USI Brand Guidelines: A 1994 Broker, the USI ONE Platform & a Pending Aon Deal

A broker assembled from local agencies.

USI says it began in 1994 with a single office and 40 associates. Insurance Journal, reporting in November 2012, also gives 1994 as the founding year; it described the firm at that time as a broker based in Briarcliff Manor, New York, with more than 3,300 employees in some 100 offices across the country, and cited the ratings agency A.M. Best as ranking it among the ten largest insurance brokerages in the United States. Today the company’s website gives its headquarters as Valhalla, New York, and presents USI Insurance Services as an insurance brokerage and consulting firm.

The firm grew by buying local agencies. USI says that, through the agencies it has acquired, it has more than 150 years of consulting and brokerage experience, with local offices that go back in their communities as far as the late 1800s. Insurance Journal reported in 2012 that USI had bought some 30 firms since 2007, most recently the U.S. insurance subsidiary of TD Bank in September 2012. The company now says it has nearly 200 offices, a figure the same magazine repeated in August 2026.

The company also gives its own initials a meaning. USI says the three letters stand for Understand, Service and Innovate: understanding the needs of each client, giving a local service, and innovating with new solutions so that clients can keep investing and growing. It describes its work in four broad areas — property and casualty, employee benefits, personal risk and retirement — and says it has served more than 500,000 clients across the United States.

Goldman, Onex, KKR and CDPQ — and Aon.

USI’s ownership has passed between private-equity investors. Insurance Journal reported in 2012 that GS Capital Partners, the private-equity fund of Goldman Sachs, had bought USI in 2007. In November 2012 the Toronto firm Onex agreed to buy USI from that fund, and on 27 December 2012 the magazine reported the deal completed, with Onex, its Onex Partners III fund and USI employees owning all of the company. Mike Sicard was then USI’s chairman, president and chief executive, the magazine reported, and he still leads the firm.

In March 2017 KKR and the Canadian pension investor Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) announced a joint purchase of USI from Onex, as partners with equal ownership, Insurance Journal reported on 17 March 2017. At that point USI had more than 4,400 professionals in 140 offices, the magazine said. In June 2018 Insurance Journal confirmed that Onex had sold USI to KKR and CDPQ in 2017. According to a Reuters report carried by Insurance Journal in August 2026, KKR invested further in USI in 2023 and became its largest shareholder.

The most recent change is not complete. On 31 August 2026 Aon confirmed a definitive agreement to buy USI from KKR, Insurance Journal reported. Aon said the purchase would build on its 2024 acquisition of NFP in the U.S. middle market, that the boards of both companies had approved it, and that the two brokers would continue to operate separately until closing, which it expected in the fourth quarter of 2026. Aon also said Sicard would become president of Aon and global chief executive of its Middle Market business once the deal closed. The purchase was agreed in August 2026 and not completed at the time of writing; until it closes, USI remains a separate company owned by KKR and its fellow investors.

How brokers present themselves.

An insurance broker has no product to photograph. It sells advice and access: it places cover with insurers on a client’s behalf, and it is paid for judgement and relationships rather than for anything a customer can hold. So brokers present themselves largely through people and expertise. Their websites lean on portraits of client advisers and specialist teams, and on named leaders who speak for the firm in the trade press.

Expertise is shown through publishing. Brokers issue risk-management reports, market outlooks and webinars on subjects such as cyber exposure, property values or employee benefits, and many organise their sites around industry practices, from construction and aviation to healthcare and sport, and around capabilities such as casualty, financial lines or private client. Howden’s US website, for example, is laid out by industries and capabilities in this way.

Scale is shown through maps and counts. Office networks spread across countries are a common feature, and so are round numbers of locations and people: Brown & Brown’s website gives a count of more than 700 locations and about 23,000 people. In a sector that has grown through consolidation, acquisitions announcements are a regular part of a broker’s news page, and the dates of agreement and completion are often months apart.

The rest of the presentation is about belonging. Brokers sponsor sport, the arts and community causes, run charitable foundations, and give recruiting pages much of the weight, because the people are the offer. This guide sets out what can be checked about each firm — who founded it, who owns it now and from when — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Initials and one capitalised word.

The clearest piece of USI’s own vocabulary is USI ONE, which the company presents as its way of working with clients and marks as a registered name. USI says ONE stands for Omni, Network and Enterprise: Omni, which it calls its “Omni Knowledge Engine,” a solutions platform built in-house by its own specialists; a Network of local and national resources; and an Enterprise planning process for each client. The Reuters report carried by Insurance Journal in August 2026 described the USI ONE analytics platform as something Aon clearly wanted, and quoted Aon’s chief executive on what the combined platforms would offer.

The same word runs through the rest of the website. Its “About” section is titled The Power of ONE, and USI says that its ability to bring solutions to clients and communities comes from the collective knowledge of its professionals “coming together as ONE.” Alongside that sit pages for industry practices from aviation and construction to higher education and public entities, annual market-outlook reports for property and casualty and for employee benefits, a set of benefits benchmarking results, natural-disaster resources, an office locator and a “USI in the News” page.

For a design guide, USI shows how a set of initials can be given a meaning of its own, and how a single capitalised word can carry a firm’s pitch from its “About” pages to its client platform. Compare Aon, which has agreed to buy it, and NFP, Aon’s 2024 middle-market purchase. For this guide we use a deep navy, a clear mid blue and a warm grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep USI’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.