Biba 2026: SSP targeting growth through new M&A strategy

Insurance software firm SSP is planning to begin a new period of M&A activity, which it hopes, alongside planned organic expansion, will usher in a new phase of growth.

Martyn Mathews, managing director at SSP UK and Ireland, told Insurance Times that it is “exciting times” for the business.

SSP – which was purchased in 2021 by buy-and-hold software investment firm Volaris, a subsidiary of Constellation Software – has spent the past few years stabilising its core business and now feels the time is right to seek a period of strong growth.

“We’ve been on a bit of a journey for a couple of years now. It’s been all about creating stability, both for customers and financially as well,” Mathews explained.

“We’ve invested heavily on behalf of our customers to create a stable operating environment. For example, £6m on a cloud investment to make sure we have a scalable infrastructure.

“But actually, now we’ve got the financial fundamentals in place for the business, the time is right to restructure and look for growth.”

To streamline its plan, from 1 July 2026 the firm will begin to operate as two separate entities, SSP UK and Ireland and SSP Worldwide – a move Martyn said would allow it to “operate with greater focus in our respective markets, bringing us closer to customers and enabling us to target growth opportunities more effectively”.

M&A strategy

The restructuring, Martyn added, will allow the business to get “much closer to customers across brokers, insurers and MGAs, and look for growth drivers”.

He added: “That includes aspects of M&As as well, so looking at organisations we can acquire to help us drive growth.

“If there are product gaps that we feel we need to fill, we would look to acquire there – digital services, for example. But actually, as an organisation, we’re acquisitive, we’re actively in the market looking to drive growth through acquisition as well as organically through the services.”

And as it scales, SSP is planning to develop its technological foundations to help drive organic growth through improved services, a development Mathews said was best built on the foundations of its existing offering.

“We’ve created the fundamental ability for ourselves to scale, and our customers as well, and of course the next phase of that is the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) driven services – pricing is an obvious place for that to start.

“AI fundamentally only works if you’ve got the underlying infrastructure, the underlying data and the platform. What we have is 40 years of history, legacy and data to help our customers, and applying AI over the top of that, you can create great solutions.

“What we’ve seen is lots of people talk about AI and try and do it, but without the history, knowledge and customer base it makes it incredibly difficult, but we can do that, because we have that history.”