Jo Sykes: Markel UK devises five pillar plan to become ‘more relevant’ for brokers

When Jo Sykes – broker divisional director at Markel UK – joined the specialist insurer in January 2024 from Axa, she did not have long to get her feet under the table before she was tasked with composing the company’s next five-year strategic plan, which had to sit in alignment with the aspirations of international parent firm Markel Group.

After four months of learning the ropes of her new job role and then a subsequent six-month stint of researching market and broker feedback, devising strategic priority points and communicating internally with the UK business’ 500 employees, Sykes was ready to implement her finalised five-year plan – called Ambition 2030 – from March 2025.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times, Sykes explains that prior to her joining Markel, the global business achieved its previous goal of doubling its size. And, for the next five-year period to 2030, this mantra is once again fuelling the group’s objectives as it hopes to again improve gross written premium (GWP) – from $2.5bn (£1.9bn) to $5bn (£3.8bn) – over this next strategic cycle.

This GWP amount relates to Markel Group’s business outside of the US and Australia. In terms of the UK contribution to this total, both its retail and wholesale divisions are included in the tally up.

Although Sykes declines to reveal the exact GWP amount that pertains to the UK’s portion of the group’s overarching target, she does, however, detail the key business areas that Markel UK will seek to develop over the next five years in order to support the global organisation in realising its growth trajectory.

“We have ambitions to grow our international business double again,” Sykes says. “So, there’s a theme. We describe it as we’ve just finished a half marathon and then we’re going to have to go for the full marathon [next].”

Five ways to boost relevancy

Sykes explains that conversations with Markel UK’s broker partners during her research phase revealed a common trend that has formed the central axis of Ambition 2030 – that brokers want the insurer “to be more relevant” so that they can place more business together.

With this in mind, Sykes has ringfenced five strategic pillars that Markel UK will be developing and building upon over the next five years, to help it achieve this aim.

One of these pillars is schemes – an area Sykes already describes as “super successful” and making up “about a quarter of our income at the moment”, however she expects further work in this vertical will amount to a chunky “third of that growth ambition”.

Spearheading this activity is the newly promoted Mike Petchey, who became Markel UK’s head of schemes development in May 2025. He will be supported by a new hire from Hiscox, who will be taking on the role of schemes operations manager – this appointee has yet to join the business at the time of writing, but Sykes confirms that Markel UK’s schemes team will receive two new joiners in June 2025.

Sykes explains that Markel UK’s schemes wheelhouse is typically “liability led” and “long tail” business, which she feels is “quite unusual” compared to rival insurers – however, she adds that the firm is now “fairly open” to embracing new specialisms supplemented by brokers, to help broaden its schemes footprint.

She continues: “One of the things we’re trying to challenge ourselves with is we don’t just want to underwrite the specialist products that we’ve got because we’re specialists in that already. [We want to find] areas where brokers have true expertise and [bring] together our specialism [and] their specialism.

“We’ve not got a specific trade list that we’ll be going out with. We’re really open minded because we want to grow and learn from different areas.

“We just want to build on [our schemes proposition] now because we acknowledge that it’s another distribution angle we can grow. We feel that we could really add value in that space.”

As well as looking at new scheme opportunities, Markel UK also plans to launch two new standalone products in 2025 – another pillar of Sykes’ plan. Although Insurance Times is unable to reveal the precise products at the time of writing, the premise is about bringing the insurer’s London wholesale expertise to the regions.

Digital trading developments

The third component that Sykes believes will fuel Markel UK’s growth is a more structured strategy around eTrading. Currently, the business trades a professional indemnity (PI) product and small legal expenses product via software house Acturis. The insurer first started eTrading back in April 2008.

In Insurance Times’ Five Star Rating Report: eTrading 2025, published in May 2025, Markel UK did not rank among the nine insurers featured in the ‘insurer via platforms’ category.

The company operates its own extranet as well, called Markel Online. In Insurance Times’ report, broker respondents awarded Markel Online three out of five stars, ranking it in ninth place out of a field of 12 insurer extranets.

This humble positioning is something Sykes wants to address.

Firstly, Sykes kickstarted a team restructure of the broker channel leadership team last October, splitting out divisions on open market trading, schemes and digital trading.

She next appointed Nicola Cunliffe in March 2025 as head of UK trading, whose role is designed to support omnichannel broker trading and relationships.

She has then worked with her team to make a contractors combined product available via Acturis from this month (June 2025) – she has visions of adding numerous products to this distribution route over 2025, including a charities product and terrorism cover. Directors’ and officers’ insurance would then hopefully be available from 2026, she notes.

Sykes additionally plans that as Markel UK’s products become available on Acturis, they will also be evident via Markel Online. For her, it is vital that all of Markel UK’s products that are available on the “open market” will also be accessible digitally with “consistent” wordings, to provide an “end to end experience” for brokers.

“Acturis gives us scale and volume to start with, but we absolutely will maintain and develop our own extranet as well,” she says. “We’re also looking at that application programming interface (API) capability for other software suppliers as well.

“We’re seeing a lot of brokers developing their own digitally traded platforms, so we have to be set up in a way that we can API into those, [giving] us capability to offer our products [via] all those distribution methods.”

Sykes adds that she will expand Markel UK’s Birmingham-based digital team as the eTrading offering grows over the course of Ambition 2030.

Regional reach

The final two components of Sykes’ plan revolve around broadening the insurer’s regional distribution footprint and empowering underwriters to be local decision-makers, helped by back office technology and artificial intelligence (AI).

Sykes admits that Markel UK has “really low market share in a number of those broad regional players”, so she is focused on getting “boots on the ground”.

She continues: “We’re well underway with that. We [have] recruited five new distribution, sales, development people that have joined us from a variety of different insurers.”

This recruitment drive is also furnishing the insurer’s core underwriting team, with new development underwriter hires in both Bristol and Glasgow since the launch of Ambition 2030.

As for tapping into AI, Sykes gives the example of how Markel UK’s underwriters use submission ingestion technology to boost “operational efficiency”. In use for the past two and a half years, this AI digitises broker submissions and presents it in an easy to understand way to underwriters.

Sykes says: “We’ve started to utilise [AI] behind the scenes. It’s skilling the underwriter, but also enhancing our view of the risk as well.

“We call it marginal gains. How do you make those marginal gains make underwriters’ lives easier and trading with brokers easier? That’s a key strand that has started and will continue to develop.”

People-centric performance

In terms of how Sykes plans to measure the success of Markel UK’s Ambition 2030 strategy over the next five years, she is very much focused on qualitative feedback and staff achievements rather than cold, hard number crunching.

“A lot of the metrics are very much around the service that we provide and the claim service that we provide,” she explains.

“We’re selling a promise. Ultimately, that’s the most important thing. We’ve got an absolute stellar track record in our claims team, staffed by very qualified lawyers, and the feedback that we get on that is excellent.”

Typifying this approach for Markel UK is its performance at 2024’s Insurance Times Awards last December, where it took home gold prizes in the Excellence in Risk Management and Specialist Insurer of the Year categories.

“That was such a special moment,” Sykes enthuses.

“That typifies what we’re all about because a key part of delivering this [strategy] is the people that we have and maintaining that family orientated culture that we have.

“We’re not trying to be a big composite. We’re going to maintain that specialist approach. That is something that is taken very seriously. We work really hard at recognising employees – reward and recognition is so big for us.

“The financials will deliver themselves if you’ve got the right team in place. That’s the most important thing for me. It’s recruiting and promoting people who live and breathe our values and want to come on this exciting journey that we’re on for the next five years.”