Brown & Brown strikes deal to buy Loan Protector's assets

Brown & Brown, headquartered in Daytona Beach, Fla., plans to buy the assets of a lender-placed insurance and insurance tracking firm that does business as Loan Protector.

Financial terms of the agreement to purchase of LP Insurance Services' assets were not disclosed. The deal will close next month if certain conditions are met.

The acquisition will expand lender-placed insurance capabilities Brown & Brown added in 2004 when it purchased Proctor Home Warren, a company that did business back then as Proctor Insurance Services. That Brown & Brown subsidiary, which is led by Mike Cox, is now known as Proctor Financial.

"Mike Cox and our Proctor Financial team have long held a healthy respect for Loan Protector as a high quality and capable competitor in the marketplace," Chris Walker, president of Brown & Brown national programs, said in a press release. "We believe that adding Loan Protector's capabilities with our solutions will benefit our collective customers."

Dennis Swit, one of the owners of LP Insurance Services, would continue to lead Loan Protector, which will remain operating from its existing Cleveland headquarters, under the agreement struck with J. Scott Penny, acquisitions officer at Brown & Brown.

"Joining Loan Protector and Proctor will create a company with three service locations, will provide professional growth opportunities for our teammates and will allow us to better serve our client partners," said Swit.

Both companies are well-known among mortgage servicers as providers of lender-placed insurance. Loan Protector has been in the business for more than 40 years and Swit has led the company, co-owned with Dawn Swit, for the past 25 years.

The transaction is the latest in a wave of mortgage-related mergers and acquisition deals either struck or closed over the course of the last two weeks.

Lender-placed insurance is used in situations where the servicer determines the borrower's homeowners insurance is no longer in effect or may be insufficient and needs to be replaced or supplemented with additional coverage.

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