insurance Corp. opened a 1,500-worker call center in Iowa, entry-level jobs that Mayor Perez wishes could have come to Hartford.

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