McGill & Partners joins Airmic as Associate Partner
The boutique specialist (re)insurance broker McGill & Partners is the latest firm to join Airmic as an Associate Partner. The partnership will provide Airmic members with an opportunity to hear directly from McGill’s fast-growing roster of experts.
In announcing the partnership CEO Steve McGill joined Airmic’s CEO John Ludlow in a fireside chat to expand upon the broker’s journey since its launch in May 2019.
“We are thrilled to be a new member and supporter of Airmic and we are excited about what you and the team do on behalf of risk managers at a very interesting time,” Mr McGill said. “A time of profound change and profound challenges.”
McGill & Partners, which is backed by private equity firm Warburg Pincus, and has quickly recruited 235 members of staff. Mr McGill was Aon Group President for more than a decade before leaving in January 2017 and established McGill & Partners over two years later.
“A gap in the market was developing, partly driven by the consolidation that had gone on over decades,” he told Mr Ludlow in the fireside chat. “The fashionable approach of the broking fraternity was to buy up company after company, some of it driven by private equity, some of it driven by strategic acquisitions.
“If you look back to those earlier days, for clients with complex and specialist needs, the choice was pretty extensive. You had a lot of really world class insurance and reinsurance broking firms.”
Having spent much of 2019 developing infrastructure, securing office space, hiring its first wave of talent and securing regulatory approvals, Mr McGill said he viewed 2020 going into 2021 as their first full year of trading.
“I have to say it’s been incredibly exciting, but the challenges were not challenges we or anybody else expected as we suddenly went into lockdown,” he added.
“I thought being a new business, being a start-up, I thought the challenges for us would be more profound in the COVID environment and I felt that we would be pushing the pause button and restarting in 2021. It’s been the complete reverse. The level of business activity in the second quarter and third quarter has been very substantial. We have been really busy actively serving clients from all over the world.”
Responding McGill joining Airmic as an AP, CEO John Ludlow said: “We are delighted to have McGill & Partners as our most recent Associate Partner with Airmic.
“Our members want choice. We want very good and brilliant firms, but we also need choice and I think having niche players come in and provide excellence is good for business.”