Finance History | 28 Liberty Street — Fortis Sold Eighty Million Shares and Kept the Rest

People treat Assurant as an Atlanta specialty writer that replaced a social-media name in the S and P 500.

The listed company was a Dutch-Belgian parent's American book, sold from a downtown New York floor.

On 4 February 2004 Fortis, Inc., a Nevada corporation at One Chase Manhattan Plaza, merged into a new Delaware shell named Assurant, Inc. The next morning the stock opened on the New York Stock Exchange as AIZ.

Fortis priced 80 million shares at 22 dollars each, the top of a 20-to-22 dollar range. Gross proceeds were 1.76 billion dollars in 2004 currency. The money went to Fortis Insurance N.V., not into Assurant's own accounts.

MarketWatch recorded an opening print of 23.75 dollars and a first-day close of 24.70 dollars on volume of 27.6 million shares. Insurance Journal, writing after Friday's session, put the close at 24.85 dollars.

The SEC filings are exact on the leftover stake. After the sale Fortis still held about 35 percent, or 50,199,130 shares, and two of five board seats.

Assurant later issued about 1 billion dollars of debt and, on 20 January 2005, Fortis sold another 27.2 million shares. That secondary finished the separation.

The mechanism is a parent cashing a specialty-insurance subsidiary through a primary listing while the operating company keeps writing policies. The ticker is new. The book is not.

One Chase Manhattan Plaza is now 28 Liberty Street. The pin is the public plaza at the tower's foot, not a trading floor.

Photo: Arild Vågen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street, where AIZ listed.