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.