Ant Middle: Organic growth focused plan seeks to put Ageas UK top of the personal lines pile

For Ant Middle, chief executive at Ageas UK, 2025 marks the specialist personal lines insurer’s second stage of evolution.

Its first foray of transformation kicked off in April 2021 as Ageas UK undertook a four-year strategy to hone its craft as a solely personal lines, intermediated business shortly after Middle took up the reins of the UK arm in June 2020 from Andy Watson.

To all intents and purposes, this strategy has seemingly paid off, with Ageas UK winning the Personal Lines Insurer of the Year accolade for the past two years at the annual Insurance Times Awards in December.

Equally, the insurer climbed three places in Insurance Times’ Top 50 Insurers 2024 report, published in October 2024, to rank in 20th place with gross written premium (GWP) of £1,292m and a combined operating ratio (COR) of 92.7% – a steep improvement versus 2023’s unprofitable COR of 106.4%, according to market intelligence provider Insurance DataLab.

With this initial strategic plan reaching its conclusion in December 2024, January this year saw Ageas UK launch the next phase of its development journey with the introduction of its three-year Elevate UK strategy – a country specific version of the Belgium-based insurance group’s Elevate 27 plan.

The main thrust of Elevate UK, Middle tells Insurance Times, is to action the insurer’s “sensible ambition” to “become one of the top three players in UK personal lines” by leveraging and focusing on organic growth – despite the ongoing “market speculation” that Ageas UK is eyeing up rival firm Esure in a bid for acquisitional growth after being denied the Direct Line Group takeover opportunity last year.

Middle explains: “As we exited 2024, [we were] really pleased with the progress we had made. We are the focused business we intended to be. We have got the capabilities in place that we wanted there to be. But that isn’t the end of the ambition, or anything like it. We’re just getting started.

“Elevate UK is about continuing to do the things that we have done so well over the last few years, making sure that we continue to develop those capabilities, but raising the level of ambition. I think we have earned the right to think bigger as a business.

“So, encapsulating all of that for the Elevate UK strategy is a longer-term vision that we would love to become one of the top three players in UK personal lines.”

In terms of what being a “top three player” means, Middle describes this as referring to the business’ scale, as well as its customer service standard for direct customers, brokers and shareholders. Excelling in personal lines is also linked to staff retention and development, he adds.

However, despite being keen to muscle in on the market position of firms such as Allianz, Middle says Ageas UK has no set time frame around achieving its ambition to be a top three player, nor a specific GWP target that aligns with this aim.

The insurer also does not have an organic growth percentage it hopes to achieve in line with Elevate UK’s progression. Middle continues: “The Ageas full-year results for 2024 showed that inflows to the UK business grew by 21% to €1,848m. This growth was completely organic, delivered by our technical pricing agility, discipline and operational efficiency.

“We cannot offer a forward looking forecast, but can say that our ambition to elevate the performance of the UK is focused on organic growth, with of course the optionality of M&A.”

For Middle, the “exciting ambition” of being a top three personal lines player is very much a long-term vision that he hopes the business internally and its broker partners will buy into – regardless of when it comes to fruition.

Broker-based growth

Middle explains that there are three key drivers of organic growth that Ageas UK will look to ignite in order to achieve its UK personal lines podium finish.

Firstly, the insurer plans to “extend our competitive footprint” by building out its home and motor product propositions. This is “about taking adjacent steps from the footprint where we’ve already got lots of data to learn how to win and be competitive profitably” for a larger customer pool.

Middle gives the example of Ageas UK being a strong provider of motor insurance to more senior drivers that own older vehicles – a “bias” that has been further cemented since the insurer’s partnership deal with Saga in December 2024. But, moving forward, Ageas UK would like to win more business from younger drivers that have bought newer cars, for example.

“We think the opportunity for growth there is significant,” Middle adds.

Ageas UK’s second driver of organic growth is “a continued commitment” to broker partners. Middle says this ethos has “been the bedrock of our business for a long time” and “will continue to be a massive part of what we want to achieve over the next three years”.

To demonstrate and solidify this commitment, Middle promoted his former chief distribution officer Adam Beckett to managing director of broker and partnerships in December 2024, in preparation for the launch of Elevate UK.

In this role, Beckett has a new profit and loss responsibility, as well as “the total management of our broker franchise”. Ageas UK has relationships with around 2,000 UK-based brokers.

Middle continues: “[The] broker and partnerships business is 80% of everything that we do in [the] UK. That is our heartland, that is the lifeblood of our business.

“Beckett will be dedicated to making sure that we continue to serve that breadth of brokers. We’re developing our proposition for them and continuing to invest in making sure that we are the first port of call for brokers in personal lines.”

AI powered

The third organic growth lever that Middle wants to activate is around Ageas UK’s continued investment in data and artificial intelligence (AI), which is geared towards making more than 2,000 UK employees’ “jobs more effective” and helping them to “deploy their expertise to a greater extent, not doing the admin tasks and better able to serve our customers and brokers”.

AI has been a recurring strategic focus for Ageas UK – for example, two and a half years ago, it introduced “fraud tools enriched by large language models and AI” that were designed to detect identity (ID) fraud and theft, as well as spot “better synthetic IDs”.

Since the launch of these tools, Ageas UK has been able to generate “£6m in terms of benefit to the to the business”, Middle confirms.

So far in 2025, the insurer’s focus on AI has seen the launch of a new “claims summarisation assistant” in February, which has been rolled out to around 300 of Ageas UK’s claims handlers following a three-month pilot with 30 claims handlers.

Middle says that even in the short time since the summarisation assistant has been live, it has managed to save claims handlers on average two minutes per call, compared to calls typically lasting 10 minutes each before the tool’s introduction.

“We’ve rolled out at scale a summarisation tool that effectively gives a snapshot instantaneously to our claims handlers, [including] a sharp summary of the status of the claim,” Middle explains.

“They can then prompt specific queries and [the tool] will instantaneously give them a summary of particular elements of that claim, which means their job is much more interesting.

“They’re not doing the reading – they’re deploying their expertise more of the time. The customer experience is a lot better.”

For Middle, what is central to Ageas UK’s AI focus is the fact that it is driven by staff feedback – the idea for the claims summarisation tool, for example, came from an employee workshop the insurer held six months ago.

He adds: “It’s that people driven pipeline of opportunities that we are working through, so meeting the demands of our people to help them, to help our customers and our brokers appears to be a smart way of working through the opportunity that AI brings to our business and making sure all of our people are involved.”

The year ahead

Although Elevate UK is a three-year plan, Middle has some clear agenda items he is keen to check off his to-do list this year.

First and foremost is delivering the insurer’s new core insurance platform, delivered by software as a service firm EIS, by the end of summer 2025.

Second is successfully completing the acquisition and partnership arrangement with Saga.

This agreement includes Ageas UK’s purchase of underwriting business Acromas Insurance Company, which the insurer hopes to complete by the end of summer, as well as establishing a 20-year partnership to provide motor and home insurance products for Saga’s UK customer base. Ageas UK is aiming to launch this by the end of 2025.

Thirdly, Middle wants to continue investing in Ageas UK’s capabilities in areas such as claims, AI, underwriting and its technology infrastructure.

He says: “We will keep investing in the things that will make us great, make us competitive, make sure that we can perform.”