We’re proud to be a firm that offers an adventure like no other and provide opportunities that set you up for long-term success. Our apprenticeship programme is designed to give you hands on experience, industry-leading training and the chance to learn from some of the most experienced professionals in the industry.
Why join our apprenticeship programme?
Historically, captives have been treated somewhat like a muscle, exercised intensively when insurance markets harden, but allowed to idle when conditions soften. Yet the most effective captive owners continue to develop and strengthen their programmes throughout the cycle, ensuring they are ready when market conditions inevitably turn. As we enter softer conditions, Airmic members face a familiar challenge: explaining to the C-suite why a captive strategy remains essential even when commercial rates look appealing.
Whether you are defending an existing captive, advocating for a new one or exploring the upcoming UK captive regime, you should shift the boardroom conversation away from short-term premium savings and toward long-term strategic control.
Warburg Pincus and McGill and Partners have reached an agreement with EQT that will see Warburg Pincus sell its majority stake to EQT.
McGill and Partners founders, management team and colleagues will re-invest alongside EQT, retaining a meaningful ownership stake in the firm going forward as they continue to serve clients globally.
Maintains commitment to firm’s independent model and culture of ownership, developed organically since its founding in 2019.
EQT will partner with Steve McGill and the management team to accelerate organic growth, including via talent recruitment, further development of technology and data capabilities, and expansion of innovative digital solutions.
McGill and Partners, the largest independent global specialty insurance and reinsurance broker, and GIB, the largest independent South African insurance broker, have launched Protea Green, a new solution focused on the insurance of risks associated with renewable energy infrastructure in South Africa. It offers a comprehensive suite of insurance coverages tailored to the needs of developers, lenders and owners involved in South Africa’s energy transition.
For years, the UK insurance industry has advocated for a competitive, proportionate captive insurance regime that would allow London to genuinely compete on the global stage. With the release of the PRA and FCA’s consultation paper, the UK finally laid its cards on the table.
As Stephen Cross, CEO of McGill and Partners Europe and Head of Innovation and Strategy, noted: “This is encouraging. The framework shows the PRA has understood what captive owners actually need.”
By introducing proportionate, factor-based capital treatment, setting a sensible 4-to-6-week target for authorisations, and allowing the flexibility to use parental guarantees and letters of credit, the regulators have delivered a strong baseline. By stripping away the complex Solvency II reporting burden and risk margins, the PRA has laid the groundwork for a viable onshore alternative.
The direction is right. However, to turn this potential into reality and truly disrupt the global market, three major pieces of the puzzle still require attention:
1. The Tax Question
The current consultation is understandably silent on the tax regime, as this falls outside the regulators’ remit. However, a captive’s viability is intrinsically linked to its tax treatment. We look forward to greater clarity and detail from HM Treasury and HMRC. To successfully attract both UK corporates and international multinationals, the tax framework must be transparent, competitive, and clearly defined in practice.
2. A Clear Pathway for Redomiciliation
The PRA expects a large number of relocations, yet the consultation lacks technical details on how to actually transfer an overseas captive to a newly authorised UK entity. Redomiciliation isn’t just about UK parents bringing their captives “home.” It is about creating a seamless, frictionless framework for foreign parent companies to move their existing captives to the UK, allowing them to plug directly into London’s unrivalled underwriting and professional services infrastructure.
3. The Global Competitive Landscape
The London professional services and reinsurance markets are clear winners simply by having this regime exist. But if the UK wants to win the actual domicile battle, it has to look at who is in the line of fire. Guernsey currently holds over 40% of FTSE 100 captives. They have the most to lose, but their established cell company structures give them massive structural resilience. With the UK delaying Protected Cell Companies (PCCs) to a secondary legislative phase, the UK risks fighting with one hand tied behind its back in the short term.
Next steps
We have been advocating for a competitive UK captive regime for some time, and the opportunity to leverage London’s world-class reinsurance and professional services infrastructure directly via an onshore captive is now closer than ever.
While we work with the industry to address these remaining missing pieces, do not wait for the final rules in mid-2027 to start planning. Now is the time to conduct feasibility studies, evaluate your current offshore structures, and model the potential capital efficiencies of a UK domicile.
McGill and Partners is actively helping clients navigate these proposals and will be submitting formal feedback to the regulators before the deadline. Connect with our team today to ensure your voice is heard and your risk strategy is prepared for the new UK landscape.
John Lloyd OBE, Chairman of McGill and Partners. Delivered the keynote address at the MGAA Annual Conference in London on 7th July 2026.
Decades in the insurance market teaches you to distinguish genuine inflection points from noise. Over my time in the market, I have witnessed my fair share of hard and soft market cycles, watched distribution models rise and fall, and seen more than a few confident predictions about the future of insurance distribution turn to dust. So when I say that the MGA sector today is at the most consequential inflection point in half a century of broking, that is not a promotional claim but a considered judgement earned through decades of watching the market at close quarters.
