Top 50 Brokers: Consolidators double down on M&A integration for 2025

This month (December 2025), Insurance Times published its annual Top 50 Brokers report for 2025 – an exclusive ranking of UK general insurance (UKGI) brokers based on revenue, delivered in collaboration with advisory firm MarshBerry.

Last year’s Top 50 Brokers report pinpointed a pivotal moment in the ranking’s history, with heavy global M&A appetite – showcased by both UK firms buying in Europe and US businesses or private equity investing in the UK – contributing to Howden Group knocking long-standing frontrunner Marsh off the top spot, as well as influencing a number of other position swaps throughout the final table.

Acquisitional appetite continues to impact the Top 50 Brokers list this year too – but in quite a different way.

For the first time since this report initially launched back in 2002, all brokers that featured in the top 10 of the list last year have remained in exactly the same spot for 2025.

To my mind, there are a couple of drivers behind this.

Firstly, M&A in 2024 created a vast amount of growth for UKGI brokers – 2024’s Top 50 Brokers report, for example, confirmed that acquisitional growth fast outpaced organic growth across that year’s cohort.

This meant that as 2025 rolled around, larger consolidators had some heavy integration work to carry out in order to fully embed new purchases within their operational and business structures.

The knock-on effect of this is that attention was diverted from pure M&A volume to instead be split between finding perhaps larger, but fewer, deals alongside integration efforts.

A prime example here is Brown and Brown Europe, which launched its integration focused One Retail strategy in April 2024.

The broker’s UK retail chief executive, Carolyn Callan, told Insurance Times in January 2025 that One Retail was very much centred on fully embedding Brown and Brown’s acquired companies to better promote “being one business and being able to show our full shop window to a customer”.

This year’s Top 50 Brokers figures also support this hypothesis, with four firms excluded from the 2025 ranking compared with 2024 because they have been acquired by a business in the top 15 of this list.

The second likely driver of 2025’s stationary top 10 is by now a familiar rhetoric for UKGI – M&A has hollowed out the broking mid-market, leaving only small startup brokers or large broker consolidators on the M&A table.

In fact, market whisperings heard by Insurance Times indicate that broker consolidators are already taking stock and considering their future options now that acquisition targets of a certain scale have diluted – which could include initiating an initial public offering (IPO) process, for example.

This year’s Top 50 Brokers report showcases that top 10 consolidators are shoring up their M&A purchases. This suggests that 2026’s list will be very telling in terms of which strategies are adopted by the UK’s brokers – will they resume the M&A hamster wheel once new buys are sufficiently embedded or will IPOs impact broker standings? Let’s see.