On Tuesday, Sagicor Financial Company (SFC) announced the merger of its two companies in the region—Sagicor Group Jamaica and Sagicor Life Inc—bringing together a Jamaican company with a T&T incorporated entity under a new, single Caribbean holding structure.
The resulting company, Sagicor Group Caribbean, would have, on a pro forma basis. over US$6.9 billion (TT$46.92 billion) in total assets and over US$1.3 billion (TT$8.84 billion) in total revenues as of and for the 12-month period ended September 30, 2025.
That would make Sagicor Group Caribbean the largest insurance company operating in the English and Dutch Caribbean by assets as its main competitor, Guardian Holdings Ltd, or the Guardian Group, had total assets of TT$38.51 billion (US$5.66 billion) as at the nine months ended September 30, 2025.
SFC, the parent company, has experienced tremendous growth since 2019, which was the year the Barbados-headquartered firm entered into an arrangement with the Alignvest group that led to an investment of US$450 million in additional equity capital and the listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
In 2019, Sagicor had US$8.72 billion.
As of September 30, 2025, the group’s assets have grown to US$24.6 billion, primarily due to its acquisition of Canadian life insurer ivari in October 2023.
In its investor presentation for its most recent quarter, Sagicor Financial noted that about 75 per cent of its balance sheet is in Canada and the United States, that over 80 per cent of its revenues and that Sagicor ranks first in universal life insurance in Canada, first in life insurance, health insurance and pensions in Jamaica, Barbados, and the Eastern Caribbean, and second in T&T.
For the nine months ended September 30, Sagicor Jamaica and Sagicor Life contributed US$41 million and US$41.2 million in net income to the group. In terms of revenue, Sagicor Jamaica contributed US$603.9 million and Sagicor Life US$361.7 million to Sagicor Financial’s total revenue of US$2.35 billion for the period.
After hosting a news conference at Sagicor Group Jamaica’s New Kingston headquarters on Tuesday, three of Sagicor’s top executives—Sagicor Financial’s president and CEO, Andre Mousseau, Sagicor Group Jamaica’s president and CEO, Christopher Zacca, and Sagicor Life Inc’s president and CEO Robert Trestrail—carved out some time on a busy day to sit down for an interview with the Business Guardian.
At the start of the interview, Trestrail described the merger as “the second-to-last, or the last piece of the puzzle” that allows the corporate structure to fall in place.
Q: When there is a merger, there is always a discussion about the synergies to be derived from that merger. And in many mergers, synergies include reducing the cost of employees. Is this merger going to be like that two years down the road? Will the combined company have fewer employees than the two companies do know?
Mousseau: So part of the part of the logic of any transaction should be to make the companies more efficient. And that’s included in ours. The underlying commercial logic for this particular combination leans heavily on acquiring the scale to be able to invest in the technology that will ultimately make us more efficient.
If you look at some of the particular challenges we have operating in the region, it’s actually more around finding the right talent than it is being in a place where you have too many people.
What we’ve observed in recent years is that when you upgrade technology, sometimes, as your workforce naturally ages out, you’re able to backfill with fewer people. So I think a goal would be over a period of many years, to eventually end up with some combination of a leaner organisation and one where there’s less focus on administration and more focus on growth, but net net, we see this as a significant positive for our team members and our employees.
Q: You said the idea of bringing the two companies together has been around for some years. Have there been any hindrances that kept it back?
Mousseau: The idea of collaboration has been top of mind, at least since I’ve been here over the past seven years, and Robert in particular, can talk about even further back than that. Our collaboration has been getting better and better. We see now as the right time to take the complete step of combining the shareholder basis. Sagicor is in excellent financial condition...I think it’s no time like the present. We’re able to make the investment of time and resources to make it happen. Robert,
Q: How does the parent company benefit from the transaction?
Mousseau: The parent company has disclosed in the SFC press release to Toronto investors that we expect this to be approximately earnings neutral on a per share basis to SFC shareholders before the effect of synergies.
We crafted the transactions so that everyone is more or less in the same place, from an earnings point of view, but then we all get to participate in the meaningful growth going forward. We believe that this combination will unlock significant operational synergies and growth synergies that would not be fully possible, fully attainable without truly combining the organisations.
Q: What percentage of the Caribbean insurance markets is it expected the merged entity would control?
Andre Mousseau: It depends very much market to market. And you know what’s important here is that there’s no overlap between these two organisations. And so the market positions will not change the competitive dynamic you would have to go through and look at it island by island, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and the news will be the same next year, as it was yesterday. There’s nothing to be combined once you look at any individual company.
Q: What is the impact of the combination on Sagicor Life Inc’s standing in Trinidad and Tobago, in terms of the life and the general markets. Are you going to become bigger than your competitor, Guardian holdings?
Trestrail: I don’t think we have any competitors in the Trinidad market, but having said that, the realities, as Andre said, there’s no combination of the entities in each market. So the operation that existed in Trinidad yesterday is going to be the same operation that exists in Trinidad tomorrow and next year. It really is a corporate reorganisation of the entity called Sagicor Life Inc and a coming together with the entity called Sagicor Group Jamaica under the newly branded and minted Sagicor Group Caribbean, providing skills and opportunities for team members to assume new and greater responsibilities across across the region.
Q: How are the customers of these two companies going to benefit from the merger?
Trestrail: In terms of orders of magnitude, I would say that collectively, we have well over 1 million customers or clients across the entire region.
What does this do to benefit them? It really positions us to transition and transform the organisation to be able to offer them the best in class of both organisations from a product perspective, from an agent perspective and from a digital solution perspective. You know, we were the first to bring to an end solutions through our direct to consumer strategy. And those, those things will continue to evolve.
Where we engage the clients is going to be where they want to engage us.
So whether they want to engage us where they do today, which is in physical space, or whether they want to engage us in that digital realm, is becoming also more appropriate and important for our new generation.
Is this a marriage of equals?
Zacca: I would say that this is a marriage of two great companies. If you want to use that analogy, both the bridge and the groom are very wonderful, good-looking people...I think the two companies coming together is going to drive growth in most of the territories that we operate in because of the scale, because of the unit cost, production, technology improvement, serving the clients better. We are not doing this just to sit still.