The numbers alone are extraordinary. Global MGA gross written premium more than doubled between 2019 and 2024, rising from roughly $70 billion to $150 billion at a compound annual growth rate of sixteen per cent. In the United States, MGA direct premiums written reached $109 billion in 2025, representing five consecutive years of double-digit growth and a ninety per cent cumulative premium increase since 2020. In Europe the picture is even more striking, with over 650 MGAs generating close to €18 billion in gross written premium, and emerging markets from Iberia to the Nordics showing remarkable momentum. Here in the UK, MGAs now manage more than ten per cent of our £47 billion general insurance premium pool.
Behind every data point, though, is a specialist underwriter who chose to build something, an entrepreneur who saw a gap, had the courage to fill it and went deep where others went broad. That entrepreneurial spirit is the beating heart of this sector, and right now it is stronger than at any point in living memory.
For most of the past half-century, the capital behind delegated authority came from a relatively narrow pool of traditional carriers and Lloyd’s syndicates. That landscape is now almost unrecognisable. Major balance sheet reinsurers reduced their participation in MGA programmes significantly in 2024, in some cases by more than fifty per cent, and what is filling the gap is not more of the same but something structurally different: insurance-linked securities, sidecars, collateralised reinsurance, and vehicles backed by institutional investors who see the MGA model for what it is – a high-quality, specialist underwriting business generating genuine returns.
For MGAs, this abundance of options brings a corresponding responsibility to be deliberate about the choice of capital partner. The best capital relationships are strategic rather than transactional, built on trust, transparency, and aligned incentives, and in a market that is now firmly softening, the quality of those partnerships will be the difference between thriving and merely surviving.
Backing MGAs has been dubbed in the market as ‘a bad bet in the majority of cases,’ pointing to volume-based incentive structures, excessive intermediation, and the risks of outsourcing underwriting while retaining risk. Criticism such as this has resulted in some defensiveness across the market, but I would argue that defensiveness is the wrong response here. The right one is honest self-examination followed by action.
This critique is not without merit in certain parts of the market. There are segments where growth has outpaced governance, where alignment between MGAs and their capacity providers has been insufficient, and where underwriting discipline has been stretched in pursuit of premium. The soft market will expose all of that, as it always does, because the cycle is the great equaliser and it has a long memory for complacency. A pattern familiar to anyone who has lived through previous turns: everybody is a hero in a hard market, and the real players only reveal themselves when conditions tighten.
The MGA model itself, however, is emphatically not a bad bet. The sector has delivered four consecutive years of double-digit growth precisely because it creates value through specialist expertise, speed to market, and innovation that traditional carriers cannot replicate, and MGA loss ratios have improved to the point where they are, in many segments, industry-leading. The answer to the criticism lies not in argument but in evolution: more skin in the game, tighter governance, real-time data transparency, and institutional-grade underwriting platforms. The market is already moving in that direction, and the best MGAs are leading it.
The MGA sector is not a niche corner of the insurance market but a global force managing hundreds of billions of dollars in premium, driving innovation, and attracting some of the finest talent in the industry. The model works, the opportunity is vast, and whether the sector truly deserves its moment is a question each participant must answer through their own conduct.
McGill and Partners, the independent global specialty insurance and reinsurance broker, has been named in The Sunday Times Best Places to Work 2026 (Big Organisations) and awarded Overall Best Company for Wellbeing, recognising the firm’s distinctive culture and sustained investment in its people.
McGill and Partners achieved an overall engagement score of 88 per cent, with an employee response rate of 84 per cent — significantly above both financial services and global benchmarks.
The firm delivered consistently strong results across all areas measured, including a wellbeing score of 89 per cent and a pride score of 90 per cent. Colleague sentiment was similarly high, with over nine in ten employees reporting that they feel proud to work at the firm, that the organisation cares about their wellbeing, and that they would recommend it to others.
The Sunday Times Best Places to Work accreditation recognises organisations achieving at least a 70 per cent engagement score across key measures including reward and recognition, information sharing, empowerment, wellbeing, instilling pride and job satisfaction.
These results reinforce McGill and Partners’ differentiated approach to building a high-performance culture. The firm operates a single global profit centre with broad-based colleague ownership, underpinned by its ‘Contract of Trust’ – a commitment to autonomy, accountability and mutual respect. This model, combined with a focus on handpicked talent and a compelling colleague value proposition, sets the business apart in an industry typically shaped by bolt-on acquisitions.
With more than 580 colleagues across 10 offices in six countries, McGill and Partners has scaled rapidly since its launch in 2019. While the award reflects the experience of its UK workforce, the firm views it as a foundation for its ambition to be recognised as a leading employer globally and to continue attracting the highest calibre talent in the market.
McGill and Partners, the independent global specialty insurance and reinsurance broker, in partnership with certain carriers in the London market, has launched a bespoke aviation insurance solution that addresses significant, unmitigated risk within the aviation sector. Coverage is specifically designed to protect aviation spares against war perils while on the ground – filling a crucial coverage gap in traditional policies.
Historically, aviation hull war policies have only covered spares for war perils while they are in transit by sea or air, leaving ground-based assets exposed. With no existing protection against war perils on the ground, airlines and lessors are exposed to significant financial loss. With individual aircraft engine values approaching USD 50 million, the absence of ground-based war peril coverage creates a direct and material risk to the balance sheets of both airlines and lessors for these multi-million-dollar assets.
