The British Insurance Brokers' Association (BIBA) has renewed its professional indemnity (PI) accredited broker agreement with Lockton for a further three years.
Paul Afteni, head of regulated financial services PI, senior vice president, global professional and financial risks at Lockton, said the firm remains the world's largest privately held, independent insurance broker and is proud to continue as a BIBA-recommended PI provider for a further three years, an extension that will bring the partnership to nearly 30 years at the next renewal.
Lockton, he said, remains committed to providing PI insurance to the broker profession "through different market cycles, working to provide broad and competitive cover."
Meanwhile, BIBA CEO Graeme Trudgill said Lockton continues to deliver trusted, expert guidance to members across their PI insurance, adding that renewing the partnership ensures members retain access to "broad and high-quality market capacity."
Lockton has held BIBA accreditation for more than 25 years, making it one of the longest-serving providers in the association's PI scheme, alongside fellow accredited brokers such as Griffiths & Armour.
As part of its suite of member benefits, BIBA runs an ongoing PI initiative offering members support with PI-related risk and claims management. Members can access this via an online PI Hub, where they can also reach out directly to BIBA's accredited PI brokers.
The initiative also covers wider issues such as understanding the most common causes of claims, measures to avoid them and how to arrange an appropriate policy for a brokerage.
BIBA's own published figures put its membership at more than 1,700 regulated firms employing over 130,000 people across the UK, with member brokers arranging around £150 billion of general insurance premiums and contributing an estimated £26.1 billion to the UK economy.
For a trade body of that scale, the strength of its accredited PI panel is a significant point of reference for members navigating their own indemnity cover.
The renewal lands at a markedly different point in the cycle to BIBA's previous Lockton renewal. Broker PI cover hardened sharply between 2018 and 2021, after a 2018 Lloyd's of London review found some non-US PI syndicates had been running at a loss ratio of around 110%, paying out more in claims than they collected in premium.
Roughly half a dozen insurers withdrew from the UK PI market during that period, according to broker analysis at the time, with few new entrants replacing them.
Conditions have since eased substantially. Marsh's professional indemnity market updates describe a period of rate correction from 2022, with new capacity entering the market through 2023 and 2024, and softening accelerating further into 2025.
Brokers now report more underwriters competing for a broadly static pool of buyers, giving them wider negotiating room and the ability to bring their own policy wordings back into renewal discussions. Construction, design and financial advice risks were among those hit hardest during the hard market, with some reports at the time citing average renewal increases of around 30% for solicitors alone, illustrating how uneven the impact was across professions and how sharply conditions have since reversed.
That competitive backdrop gives brokers more choice when placing their own PI cover, but it also raises the stakes on selecting a provider with a track record through both hard and soft markets.
Brokers' own indemnity claims often centre on disputes over what was and was not covered, or on errors in advice and placement, meaning continuity of service and claims support matters as much as headline pricing when conditions are this competitive.
Lockton's near three-decade run as a BIBA-accredited provider spans the post-2008 downturn, the 2018 to 2021 hardening and the pandemic-era disruption that followed, a period during which several PI insurers exited the class altogether rather than ride out the losses.
For a class of business defined by long-tail claims exposures, where a policy written today may not generate a claim for years, that continuity is valuable to members in its own right: a provider that withdraws from the class during a hard market can leave brokers scrambling for alternative cover at short notice, often at a point in the cycle when capacity is hardest to find.
