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Safeco Insurance, a member of Liberty Mutual Group, is a national U.S. insurance company. It holds naming rights to the Seattle Mariners' baseball stadium, Safeco Field.
Safeco was founded in Seattle, Washington in 1923 by Hawthorne K. Dent as the General Insurance Company of America, a property and casualty insurer. This name is still used by Safeco on some of its insurance products.[1] Thirty years later the company founded the Selective Auto and Fire Ensurance Company of America, or SAFECO (i.e., S.A.F.E. Co.).
General Insurance's first headquarters were in downtown Seattle at the corner of University Street and Fourth Avenue. In 1936, it moved to the eight-story Brooklyn Building at the corner of N.E. 45th Street and Brooklyn Avenue N.E. in the University District.
General Insurance began to sell life insurance in 1957. Eleven years later the corporate name changed from the General Insurance Company of America to Safeco Corporation. (The company would end up changing the capitalization of its name from SAFECO to Safeco at the turn of the century.) Around the same time the company began to offer mutual funds and commercial credit (though precursors to the Safeco Funds had been around since the 1930s).
Safeco replaced the Brooklyn Building with the 22-story Safeco Plaza building in 1973. It remains the tallest building in the city outside Downtown.
In 1997, Safeco bought American States Financial Corporation to expand beyond the West Coast. Washington Mutual's WM Life Insurance Company was purchased the same year. Two years later Safeco bought R.F. Bailey (Underwriting Agencies) Limited of London.
In 2001, new management was brought in to restructure the company. Commercial credit operations were sold to General Electric in 2001, and on March 15, 2004, the company announced the sale of its most profitable division, the life insurance and investments business, to a group of private investors led by Safeco board members and Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and White Mountains Insurance Group, Ltd., incorporating as Symetra Financial Corporation. The same day, it was announced that Hub International Ltd. was buying Safeco's insurance brokerage operations. Less than a month later, on April 12, it was announced that Mellon Financial Corporation would buy Safeco Trust Company, whose business is providing financial and estate planning services to individuals with over $1 million in assets. On August 2, the closure of Safeco Asset Management, the mutual-fund business, was announced.


The former Safeco Plaza, now UW Tower


The current Safeco Plaza, originally the Seafirst Building.
On April 6, 2005, CEO Mike McGavick announced that Safeco would be consolidating operations at either the University District "home office" campus or the newer Eastside campus in Redmond, pending a competition between Microsoft and the University of Washington for the sale of one or the other location. On January 19, 2006 it was announced that Microsoft would purchase the Redmond campus for $209.5 million.[2] Plans were announced for a new 125-foot office tower across the street from Safeco Plaza to house the approximately 1,300 Redmond employees. However, McGavick subsequently stepped down as CEO to run for the U.S. Senate. In a surprise move, his replacement Paula Rosput Reynolds announced on August 30, 2006], that the entire University District complex would be sold as well, to the University of Washington for $130 million.[3] Employees were told they would be moved to leased space in downtown Seattle. Some speculate this signalled the imminent sale of the company, although Safeco denied this. Safeco moved back downtown in 2007; its new headquarters at 1001 Fourth Avenue became the new Safeco Plaza, and the old Safeco Plaza was renamed UW Tower.
On June 27, 2007, Safeco introduced a new service, Teensurance, aimed at "providing parents peace of mind while teens earn their freedom." The product put GPS units in cars driven by children of insureds, allowing parents to monitor location, speed, distance and driving habits, remotely lock or unlock doors, and provide 24/7 roadside assistance.[4]
On April 23, 2008, Safeco announced an agreement to be acquired by Liberty Mutual for $68.25 per share.[5] Safeco continues to offer personal lines insurance (including auto, home, motorcycle, recreational vehicle, watercraft and more) through independent agents [6]
On February 12, 2010, Safeco announced its donation of more than 800 pieces of its Safeco Art Collection to the Washington Art Consortium This move was hailed as being a significant and rare gift by members of the local arts community.

A supplemental group life and health insurance plan is now available for part-time, seasonal and temporary workers, providing employees with coverage they need and employers with a tool for easy benefit management and employee retention.

"SAFECO's (Nasdaq:SAFC) Select Benefits serves a marketplace with nearly 20 million uninsured working Americans," said Randy Talbot, president of SAFECO Life & Investments. "And this product brings workers a tangible health benefit that is tied to the number of hours they work, even if they're part time."

Select Benefits breaks away from the mold of the conventional health insurance program, which offers a fixed level of benefits for full-time employees, with premiums normally based on forty-hour work weeks. This traditional coverage is not practical for today's work force, which is filled with employee leasing operations and temporary placement agencies. Employers are left wanting to offer health benefits, but not able to cover monthly premiums and still remain a financially functional business.

Instead, Select Benefits provides coverage with premiums based on the actual number of hours worked by an employee. In offering an hourly premium program, Select Benefits provides part-time employees with coverage they would not normally be eligible for and employers with affordable health benefits for their workers. Select Benefits also offers monthly plans with core benefits and employee buy-up options.

"It has broad appeal to employees because it provides first-dollar benefits," said Talbot. "Most Select Benefits plans are structured to have no deductibles or co-pays. So it's a real benefit to previously uninsured employees."

