• Brokers service for small and large buyers
• Brokers expertise for small and large buyers
• Brokers overall for small and large buyers

Innovation and industry expertise are at the forefront of Marsh Inc.'s strategic development of services across the spectrum of its account sizes, according to David Bidmead, CEO-United States for the New York-based brokerage.

Marsh's focus on pioneering new insurance products to meet emerging risk exposures, as well as its recent emphasis on industry-specific risk advisory services, appears to have paid off with the company earning top honors in overall brokerage, services and expertise for large and small buyers in Business Insurance's 2012 Buyers Choice Awards.

“Our clients expect us to be the leading transactional insurance broker in the U.S. and around the world, but what they're also expecting us to do is to be a thought leader and to partner with them on key strategic issues,” Mr. Bidmead said.

One example of Marsh's commitment to innovation, Mr. Bidmead said, is the brokerage's Workers Compensation Center of Excellence, which it launched in July. Mr. Bidmead said the new center is designed to provide seamless delivery of Marsh's workers compensation products and services for large and small clients alike, centralizing the company's workers compensation insurance programs, analytics and modeling, pre- and post-loss strategies, claims management and advocacy operations.

“It was a little surprising that there hadn't really been one major provider in the domestic market that really planted a flag and established a center of excellence for workers compensation, so we've done that,” Mr. Bidmead said.

“We hope our clients will perceive that as a more efficient way to really get at their total cost of risk,” he said.

Other recent Marsh innovations include its CloudProtect, RCO Corporate Response and FCPA Corporate Response insurance products, which were rolled out during the past 18 months.

%%BREAK%%

Marsh's large and small U.S. commercial clients also have responded well to its emphasis on industry-based risk analytics and consulting services, Mr. Bidmead said.

In the past two years, the company's decision to focus its investments in the U.S. on a limited number of key industries has been validated by substantial growth in revenue and account volume in those segments, which he said have consistently outperformed results in the company's non-industry-specific segments.

Mr. Bidmead said the results have been particularly encouraging in its construction segment, especially considering the challenged state of that industry.

“We made a conscious decision to place significant investment into that industry segment at a time that, quite frankly, might be bemusing to some,” Mr. Bidmead said. “We see it as an opportunity to really increase the strength of our bench for both our transactional and advisory capabilities, and it's produced a quantum increase in both the number of clients that we have and the revenue that we generate from that segment.”