Insurance and risk management firm Merriwether & Williams Insurance Services has closed a merger with Hub International Limited.

The San Francisco-based firm, which maintains a downtown office at 550 S. Hope St., will retain its space and staff in the move and added “A Hub International Company” to its formal name. Hub, which already had a location here, does not plan to blend the operations together.

Ingrid Merriwether, who founded the company in 1997, said this is largely because of what her firm’s appeal was to begin with: its work in aligned risk management.

“There aren’t the typical redundancies that are commonplace,” said Merriwether, who is now president of aligned risk management for Hub. “They don’t do what we do, which was really what the draw was.”

Terms of the merger were not disclosed.

Merriwether & Williams provides commercial property and casualty insurance, owner-controlled insurance programs, risk management and special project consulting, and creation and administration of contract-based financing. Its signature service is working with public agencies for so-called Contractor Development and Bonding Programs, where the company ensures entities are properly covered in terms of risk management while also adhering to professed good-governance values.

As an example, Merriwether & Williams does a lot of work locally with Los Angeles County, the city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. When consulting for projects that are put out for bid, Merriwether said her firm works to ensure that smaller, less established contractors – very often helmed by minority owners – are able to submit bids, such as, for example, by providing the necessary up-front financing.

“We need to be doing (risk management), but can we do it in a way that aligns with our values and objectives?” she posited. “It’s saying, ‘“Don’t let the necessary practice of mitigating risk also become an obstacle to other objectives and goals that are important.’”

Merriwether said outside of the DEI-coded achievement, this work achieves two important outcomes for governing entities: ensuring that more taxpayer dollars stay within the county and finding significant savings on public projects because more bidders mean competitive pricing. The firm claims its work has saved more than $22 million in taxpayer dollars.

Hub, which is based in Chicago, typically grows by merger. It provides a wide range of insurance services and employs more than 17,000 people nationally.

“We see our role as facilitating the expansion and effectiveness of MWIS’ work while simultaneously broadening the mutual palette of resources and products through an aligned risk management lens to support our clients more holistically,” Darren Caesar, president of Hub’s Central and Northern California operations, said in a statement. “Cooperatively, we can all play a part in building a brighter, more resilient future.”

Merriwether said talks between the two companies began in October and that it was “very intentional” to stick with Hub in a merger. She particularly hailed the regional model Hub employs as allowing for better service for clients.

“What’s unique about this structure is that it allows for the bandwidth, reach, capacity and technology of a global company but really operated and managed at the local level,” she said. “Unlike some of the really large brokers, they have these regional models because they want a presence in the community.”