Biba 2026: Pen Underwriting seeking continued product expansion in a ‘topsy turvy market’ – Tom Downey

Gallagher-owned MGA Pen Underwriting is committed to continue expanding its product lines and customer numbers in the UK insurance market despite currently operating in a “soft, topsy turvy and little bit chaotic market”. 

That is according to Pen Underwriting UK chief executive Tom Downey, who spoke to Insurance Times at last week’s Biba conference in Manchester (13-14 May 2026) on the firm’s priorities.

He explained: “We’re trading in a difficult market, but brokers’ have just got to look after their customers and our job is to help them do that by finding solutions.

”We talk to them a lot about what products they would like Pen to build out where they are seeing challenges, or if they have a niche where they believe that we can help, because there’s no point in us launching a product when nobody wants it.”

Downey said that recent launches of university business and anaerobic digestion insurance products last year, and mid-market professional indemnity in March this year, had illustrated the strength of this information-based approach.

“It’s about expanding our product range and then looking at new products and sectors further down the line that might be available. For example, we’re one of the marine war underwriters but we don’t do cargo, so we’re starting to think about that and building out our marine expertise.” 

Modular business

Having grown in scale to become one of the UK’s largest MGAs with over £1bn worth of gross written premium, Pen Underwriting is cautious to retain the responsive, adaptable capabilities associated with the MGA sector while growing further, chasing its £1.75bn GWP target and expanding the product range.

Downey says this focus is “something I try to hold on to dearly” and is helped by the way the business is structured, with management “letting our teams say what they need”. 

Each sector specialism is run to focus on its own area with the backing of central management, allowing teams to remain lean and responsive.

“Our teams are closer to the brokers and closer to the customers, so they know what they need to do,” Downey explains.

“But with scale comes the ability to invest more into our insurer hosted pricing for home insurance and eTrading, for example. 

“It’s about being able take all of that investment without losing any flexibility and not becoming bureaucratic. Modular is a great word to descibe it, because we sell, manufacture and distribute products, that’s our strength.

”Our teams are full of expertise and understand their markets, so they might build out into an adjacent line but each team will remain focused on the core. If we bring in something new then we create a new team, create a new product specification, sector specialism and that’s the modularity, which is the right word for our business.”

Share of wallet

Despite it’s size, Pen’s MGA structure means that focus on both new products and growth are dependent on reliable capacity provided by insurers, which Downey said made positive relationships essential. 

He explained: “What I won’t allow us to do is go off and do things without consulting our capacity partners, because that would not be collaborative or consultative and wouldn’t be partnership.

“That’s one of the things that has historically gone wrong with the MGA sector. We don’t want to compete with the top 10 insurers because they already do things really well, our job is to think about finding niches and building those out.” 

Supplementing the areas that the existing insurer market already serves is another way that Downey believes the MGA sector can grow as a whole.

He finished: ”In the medium term there’s going to be a shift in the insurance industry and MGAs will play a part in that. We’ve been the challenger marker and we want to remain in that space.

“Where MGAs are roughly 10% of the UK insurance industry, we are thinking about taking that to 20% – whether that’s in seven, 10 or 20 years – and I’m confident that we’ll do it.”