Top 100 UK Insurance Brokers 2024: Q&A with Open GI CEO Simon Badley

This year’s top 100 features the first broker to break through the £1bn revenue barrier and more brokers on the ascendancy than going downwards. What is your take on the state of the UK broking market?

We can see that, despite tough conditions for the insurance space, brokers are retaining and building on their role as a vital part of the chain. Over the past 12–18 months, they have faced down macroeconomic pressure, geopolitical pressure and, crucially, reduced access to capacity due to inflation.

Our role is to help our brokers to write more and better quality business, and build the most effective exchange between insurers and brokers and third parties.

Simon Badley, Open GI

Despite these difficulties, brokers are still shining. Obviously, market hardening has influenced revenue and GWP, particularly in wheels-based insurance. We’ve also seen consolidation-led growth – M&A is still pervasive, and is likely to continue for some time. But overall, growth is being driven by the fact that there is still a huge demand for the expertise brokers bring to the exchange between insurance companies and the end customer. They have been able to navigate what have been extremely stormy waters because they’re so agile and so flexible.

Brokers have a vital role across personal and commercial lines. They are excellent at building strong customer relationships, they’re great at managing risk, and they support and serve customers in a positive way.

The growth shown in the Top 100 is a direct result of the demand for what brokers bring. It’s very exciting, and it’s a really positive indicator for the future.

From your conversations with broker clients, where do they see the greatest opportunities for growth in 2025 and onwards? And how important is data to help them achieve their objectives?

The market will see improved access to capacity, across motor and home in particular. We will continue to see opportunities for brokers to improve how they operate and how they manage the relationship between quantity and quality. Alongside growth in core markets, new business lines will open up. In motor, we expect to see more short-term models and different consumption models emerging – people want to move away from the traditional, annual contract and reflect how they actually use their vehicle.

We’re also seeing the emergence of new lines of business around cyber. Another area which is growing is climate insurance, and we are doing some exciting work around travel. What we expect to happen is, as new lines of businesses and opportunities emerge, those really strong brokers will get the chance to go into those markets.

Data is key to efficiency and the removal of waste in terms of broker operations. They need to use data to ensure that they’re managing probably one of the biggest impacts to their underlying economics, which is loss ratio.

We’re doing a lot of work through our business in Amsterdam, Machine Learning Programs, to support this. They … have built some extremely powerful models that help brokers assess things like propensity to claim or propensity to defraud. Using data in this way helps brokers to make more efficient and effective decisions at the point of sale. There is going to be a revolution in how brokers use data to understand and support relationships with their customers.

This year, you acquired Hug Hub’s Digital Platform – what does that bring to Open GI and your clients?

When we think ahead, brokers are going to have to reduce operational costs and find a way to service more customers at a lower cost. The Hug Hub deal means we have the capability to help brokers encourage their customers to become more self-directed through the purchasing and servicing journey, which saves the broker time and money.

The architecture that supports Hug Hub is really well designed, and we can use it to act as a foundation for a range of digital solutions for our brokers. It also means we can support our brokers to build more robust omnichannel journeys.

Additionally, we want our brokers to have more control, so one of the other things that Hug Hub has brought is the ability to build technology solutions in a way that allows brokers more power over what they do and how they do it.

What trends are you seeing in terms of the broker utilisation of the latest technologies available to them? And how is it evolving?

Brokers are keen to utilise technology to drive growth, and it is our job to support that ambition. We want to take away headaches like duplication and re-keying through tools such as AI [artificial intelligence], automation and machine learning. Brokers want to spend time with the customer helping them to buy the insurance that meets their needs. They want technology that makes it easier for them to sell to their customers, service those customers and help those customers at the points of claim.

We want to take away headaches like duplication and re-keying through tools such as AI, automation and machine learning.

Simon Badley, Open GI

Data is also key – they want to be able to use data effectively. Artificial intelligence is really coming to the fore, especially generative AI. We’re already in pilot using a generative AI solution, which will be used around mid-term adjustments, where it will literally take all of the wasted time out of the transaction and enable automation to execute what is a very basic process.

Looking to the future, how do you see brokers adopting more automation, machine learning and AI technologies into their operations?

There is still quite a lot of concern about technology and technology projects, but brokers are starting to recognise it as an opportunity. It’s about working with the trailblazers to test and prove the different emerging technologies. Once we do that, there will be an opportunity to adopt it very quickly. It’s about being a true partner and being at the heart of innovation. We are there to say: ‘This isn’t scary – this is how you can use this technology, and we’ve already started playing with it, and we’re gonna help you use it.’

From your perspective, what can brokers expect in terms of new solutions and partnerships to help enrich their relationship with Open GI in the future?

We’re building a number of exciting capabilities across our PAS platforms, and we’re continuing to invest in Core, V and Mobius. We’re increasingly focused on data, digital and connectivity. We want to build more and better data solutions for our brokers, and, on the digital side, we’re developing new self-service portals backed by the Hug Hub technology. We’re also doing a lot of work around generative AI.

Connectivity is also key. Our role is to help our brokers to write more and better quality business, and build the most effective exchange between insurers and brokers and third parties, such as premium finance, data-enrichment providers. We are constantly working to evolve all of that for our customers, so we are developing better insurer/broker connections, helping customers be more agile, offering access to the strongest panel, and driving better speed to market. It’s a very exciting time to be a software partner.

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