Two Boston, Mass.-based advisory and research firms for the insurance industry are now one. Aite Group and Novarica Inc. said they have merged to create Aite-Novarica Group.

The move comes with an investment by Pamlico Capital, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based private equity firm. Pamlico became the majority owner in May and is providing growth capital.

Terms were not disclosed.

Advisory business veteran Kurt Reisenberg has joined Aite-Novarica as its new chief executive officer. Reisenberg was with Corporate Executive Board (CEB) for 23 years and then spent two years at Gartner, after Gartner acquired CEB in 2017.

Reisenberg had identified both Aite and Novarica as investments for Pamlico, according to the private equity firm.

“We have a tremendous opportunity to leverage our subject-matter experts’ hundreds of years of collective industry experience to advise financial services executives on their most critical decisions,” said Reisenberg.

Matthew Josefowicz, founder and former CEO of Novarica, is now head of Research Councils, while Sang Lee, a co-founder and former Aite CEO, is now head of Products and Strategy, for Aite-Novarica Group.

The combined firm will help executives from insurers and other financial services firms and their service providers respond to technology, market, operations and regulatory changes.

“Joining forces with Novarica and partnering with Pamlico to further accelerate our growth trajectory is a natural next step as we seek to continually find ways to better serve our clients,” said Frank Rizza, co-head of sales at the new combined firm and a co-founder of Aite Group, when the Pamilco deal was announced.

“This move will allow our team to continue to serve our insurer clients as we always have, while broadening our offerings to include additional services on cybersecurity, fraud/AML, payments, and other areas. Aite’s insurance analysts will be joining our practice, and we’ll also have new colleagues in banking, wealth management, institutional securities, and other areas of financial services that are increasingly relevant to insurers,” wrote Josefowicz in a blog post.

The combined firm has more than 70 analysts, advisors, and consultants in North America and Europe, with expertise across banking, payments, insurance, and investments. It has a library of more than 3,000 reports covering the last 16 years of financial services technology innovations and analyses of financial services vendors.

Lee said the firm will be looking to add more staff and launch more products and services over the next year.

*This story ran previously in our sister publication Insurance Journal.