Markel UK has ‘very ambitious plan’ to boost eTrading service following disjointed broker scores

Markel UK has a “very ambitious plan” to “accelerate” its eTrading service for brokers after Insurance Times’ exclusive Five Star Rating Reports for 2025 reveal a yawning service gap between the insurer’s digital and underwriter led trading routes.

Within March 2025’s Five Star Rating Report: Commercial and Personal Lines 2024/25, Markel UK ranked in first place for delivering high quality commercial lines service to broker partners, with an overall 4.36 score equating to a five star accolade.

This marked the second consecutive year that Markel UK topped the table of 12 commercial lines insurers, with its 2025 score reflecting a five star rating across all five service metrics measured by the annual report. This includes relationship management, claims experience, policy documentation, underwriting experience and quality of cover.

However, Markel UK’s service score dropped considerably in May 2025’s Five Star Rating Report: eTrading 2025. For its digital trading proposition, Markel UK achieved a three star rating from Insurance Times’ broker respondents, amounting to a score of 3.77. It ranked in ninth out of 12 insurers benchmarked by the report.

One commercial lines focused broker respondent noted: “I would like to see a stronger digital proposition from Markel. If we can have [Markel] supporting us in more ways, this will only be good for our business and customers.”

Lee Mooney, Markel’s UK managing director, told Insurance Times that this scoring chasm signifies “a huge opportunity” for the insurer, especially as it looks to expand its relationship with software house Acturis and build out its overall product portfolio as part of the organisation’s Ambition 2030 strategy.

He explained: “We’ve got the opportunity to make some real critical decisions. How do we use Acturis and how do we deploy that faster into the market? How do we use our own extranet to ensure that we’ve got products on there that are fit for purpose?

“Ultimately, by increasing our products and making sure [they are available via eTrading or] through a manual underwriter, [this makes] sure that we’ve got that seamless journey of service, so we don’t predetermine a broker’s way of entering Markel.

“We’ve got a very, very ambitious plan in the [eTrading] space because we have to make sure that we accelerate to get that level of service up to the levels [brokers] would normally enjoy through that manual lens.

“We can no longer have different levels of experience. Everybody should say ‘that’s Markel and it’s one experience and it’s fantastic. It’s five star’. We’ve got some plans in place to make sure that happens through investment in technology, investment in third party relationships with Acturis [and] making sure we can get more products and more touch points on there from an eTrade perspective.”

Although it is still early days in Markel UK’s eTrading improvement journey, Mooney has already started to instigate some of these identified changes since joining the business in June 2025.

For example, Markel UK launched its contractors’ combined product onto Acturis in August 2025, with Mooney confirming that the insurer’s new product pipeline for this year also includes the introduction of charities combined, management liability and life sciences propositions to its overall book.

He added that Markel UK is also planning to launch an eTraded cyber product in 2026, borrowing existing expertise from Markel’s wholesale division.

Driving results

Although Mooney’s appointment at Markel UK did not influence the insurer’s most recent five star rating from Insurance Times, his fresh perspective on the business can appreciate and pinpoint why he believes brokers value Markel UK’s commercial lines service proposition.

He puts the firm’s table topping score down to two factors.

Firstly, “the critical thing is we completely own all of the customer journey”, he noted. “There’s no separate third party providers. There’s nothing that we are complicating in that customer journey. We own it, end to end.”

Secondly, Mooney pointed to Markel UK’s “depth of proposition from a claims perspective”, which includes pulling on the expertise of an in-house legal practice. He added that this creates “a seamless experience at the point of claim, when brokers need us [and] when customers need us”.

He continued: “I’m not surprised [about the five star accolade] from what I’ve seen from the service perspective because it goes back to the people at the end of the day – everybody wants to do the right things.

“They’ve got the right tools to do it. They’ve got the right focus. We just now need to make sure we can grow and build upon that, to make sure we can make all brokers experience that first class Markel experience.”

Avoiding ‘falling back within the pack’

With strong year-on-year results in the commercial lines section of Insurance Times’ Five Star Rating Report, the challenge for Markel UK now is how can it further improve when its service ranking is at an all time high, according to broker respondents.

Mooney addressed this: “If things are going well, that’s more dangerous than when it’s not because when it’s not going well, you know exactly where to fix, you know exactly what to do and you know exactly how to remediate.

“When it’s going really well, you could end up having an approach which is quite complacent.

“When you spend time understanding the business and every single component part of it, everybody’s striving to do a better job and we just need to keep that pace, keep that energy and keep that ambition within the business, so we can constantly ensure that every single hour, day week, we’re just constantly improving [both the] business and [customer] experience.

“I see a huge opportunity. We’ve got some areas of real brilliance here, but if we don’t do anything with it to improve and make it even better, we’ll end up just falling back within the pack.

“We don’t want to even compare ourselves with the rest of the market when it comes to service because we always want to be at that top upper quartile when it comes to service.”