Marsh Breaks the Chain(link)

Earlier this year, I wrote that Marsh had acquired Chainlink, a research and advisory firm specializing in the supply risk area (among other supply chain analyst pursuits). Well, this marriage was short-lived. I recently learned that Marsh has gotten rid of most of the research practice it had planned to build around supply risk. As a result, the Chainlink folks are back on their own again. I'm not sure if this means that Marsh is abandoning supply risk insurance products as well as research and advisory in the area. I'm guessing that there's no market to underwrite such coverage today given the tight credit markets. There certainly is demand, but I'm sure that the appetite for assuming such risk is quite low at the moment. In any event, I look forward to checking in with the folks from Chainlink as they once again go off on their own (Ann Grackin, the firm's founder, started Chainlink when she was at AMR Research). And as to Marsh, it's a shame that this experiment did not work out. But I suppose when a new executive comes in -- as one did -- and decides to only focus on the core business, then experiments like their supply risk advisory, research and insurance practice are bound to play second fiddle to larger sources of revenue.

- Jason Busch