Bath-based accident management and specialist legal services group Redde has taken over a rival for £43.2m as it continues its major restructuring.
Redde – known until last year as Helphire – said the acquisition of Huddersfield-headquartered FMG would broaden its accident and fleet management capabilities and allow it to enter additional industry sectors. 
It would also be able to widen its appeal to owners and managers of large vehicle fleets requiring accident management and legal services as part of a long-term customer development plan.
Helphire, which launched in 1992, grew to become one of Bath’s biggest and best-performing companies by working with the insurance and motor industries to provide replacement vehicles to motorists involved in accidents.
But changes in the market – some driven by legislation aimed at stopping firms from charging large amounts to motor insurance firms for replacement cars – hit the business hard and by 2012 it was loss making and looking for ways to diversify away from its core offering.
The transformation started last year when it acquired the NewLaw group, which specialises in road traffic personal injuries and consumer-related services such as wills and probate and provides medical reports, costs drafting and employment law advice. It also re-branded as Redde – a name it said drew on the Latin word for ‘restore’. The FMG deal adds further scope to widen its services.
In a statement FMG, manages around 250,000 vehicles, said it “was strongly attracted to the deal on a number of fronts; not least Redde’s ability to invest for the long term, further enhance the overall product and service offering to its customers and support FMG’s market leading multi-product digital platform development.”
Redde chief executive Martin Ward said: “The addition of FMG to the Redde group supports our strategic objective of growing earnings on a sustainable basis and broadening the scope of services we offer which are related to our core businesses. FMG is a quality business and has a strong reputation in its fields of business for serving its customers well.
“We have worked together in the legal services arena for a number of years and this acquisition is a further step in strengthening Redde’s proposition to its customers as we build on our recent successes.”
FMG executive chairman Andrew Cope, who bought out the business in April, said: “We strongly believe that marrying FMG’s people, knowledge and innovative capacity to Redde’s long-term investment and commitment to the vehicle claims industry will result in an outstanding service and technical proposition for our customers today, tomorrow and well into the future.”
Matthew Deering, partner at Endless, the venture capital firm which supported Cope’s buy-out, added: “We did not expect to be engaging with strategic buyers of FMG for quite some time yet, but we could not ignore the approach of the Redde board or the recommendation of the management shareholders to accept the offer.”
The deal is subject to regulatory approval.
