Four years ago Clive Cowdery’s Resolution was an upstart entrant to the market for closed life insurance funds that had promised much but had yet to deliver.

Two transformational acquisitions later and the man who set up Resolution in 2003 with £500,000 of his own money is running a £4.3 billion FTSE 100 giant and sitting on a share-based fortune estimated at nearly £130 million.

Merging with Britannic in 2005 and paying £3.6 billion to buy Abbey National’s closed life funds last year doubled the size of the group. They helped to spur its move to chase deals with companies that write new policies as well as operating closed funds of life assurance policies.

Resolution may be the dominant force in any merger deal struck with Friends Provident, but it is the smaller of the operations. Resolution employs about 3,500 staff, with about 2,000 poised to transfer to Capita under an outsourcing arrangement struck this year. It serves seven million customers and manages assets worth more than £60 billion.

Friends Provident has about 5,000 staff and 2.5 million life and pensions policyholders. F&C, the asset manager it controls, manages assets of more than £100 billion. Culturally, the combination will be intriguing. Mr Cowdery cultivates the reputation of an entrepreneurial start-up, and Friends is steeped in its history as a former mutual. Friends was founded in Yorkshire in 1832 to sell life assurance policies to Quakers, or members of the Society of Friends.

It hauled itself through demutualisation and listed its shares on the stock market in 2001. Simultaneously, the company joined the FTSE 100 and assumed a near-cult status as a potential takeover target. Speculation that a UK or continental insurer might table a formal bid heightened this year when Friends acknowledged that its target of achieving up to £200 million of new business profits by the end of next year would be challenging.

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