High praise for T&T's econ­o­my from Suri­name-based In­sur­ance com­pa­ny As­suria NV, as the reg­u­la­to­ry bod­ies here and in Suri­name have giv­en fi­nal ap­proval for the com­pa­ny to ac­quire Gulf In­sur­ance Ltd.The cer­e­mo­ny to in­tro­duce the new board of Gulf In­sur­ance Lim­it­ed was held at the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce head of­fice, Colum­bus Cir­cle, West­moor­ings. On March 26, the Cen­tral Bank of T&T gave the reg­u­la­to­ry ap­proval for the ac­qui­si­tion and on April 26, the Cen­tral Bank of Suri­name gave its ap­provals.

Stephen Smit, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of As­suria NV, said the com­pa­ny want­ed to grow out­side of its do­mes­tic mar­ket and T&T, through Gulf In­sur­ance, pro­vid­ed the ide­al plat­form.Changes for mar­ket­ing and brand­ing the com­pa­ny are on the way and al­ready the lo­go has been ad­just­ed.

Ex­plain­ing why Gulf In­sur­ance Lim­it­ed need­ed to of­fer it­self for ac­qui­si­tion, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor John Gon­za­les said: "One of the biggest chal­lenges which Gulf came up­on was op­er­at­ing in the shad­ow of Cli­co up the is­lands. The Gulf prob­lem was a bal­ance sheet prob­lem and not an op­er­a­tional prob­lem from the pre­vi­ous hold­ing com­pa­ny which had to be re­placed and which has now been re­placed with a sol­id hold­ing com­pa­ny in the As­suria.

The chal­lenges up the is­lands was con­vinc­ing reg­u­la­tors af­ter what hap­pened with Cli­co. Gulf is okay, op­er­a­tional­ly."

Gon­za­les said the pre­vi­ous board re­ceived 15 bids but did not "feel it was right for an in­di­vid­ual (to be) in con­trol"l."We boiled down that 15 to five. We felt that we were look­ing for a fi­nan­cial group and there were about a few of them, peo­ple who knew the busi­ness, peo­ple who had some fi­nan­cial man­age­ment ,peo­ple who had ex­treme­ly good prac­tice in cor­po­rate gov­er­nance," he said.

Gon­za­les added that there were even bids com­ing from far North of the Caribbean. There were two of­fers from T&T en­ti­ties but As­suria came out on top. Gon­za­les said the lev­el of ser­vice pro­vid­ed to cus­tomers con­tin­ues to be strong and noth­ing has changed with the ac­qui­si­tion.As­suria is not rul­ing out in­vest­ment in oth­er sec­tors of T&T's econ­o­my but first the com­pa­ny wants to deep­en its foot­print in the In­sur­ance in­dus­try in T&T.