When Stuart Davies was named non-executive chairman of Avid Insurance and Landmark Underwriting this week, it read like a fairly standard governance appointment - a veteran market figure taking a board seat at two London MGAs. Look at who owns those MGAs, though, and how many other businesses that owner has bought recently, and the appointment looks like part of something considerably bigger: one of the most active roll-ups of specialty underwriting businesses currently under way in the London market.
Avid and Landmark both sit under Bishop Street Underwriters, a platform owned by RedBird Capital Partners, the US private equity firm that manages around $10 billion of assets. Bishop Street's model, in its own words, is to partner with managing general agents and niche underwriting teams, pairing an in-house (re)insurance leadership team with RedBird's capital and dealmaking experience to build what it calls a "differentiated platform" capitalising on structural growth in the sector.
In practice, that's meant a rapid string of acquisitions. Landmark, a London-based specialty MGA, was bought in February 2025 - Bishop Street's first move outside North America. Avid followed in October 2025, adding capabilities across construction, social housing, leasehold, equine, motorsport and travel insurance.
Between those two UK deals, Bishop Street also picked up Aerospace Insurance Managers from Hallmark Financial, Ethos Specialty's transactional liability unit, and Conifer Insurance Services, on top of earlier moves into Verve Services (specialty private passenger auto) and Ahoy! - seven deals in total since late 2023, alongside a joint venture with Skyward Specialty Insurance Group to provide preferred capacity across the platform, and a fresh strategic investment from insurer White Mountains, announced in February 2026, to fund further growth.
Mike Zabik, a partner at RedBird Capital, has been the consistent voice behind the strategy across multiple deal announcements, framing each acquisition as part of a platform "well positioned to take advantage of secular tailwinds" in the industry. Bishop Street's own leadership - chief executive Chad Levine, a former Aon Affinity chief strategy officer, and president Chad Weber, previously a managing director in Guy Carpenter's North America treaty practice has described the ambition as building "a connected ecosystem of diversified MGAs, each with best-in-class underwriting," sitting on shared data, compliance and distribution infrastructure rather than operating as standalone businesses bolted together.
Stuart Davies brings more than 30 years across the London and international insurance markets: 11 years at Aegis London, then group chief executive of Sompo Canopius, where he ran its international specialty book including the US business. He also sat as a non-executive director at Apollo Group through its sale to Skyward Specialty - the same Skyward Specialty that is now Bishop Street's preferred capacity partner. He currently holds non-executive roles at Milestone Risk Solutions and Momentum Insurance.
Davies has direct, first-hand experience of a specialty underwriter being sold into a larger, US-listed group and coming out the other side – the same transition Avid and Landmark are both mid-way through as they're folded into Bishop Street's shared-services model. For brokers placing business with either MGA, a chairman who has actually lived through that kind of integration, rather than simply advised on one from the outside, is a reasonable signal that someone senior is watching how it affects the capacity and service brokers can expect going forward, succeeding Mark Cliff and Peter Staddon, who are each stepping back after six years chairing the two businesses.
Bishop Street is a particularly visible example of a trend running much wider across the UK's managing general agent sector. More than 350 MGAs collectively place over 10% of the UK's £47 billion general insurance premium pool, and membership of the Managing General Agents' Association rose by 58.5% between 2019 and 2024 - a pace of growth that has made the sector one of the most consistently attractive targets for private capital anywhere in UK financial services.
Private equity's interest isn't hard to explain. MGAs are asset-light: they underwrite on behalf of insurance capital rather than carrying the balance sheet risk themselves, which makes the model easier to scale and considerably easier to value than a traditional carrier. Bishop Street isn't the only platform pursuing this playbook - specialist Lloyd's underwriter Carbon Underwriting recently took a growth equity investment from FTV Capital to expand its own data and AI capabilities, in a deal explicitly framed around the same consolidation backdrop, while Bain Capital has also made strategic investments into UK insurance distribution over the same period.
For brokers with clients placed through Avid, Landmark or any of the other MGAs Bishop Street has acquired, the practical questions worth asking are less about the parent company's strategy and more about what changes underneath it. Consolidation of this kind tends to bring genuine benefits such as better technology, broader capacity access through group-level carrier relationships, and, in Bishop Street's case, a dedicated incubator (Bishop Street Program Managers) designed to help new underwriting teams launch faster using shared infrastructure. But it can also mean shifting appetite, changing underwriting authority, or leadership continuity questions as founder-led businesses adapt to reporting into a larger platform.
Davies' appointment, and the broader wave of MGA consolidation it sits within, is worth watching as an early indicator of how quickly the ownership structure behind a growing slice of London's specialty capacity is changing - and how much of that change is now being driven by private equity money rather than by the underwriters themselves.