McGill and Partners’ new policy is designed to provide ground-based war coverage and protection for spares and equipment located on the ground and not in transit by sea or air. It provides war perils coverage for physical loss or damage resulting from war, invasion, acts of foreign enemies, hostilities (whether war be declared or not), civil war, rebellion, revolution, insurrection, martial law, military or usurped power or attempts at usurpation of power. The solution will have defined limits with a sum insured per item, subject to a defined annual aggregate limit.
The announcement comes at a particularly crucial time for the market, with conflict in the Middle East, in particular seeing airports acting as key targets for those actors involved.
This report sets out our 2025 gender pay gap reporting information for McGill and Partners UK.
Our strategic priority remains to increase the representation of women in senior roles and the upper pay quartiles. We are confident that by continuing to focus on hiring, developing, and promoting our talented female colleagues, we will achieve sustainable and meaningful change.
You can read our full report here.
To review our previous reports, please click below.
McGill and Partners and American International Group, Inc. (NYSE: AIG) today announced a significant strategic collaboration for the subscription market that will provide clients with seamless access to exceptional insurance solutions, backed by long-term, high-quality insurance capacity and capital. As part of the initiative, AIG and McGill and Partners will leverage agentic AI capabilities to manage the deployment of capacity to clients.
Through the collaboration, AIG performed a detailed analysis of McGill and Partners’ specialty portfolio, validating its strength and quality. Based on this analysis, the company created underwriting criteria to enable real-time underwriting through McGill and Partners’ digital broking platform. As a result of this approach, AIG expects to deploy meaningful capacity of 25% across up to $1.6 billion of McGill and Partners Gross Premiums Written specialty portfolio.
The analysis of McGill and Partners’ portfolio by AIG was made possible by the digital-first approach the broker has adopted since their launch in 2019. Utilising its tech-enabled platform, McGill and Partners provided access to high-quality data and insights to enable AIG to underwrite the portfolio and to use an agentic AI approach to manage its performance in the future.
AIG collaborated with Palantir to build an ontology of McGill and Partner extensive portfolio. By leveraging McGill and Partners’ digital broking platform in addition to Palantir’s Foundry platform, AIG will develop comprehensive insights on business underwritten, including near real-time exposure, limit deployment, modelled risk outputs and loss information. This access to near real-time data analysis will allow AIG to manage the performance and deployment of AIG’s capacity to McGill and Partners’ clients on an ongoing basis.
This strategic collaboration sets a new industry benchmark and significantly evolves the model for pre-secured capacity across a diverse specialty portfolio of risk. With industry leading capabilities from AIG, McGill and Partners’ brokers can focus on working with leading underwriters to develop the best possible solutions for clients. McGill and Partners’ clients will gain access to valuable long-term capacity from AIG and stability and security in an increasingly volatile risk landscape.
Steve McGill, CEO, McGill and Partners, said: “This collaboration has the potential to disrupt the dynamics of the subscription market. It strengthens the value proposition of leading underwriters in the market and redefines the way capacity is positioned in the best interests of our clients. This moves beyond incremental change and repositions the way the market operates in the future.”
Peter Zaffino, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, AIG, said: “The rapid evolution of AI and large language models is reshaping risk analytics, giving us the ability to continuously learn from McGill and Partners’ portfolio and deploy capacity with greater insight, discipline and speed. By using McGill and Partners’ robust data ingestion capabilities along with Palantir’s Foundry platform, we are able to evaluate their portfolio to align with our risk appetite, and over time, we see significant opportunity to deliver greater efficiency to the subscription market while giving clients easier access to high-quality insurance solutions.”
We are pleased to share we have renewed our Ukraine War Risks Reinsurance Facility for another year, with the maximum line per risk increasing from $50m to $100m.
More than $100m of cover has already been placed for the benefit of businesses operating in Ukraine, allowing vital industries such as energy production, manufacturing, warehousing, food and battery energy storage, to access the cover they need.
The facility is designed to support local Ukrainian cedants, including ARX, the insurer we first collaborated with, by providing the reinsurance capacity needed to protect commercial property in the region against war related risks faced by their clients.
The increase in capacity reflects a marked expansion in carrier participation, which has more than doubled and now stands at 14 insurers, including Aegis London, Atrium, AXIS, Liberty Specialty Markets, The Fidelis Partnership, and Westfield Specialty International.
Participating carriers have committed $250m in the aggregate for the next 12 months, reflecting the significant expansion in per risk and aggregate capacity available for Ukrainian clients.
The facility supports Ukrainian businesses during the current conflict and aids the economic recovery afterwards. The renewal of the facility has been designed to accommodate future investments, which may require larger limits, that are anticipated during Ukraine’s reconstruction.
Chris Stevenson, Head of Property, Casualty, and Construction at McGill and Partners said: “This is the only facility in the market that offers these kinds of limits at this scale, and we’re committed to ensuring it continues to provide meaningful support to businesses operating in such difficult circumstances. We’re pleased to be able to increase the limits and provide access to critical cover to support Ukrainian businesses as they navigate the devastating effects of war and look to rebuild in the future.”
