Higginbotham, now ranked as the 16th-largest independent brokerage chain, has expanded into South Carolina with the acquisition of the well-known Turbeville Insurance Agency.
Turbeville, founded in 1991 by William L. “Bill” Turbeville Jr., has 60 employees, with offices in Columbia, Lexington, Beaufort and Charleston, the companies said in a news release this week. It’s Higginbotham’s first foray into South Carolina, which Higginbotham considers to be one of the fastest-growing states.
“A South Carolina presence has been our goal for a long time, and we didn’t want to tiptoe into it,” said Rusty Reid, chairman and CEO of Higginbotham. “Bill Turbeville and his team have built one of the state’s most respected independent firms, and they did it by staying close to their clients, investing in their people and showing up for the communities they serve.”
The Turbeville agency has focused on personal, commercial, life and health insurance, as well as employee benefits. It has grown considerably in recent years, through organic growth and new agency partnerships.
“We’d grown to the point where the next level was going to require a different kind of scale,” Bill Turbeville said. “We had to decide whether to make that major push on our own or join forces with a larger firm that could help us keep growing.”
Higginbotham, with offices in Fort Worth, has been in business since 1948, and has more than 180 agency locations across the country.
“It’s from day to day, hour to hour,” Greenberg, whose company is a major insurer of commercial shipping, said on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures.
“Mines are the greatest uncertainty” in the strait, Greenberg said, as US and Iranian negotiators held talks in Switzerland on a permanent ceasefire and to lock in free passage through the waterway.
“We’re talking more about a war-zone environment,” he said. “Only a narrow channel is really being used to transit, and so it limits the number of ships that can actually go in and out. The Navy has been working to open up a broader set of channels, and as that happens, then shipping will increase.”
Oil has kept flowing even as Iran seeks to exert control, including its announcement Saturday that it had closed the strait once again. The US military’s Central Command said commercial ship traffic increased in the strait on Saturday, with 55 merchant ships transiting cargo and more than 17 million barrels of oil.
Lloyd’s of London Ltd. and Chubb announced on Friday a joint $400 million marine war risk consortium offering companies insurance for passage through the Hormuz strait.
