French social protection group Apicil in August 2018 acquired Luxembourg-based individual life insurance carrier OneLife from its owner, U.S. private equity firm J.C Flowers.

Apicil has a €2.4 billion turnover and specializes in health and life insurance, pensions, as well as savings and financial services. As a paritarian institution, Apicil is akin to a mutual that is co-managed by trade unions and employers’ representative bodies. Headquartered in Lyon, France, Apicil is the fourth largest social protection group in France with over 2 million clients and 2,000 employees.

OneLife, which has over €5.2 billion in assets under management (AUM), adds wealth management capabilities to Apicil’s product range, including cross-border wealth planning for life insurance.

J.C. Flowers acquired OneLife’s predecessor company Private Estate Life as soon as 2006. Rumors of an impending sale have made the rounds for several years now. The OneLife brand was created as recently as June 2016 by combining NPG Wealth Management and Private Estate Life’s operations, at a time when J.C. Flowers claimed OneLife had “over €6 billion” in AUM.

According to OneLife’s website, the company addresses “High Affluent, High Net Worth and Ultra High Net Worth people and organizations -and anyone responsible for looking after their wealth.” How that fits with Apicil’s core clients, i.e. rank-and-file employees, blue-collar workers, and middle managers, has a simple answer: it does not. The OneLife deal appears to be for diversification purposes. And how the 150 OneLife employees will fit with their 2,000 colleagues from APICIL makes for an interesting challenge.