BCU out to entice clients and advisors with "highly consultative approach". By definition the wealthy have more assets than most other people. That means they have more to lose and, as a result, a need for sophisticated approaches to managing their liabilities. With this in mind, three industry veterans have set up BCU Risk Advisors, an insurance brokerage that caters to the needs of ultra-high-net-worth clients.

"The more complex the estate, the more sophisticated the insurance has to be," says Jeffrey Cline, CEO of Chicago-based BCU, a firm that works exclusively with families and individuals whose net worth comes to at least $30 million. "That calls for a highly consultative approach to helping clients protect their assets."

Service

Cline and his colleagues Bruce Billmeyer and William Uniowski left AON's Private Risk Management group last year to found BCU with backing from Financial Investments Corporation, the investment arm of the Chicago-based Harrison Steans family, and processing support from Tampa, Fla.-based general insurance brokerage Baldwin Connelly.

Though Cline says the decision to leave AON, a Chicago-based commercial property and casualty insurance brokerage, was a tough one. But he and his colleagues felt it was important to zero in on high-end clients as a core concentration, not an ancillary business. "Service is the key with clients in this segment and focus is the key to service," he says.

Though ties between the Steanses and the Clines go back to the 1950s, when Harrison Steans, formerly chairman of NBD Illinois (now part of JPMorgan Chase) and Jeffrey Cline's father Richard Cline served in the U.S. Navy together, Financial Investments Corporation president Jennifer Steans says her firm's decision to invest in BCU was a practical one.

"We checked them out very well," says Steans. "They're a high-calibre boutique managed by people with histories of doing what they say they're going to do, and they're going after a type client we know well."

Steans also sees BCU in light of her family's history in banking -- including another recent Financial Investments Corporation investment, Largo, Fla.-based community and business bank called USAmeriBank. "There's a lot of similarity between banking and insurance brokerage," she says. "Both are service intensive, and the big players in both [industries] aren't very good at meeting the needs of their high-net-worth clients."

For the moment, says Cline, most of ultra-high-net-worth clients turn to mainstream insurance brokerages that aren't equipped to understand their needs or to colleaborate with other "centers of influence" like estate attorneys, accountants and financial planners to make sure their insurance meshes with their overall wealth pictures.

In addition to its headquarters in Chicago, BCU has offices in Los Angeles, New York and Palm Beach, Fla. -FWR

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