Amwins' Jackson: Nimble MGA market is similar to Lloyd's 30 years ago

By Rebecca Delaney

April 22 - (The Insurer) - The current MGA segment is similar to the Lloyd's market around 30 years ago owing to its nimbleness and the ability of underwriters to "put the pen down", said Amwins' Simon Jackson.

Jackson, who serves as managing director at Amwins International Underwriting (AIU), spoke to The Insurer following the launch of specialty lines MGA Contour Underwriting, which sits alongside existing MGA Unicorn Underwriting and the Amplify fast-follow facility.

"Today, I view the MGA space very similar to how Lloyd's was 30-plus years ago," he said. "We're seeing an influx of underwriting talent into the MGA space because the entrepreneurialism, the nimbleness, (and) the ability to put the pen down is much easier in an MGA than in some of the balance sheet partners."

Contour will serve as AIU's "Lloyd's product MGA" owing to its focus on specialty lines. It initially will underwrite a marine cargo line with $50 million of capacity led by recent hire Jack Bryan from Tokio Marine HCC, with plans to expand into new lines of business over 2025.

Later in the year, AIU's worldwide property offering will be rebranded to Contour from Unicorn, which will continue to focus on UK fleet and UK SME products, with plans to add a selection of UK-based products under the Unicorn umbrella.

"We've been quite successful in the last year in finding carriers that want to support us across multiple product lines, but we often find that UK-focused insurers have a different appetite to specialty insurers, so it seemed to make sense to us to distinguish the two brands rather than just having one brand going forward," said Jackson.

He continued: "I like to think of Contour as our specialty lines-focused MGA, like a Lloyd's product MGA. Going forwards, our box in Lloyd's will be a Contour box and it will expand as we have more product lines going under there."

Jackson explained that AIU operates on a "class-agnostic" basis, with new product lines to be added to Contour on the condition of a "strong USP" combination of underwriter expertise, technology, distribution and product.

"What we tend to focus on is why a capacity partner would trust us to underwrite on their behalf, and what we bring to the table that they haven't got," he said. "In the last year we've not progressed with four or five opportunities because we're very mindful, as we build our underwriting brand out here in London, that we provide returns across the cycle rather than just an opportune moment.”

In the same vein, AIU is not actively seeking to add a "myriad" of brands under its roster, although the existing structure does provide the optionality of an additional brand from M&A activity.

"If we were to ever look at acquiring something, we've got the optionality of an additional brand. But we'd like to try and ensure we've got consistency into those three broad buckets, and we think it aligns better with our capacity partners' appetites," Jackson said.

He concluded: "As we get on to adding more product lines, the more diversified panel portfolio and the more product set we have, the more likely it is that we will have carriers wanting to participate across that panel. Rather than having 10 different products with individual capacity stacks, we see a world where we'll have capacity that supports us across our platform."