WHO WE ARE

Marsh is the world’s leading insurance broker and risk adviser. In more than 130 countries, our experts in every facet of risk and across industries help clients to anticipate, quantify, and more fully understand the range of risks they face. In today’s increasingly uncertain global business environment, Marsh helps clients to thrive and survive.

We work with clients of all sizes to define, design, and deliver innovative solutions to better quantify and manage risk. To every client interaction we bring an unmatched combination of deep intellectual capital, industry-specific expertise, global experience, and collaboration. We offer risk management, risk consulting, insurance broking, alternative risk financing, and insurance program management services to businesses, government entities, organizations, and individuals around the world.  

Since 1871 clients have relied on Marsh for trusted advice, to represent their interests in the marketplace, make sense of an increasingly complex world, and help turn risks into new opportunities for growth. Our more than 35,000 colleagues work on behalf of our clients, who are enterprises of all sizes in every industry, and include individuals, multinational organizations, and government entities worldwide.

We are a wholly owned subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies (NYSE: MMC), a global professional services firm offering clients advice and solutions in the areas of risk, strategy, and people. With 76,000 colleagues worldwide and annual revenue exceeding US$17 billion, Marsh & McLennan Companies also include global leaders Guy Carpenter, Mercer, and Oliver Wyman.

History

For more than 140 years, Marsh has grown by helping our clients anticipate and meet the challenges of changing times and technologies. Henry W. Marsh and Donald R. McLennan founded the company to help businesses during the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution.

Marsh dropped out of Harvard to seek his future in Chicago. The Great Fire of 1871 had wiped out most insurers and Marsh saw opportunity for insurance brokers that could distribute great risks across many firms. Almost upon arrival, his ambitions were bigger than the new company he joined. Marsh wanted to open an office in New York. Then he set out to win U.S. Steel, the world's first billion-dollar corporation. Colorful, urbane, high living, and audacious, Marsh was the kind of man who would book a transatlantic passage so he could pitch AT&T's Theodore Vail aboard ship. On Vail's return voyage, there was Marsh again. He got the business.

McLennan of Duluth, Minnesota, became his family's sole support at age 14. In business life, his intense competitiveness took the form of thoroughness. McLennan was all diligence, researching insurance clients' operations until he knew as much as the owners. During 1901, while Marsh was pursuing U.S. Steel, McLennan was mastering the intricacies of railroads, winning one line after another. He spent weeks at a time inspecting every property along thousands of miles of road — a man who believed in research, and in seeing for himself.

When the two men merged their firms in 1904, the new company was the largest insurance agency in the world with annual premiums of US$3 billion — and it was only the beginning.