Curi Holdings, Constellation Complete Merger to Offer Scale the Modern Healthcare Delivery System Requires

Curi Holdings and Constellation closed their previously announced merger last month. Both mutual holdings companies, the combined entity now operates under the name Curi, creating a unified national brand. With more than $2 billion of consolidated assets and nearly $400 million in revenue, the merged organization now serves more than 50,000 physicians, healthcare providers and organizations across the U.S.

“The reason we did this merger is because we serve a very distinct client base in healthcare, primarily independent practices but, now merged, also facilities, like long-term care facilities and community-based hospitals,” said Jason Sandner, Curi Holdings chief executive officer. “Our clients themselves are on the move. They are seeking scale, particularly the private practices, so that they can compete in today’s healthcare space. We need to be where they will be. They continue to grow beyond state lines. We need to be positioned to continue to serve their needs. We’re doing this so that we can keep pace with the scale that our clients are seeking.”

“Curi was the brand that was best positioned to lead the organization forward. Not only for where clients are today, but where they want to be decades from now,” added Ryan Crawford, former Constellation chief executive officer and current chief executive of the merged Curi Insurance business. “We’ve already started the process of rebranding Constellation to the Curi name in the Midwest and Mountain West markets, where Constellation is a more known entity. You will see a lot of the marketing material in those states announcing Constellation is now Curi. We will also be focused on integration for a number of years and continue to build that scale as a growth organization for the foreseeable future.”

Under the merger plan, Constellation’s subsidiary brands — MMIC Insurance, UMIA Insurance, Arkansas Mutual Insurance, MMIC RRG and Michigan Professional Insurance Exchange — will continue to write coverage with their individual policy forms, similar to how Curi has continued to write its coverage on Medical Mutual Insurance Co. of North Carolina issuing paper since it rebranded in 2019.

“If there is one overarching message that we want to send to our healthcare clients and the brokers who serve them, it’s stability,” Sandner explained. “Keeping the issuing paper and both companies’ executive teams intact helps us to deliver on that aim of stability for the members. At the same time, we’re now able to offer a broader portfolio of services, a larger geographic scale and a more diversified client base that also provides stability for the company and the members that we serve.”

In addition to Curi Insurance, which oversees the medical professional liability insurance business, the company operates Curi Capital, a registered investment advisor and full-service financial advisory business, and Curi Advisory, which provides business solutions and consulting services to physician practices.

“Curi has been intentional during the last eight years about growing further into our insurance footprint — and this merger helps us do that — but we’ve also focused on diversifying our business beyond insurance into the wealth-management space and the practice-consulting space,” Sandner said. “As we’ve made that evolution to be a multi-channel business, we’ve had to rethink how we’re set up structurally.

“Our team is spreading their focus across all three of those business lines. From a leadership perspective, we created an executive leadership team where each of us may have our individual areas of the business that we tend to maybe 80% of the time, but the other 20% we are focused across all Curi and how do we advance the broader mission of who we are. Working down from there, we have leadership teams at each of those three business units — insurance, capital and advisory. And there too, we’ve had a nice merging of the two leadership teams.”

“We are a growth-oriented company,” Crawford added. “We both were growing organically in the past, and now we’re growing inorganically by bringing this merger together. Both of those prongs will continue to be a focus for us going forward. M&A is something we still want to entertain, but we believe we have offerings and solutions for clients that allow us to continue to grow organically, not only in the spaces where we have a dominant presence, but also those where we have growth opportunities.”