Biba 2025: Reciprocity between brokers, insurers, reinsurers and MGAs key to increasing capacity

Insurers, reinsurers, brokers and MGAs need to become more collaborative in order to maximise capacity in the insurance industry and avoid systemic issues taking root.

That was according to MGA Pen Underwriting’s chief executive Tom Downey, who spoke on 14 May 2025 at the Biba Conference in a seminar entitled Insurance Capacity for the New Era.

Downey explained: “Our job as an industry is to make UK plc work and look after customers. We sometimes get stuck on our own pathways and we don’t solve the problem that’s in front of us.

“There’s a lot of excess capital flowing around. Why don’t we take some of that capital and create something. [Let’s] all work together to solve for the customers.”

Important partners

Michelle Taylor, broker distribution director at Aviva, agreed that working with MGAs was an important route to increasing coverage.

Taylor explained: “Where we do [business] really well, why would we ask someone to do it for us? Well actually, where there’s absolute specialisms, or where there’s different distribution that maybe we can’t access or be as quick to, then we would be open to supporting MGAs. Absolutely we would.”

Michael Gregory, director of underwriting strategy at RSA, explained that reinsurers are also a pivotal part of the supply chain in providing capacity to insurers.

Gregory said: “We have to start with, ‘where does insurer capacity come from’ and, in most cases, it comes from the reinsurance market.

“I’m really optimistic that if we can work with reinsurers, from an insurer capacity point of view, to say this risk is coverable, and here are the reasons why, and here is the data to support that. 

“Then that’s a more conducive conversation to us then being able to widen our appetite, provide new products and perhaps go into non-standard risk.”