Many firms in the London market describe themselves as specialists. According to Stuart McMurdo, chief executive of Accredited Insurance (Europe & UK), far fewer can clearly define what that actually means. McMurdo joined Accredited in October 2024 to lead the group's UK and European operations.
"The Accredited business is entirely dedicated to MGA," he said. "We are not a specialty insurer that happens to do MGAs."
The company writes around $2 billion in gross written premium (GWP), split evenly between the UK/Europe and the US, employing around 100 people in each region. Having recently completed a portfolio remediation programme, it has shifted capital away from legacy books towards areas it believes offer stronger long-term opportunities.
For McMurdo, specialism has little to do with whether an insurer writes marine, engineering, fine art or another traditional specialty line. Instead, it is about possessing an advantage competitors cannot easily replicate.
"You could have vanilla lines of business that are able to position themselves in a specialised way because they perhaps have a geographic market advantage, they perhaps have a distribution advantage or a risk management advantage that allows them to deliver something that is market beating," he said.
Those competitive advantages, not simply operating in a niche, are what distinguish genuine specialists. Other MGA leaders have similarly argued that underwriting expertise, rather than access to capacity alone, is becoming specialty insurance's real differentiator.
Too many businesses, he argued, adopt the specialist label without being able to justify it.
"When you press a little, you'll find out that they haven't really thought it through," he said, arguing that firms should be able to point to a clear distribution, geographic or risk management advantage, or demonstrate genuine expertise within a specialist class.
Asked what separates businesses built for the long term from those simply benefiting from favourable market conditions, McMurdo consistently returned to disciplined underwriting.
"The winners are going to be the ones who are able to demonstrate underwriting discipline and don't write risks that they don't understand," he said, arguing that deep risk knowledge becomes even more important in specialty classes than in higher-volume markets such as motor.
The real challenge, he suggested, often comes not from underwriting teams but from investor expectations.
"One of the key things is whether or not shareholders have the courage to say to their underwriting teams, we're okay for you to tap off on the growth because the market conditions just don't favour that," he said.
Pressure to deliver annual growth targets can encourage businesses to compromise underwriting standards. McMurdo linked that behaviour to the "underwriting clock", a market cycle framework first developed in the early 1980s that he believes remains just as relevant today.
His comments mirror wider market trends, with many MGAs continuing to prioritise pricing discipline despite increasing competition and softening market conditions.
McMurdo pointed to transactional liability, including warranty and indemnity, contingency and tax risks, as an area where capacity has become crowded, citing WR Berkley's recent decision to reduce its exposure. Political violence, by contrast, is emerging as an area of opportunity.
"If you look at the moment in the wake of the situation in the Middle East, the whole PV war market is one that's on the move," he said, while cautioning that fresh capital could eventually create the same competitive pressures seen elsewhere - part of a wider pattern in which PV and War insurance accumulation risk has moved into the spotlight since the conflict escalated.
McMurdo expects successful specialty insurers to differentiate themselves less through growth than through consistent underwriting. That includes maintaining discipline over policy wordings and coverage terms as competition intensifies.
"You pick a risk that you believe is well managed, is well priced, but if the terms and conditions drift, all of a sudden you say, gosh, that's strange. I didn't realize I was going to be paying a claim like that," he said.
As competition intensifies across specialty insurance, McMurdo believes the firms that emerge strongest will be those willing to sacrifice short-term growth to preserve underwriting standards. In specialty insurance, sustainable advantage comes from discipline rather than expansion.
