Michelle Taylor: New role provides opportunity to ‘draw the dots’ and fill Aviva’s distribution strategy gaps

At trade body Biba’s 2025 conference last month (14 and 15 May 2025), Aviva’s bright yellow stand was buzzing with brokers wanting to speak to the firm’s distribution team.

The 70-odd insurer staff in attendance, meanwhile, were adamantly banging the drum that UK general insurance “is a people industry” where “relationships are absolutely key” – this mantra ultimately underpins Aviva’s distribution strategy, which is centred on “visibility, execution [and] responsiveness”.

Leading this ethos from the front is the insurer’s impassioned broker distribution director, Michelle Taylor.

“In terms of visibility, personal relationships are really, really key. Don’t underestimate that,” Taylor tells Insurance Times.

“We talk about artificial intelligence (AI) all the time, but we want better AI to make us more efficient, so we [can] get out and have better relationships and better conversations.

“We want partnerships where [Aviva and its broker partners can] challenge each other all the time. We can’t do that if you’re not having a conversation with someone.

“We want brokers to come and tell us if we’re not showing up, but [also] tell us what we’re doing great as well so we can do more of that. People [are] the key.”

Part of the club

Taylor has been in situ at Aviva since December 2023, when she followed former Zurich colleague and boss David Martin across the Square Mile to join Aviva’s ranks, becoming the firm’s director of strategic accounts. In this role, she was tasked with looking after the company’s 27 key broker partnerships.

Taylor’s oversight of Aviva’s broker network broadened in September 2024, however, when she was promoted to broker distribution director after commercial claims director Kelly Whittington’s maternity leave gave the insurer an opportunity for a leadership reshuffle and a strategic rethink.

In her new, expanded position, Taylor steers Aviva’s new business and bid and deal management teams, as well as continues to handle those key strategic broker accounts. She has 130 Aviva staffers reporting in to her, which includes 12 strategic account managers.

Taylor says she is “very happy” with the role change and that it makes her “a very busy girl”.

However, the main advantage of overseeing the entirety of Aviva’s distribution portfolio is that this enables Taylor “to pull it together top to bottom”, helping to “draw the dots up of where we’ve got gaps”, she explains.

For instance, a broker may have a presence in two different regions, but rather than treating the business as one company with two operating sites, Aviva has historically been treating each location as a separate broker.

“Before, I think we were probably a little bit siloed in terms of our approach to distribution,” she confesses.

For Taylor, there are two main areas she wants to finesse within Aviva’s distribution strategy – its Club 110 proposition and the brokers this includes, plus the impact of broker consolidation on distribution relationships.

In terms of Club 110, this was founded in 2007 as an invitation only proposition designed to support the regional independent brokers that Aviva identified as its most valuable partners in the UK.

The proposition provides these brokers with access to enhanced services and benefits – such as marketing resources or compliance assistance, for example – to help these firms grow. Currently, Aviva has around 200 Club 110 members.

Taylor wants to make Club 110 more accessible and broaden the pool of brokers that can take advantage of its exclusive services.

She explains: “Some brokers think we’re obsessed with Club 110. We’re not – we’re obsessed with all brokers. We want all brokers to be successful and have the right access into our business.

“[To join Club 110 currently, brokers] have to get to a certain size [and] a certain level. We’ve got [a] great proposition there, but actually, some brokers [could] benefit [from the club’s services] a bit earlier in their [growth] journey. There’s some really amazing brokers that would really like to work with us at an earlier point in their journey.

“I expect we’re not going to come out and do anything dramatic, but I see [that we will probably] be less rigid in terms of entry level [to Club 110] and challenging ourselves [whether it is] still relevant anymore.”

Post-consolidation contact

The second area Taylor is cognisant of is the impact of broker consolidation on distribution relationships – for example, when regional, independent brokers are bought by one of Aviva’s 27 strategic account partner brokers.

She explains that some of these firms are themselves “huge businesses” that now just happen to be part of “global brokers”, so the challenge has been ensuring that acquired organisations still enjoy a high quality trading relationship with Aviva, despite their change in ownership and an almost automatic levelling up into this strategic account bracket.

Taylor describes the insurer’s strategic broker partners as being “multiregion, multiclass, complex [businesses that are] across every single bit of our chain”.

To manage this type of M&A movement, “you have to change your tack in terms of approach,” Taylor says.

She continues: “We will constantly look at if [a broker gets] acquired, have we got the right relationship management? Have we got the right contacts? We’re constantly having to revisit our contact plans, our strategies.

“I think a lot of [regional brokers] will get acquired for many, many reasons, but I think they quite like the power of that big brand [they can tap into post-acquisition]. How do we make those brokers feel as important when they get bought by a bigger [broker]?”

Taylor recognises that this is a topic Aviva has to keep its finger on the pulse of because broker consolidation “doesn’t seem to be slowing down”.

She adds: “We are seeing quite a rise in terms of appointed representatives (ARs) and those models. We’ve seen quite dramatic growth in that percentage of brokers falling out of big, large corporate brokers and wanting to set up on their own. We’re then seeing them find another route into market.

“We’re looking at how [to approach] ARs. How do we manage those relationships better and differently? We partner with quite a few of those. We’ve definitely seen an upward trend in that.”

Aviva currently partners with AR networks Movo Partnership and Eleven Network.

‘Let’s do better together’

While fleshing out these strategic considerations, Taylor has had a busy 2025 so far.

For example, Aviva introduced a new Salesforce system across its distribution team at the start of the year to help provide greater transparency around the frequency of broker visits, as well as to log conversations.

There is also Taylor’s hectic schedule of visiting Aviva’s regional teams and the insurer’s recent investment in personal lines broking – evidenced by its purchase of Direct Line Group, which was announced in December 2024 and is expected to complete by H2 2025.

Furthermore, the development of technology in Aviva’s mid-market team is also ongoing, Taylor notes.

She continues: “At some point, we’re going to know where every single quote is in our business and how quickly we’ve responded to it. Then we can start to play that back to our brokers.

“Our biggest thing is using some of the data that we’ve got in a better way, to lean into our relationships and say ‘let’s do better together’.”