Additionally, Select Benefits makes it easy for employers to manage their healthcare benefits while maintaining the bottom line. Because Select Benefits is based solely on an hourly rate per employee, the employer does not deal with any number crunching or paperwork at the end of the month. Employers can simply review their workers' time cards to figure out the premiums without administration costs.

"Select Benefits is ideal for employers looking to offer supplemental life and health insurance as a way to retain workers and is open to employers with a minimum of 51 full-time employees," said Ron Braley, assistant vice president, worksite distribution for SAFECO Life & Investments.

The program is geared for industries with a high portion of hourly or part-time employees, including fast food and restaurant franchise operations, data processing, manufacturers, distribution centers, call center operations, computer processing operations, agricultural operations, chain retail operations and employee leasing operations.

Select Benefits is underwritten and insured by SAFECO Life Insurance Company and is available in most states. Offering individual life insurance, group life and disability insurance programs, annuities, mutual funds and retirement plans, SAFECO Life provides a lifetime of quality financial solutions

NEIL FULLER, IR, SAFECO CORPORATION: Good morning everyone and welcome to Safeco's third-quarter call. Copies of our financial supplement, our news release, and access to our 10-Q filing made this morning, which we may refer to during the call, are available at safeco.com/ir. This call is being broadcast live on the same website and it will available as an audio replay. We will also post a transcript later in the week.

We want to thank many of you for visiting us in Seattle on September 27 at our analysts meeting. If you were no able to make it, a video replay and a transcript are available on that same website.

With us on the call this morning are Paula Reynolds, President and CEO; Ross Kari, our Chief Financial Officer; and Mike Hughes, Executive Vice President of Insurance Operations. We also have several members of our senior leadership team here for the question-and-answer session. We will start the call with a discussion of our results for the quarter and then we'll open it up for your questions. We expect the call to last approximately one hour.

Safeco Corp. said yesterday that the company will lay off 1,200 employees, including 250 at its University District corporate headquarters, the latest in a series of aggressive steps that Chief Executive Mike McGavick has taken in his attempt to revive the troubled insurer.
The layoffs, which began yesterday, won't be completed until 2003 and will affect 10 percent of the company's approximately 12,000 employees. The cuts include 450 positions that Safeco said it would slash in April as part of an effort to reorganize its commercial insurance operations.
"From my point of view, there is nothing pleasant in any of this," said McGavick, who looked and sounded weary during an interview in his office yesterday morning. "This company has a proud and long record of being a stable employer, and we want to do this fairly and fast and then let people get on with their lives."
McGavick also announced plans yesterday to overhaul Safeco's personal-insurance operations, which include the company's automobile and struggling homeowner's insurance offerings.
The layoffs and restructuring, including the previously announced consolidation of Safeco's commercial insurance operations, eventually will save the company $100 million a year, McGavick said. The company will take $60 million in restructuring charges in the next two years.
"The savings are significant," said Mike Lewis, an analyst with UBS Warburg in New York. "But they are not going to be fully realized until 2003, which is a somewhat protracted period of time. It's certainly a step in the right direction, and hopefully it will be sufficient, but it's too early to tell."
Changes in the personal-insurance lines, McGavick said, will include the addition of a new automated underwriting system.
Michael LaRocco, who will begin next month as president and chief operating officer for Safeco's personal insurance lines, will play a large role guiding the implementation that system.
The second major change in the personal-insurance operations, McGavick said, is that the company is consolidating its underwriting into its Seattle and Atlanta offices.
Ragen MacKenzie analyst Dan Nelson noted that for years Safeco has tried -- and failed -- to turn around its homeowner's insurance operation. "The realistic efforts that he laid out there just might do it," Nelson said.
McGavick said that the company has lost so much money on under-priced policies in certain markets that the only way to continue to offer those policies is to raise rates by as much as 25 percent to 33 percent in some states. He acknowledged that such steep rate increases might chase away some customers.
"I think the fact that they are willing to lose a fair amount of business to fix this shows that they are pretty serious," Nelson said.
Yesterday's announcements were part of an ongoing recovery plan for Safeco that McGavick has been developing since he arrived in January. McGavick has acted decisively over the past six months, cutting the company's dividend in half, announcing plans to sell off its Safeco Credit Co. subsidiary, and presenting plans for significant restructuring.
While analysts uniformly praise the directness and immediacy of McGavick's efforts to fix the company, many said that they are taking a wait-and-see approach before making a judgment on whether he can save the company.
"You have a very difficult situation here," said UBS Warburg's Lewis, who has a "hold" on the company's stock. "Mike McGavick came in to a company that has severe and deep-seeded problems."
Lewis said that he has to see whether McGavick's efforts have any effect on the company's underwriting before he can make a decision about the future of Safeco and its stock.

SAFECO strengthens America's Neighborhoods through strategic grant making, employee volunteerism and developing consumer education around loss prevention and financial education. Founded in 1923 as the General Insurance Company of America, SAFECO has grown to become the premier company selling insurance and financial products through independent insurance agents and financial advisors nationwide. SAFECO offers a comprehensive mix of products that help individuals, organizations, and companies protect the things they value and profit from financial opportunities
 
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