Britain's Prudential in AIA bid

LONDON : British insurer Prudential is in talks to buy AIA, the Asian arm of US giant AIG, for 25 billion dollars, Sky News television reported Saturday.

Prudential "is in talks about a takeover that would be one of the biggest-ever foreign acquisitions made by a British company", the channel said.

The insurer had been examining a range of options for the deal which could cost it about 25 billion dollars (18.4 billion euros)", the report said.

questions:

1) how will this merger and acquistion affect consumers?

2) are the costs heavier for the management? in terms of human resource reallocation, retrenchment, change of management systems??

this is an example of horizontal integration. click to read up more on it. :)