OAK Global has received Lloyd’s approval to launch OAK Partnerships, a new business unit that will provide multi-class capacity for portfolios of risk written by underwriting partners, starting from January 1, 2027.
Capacity will come from OAK Syndicate 1440, and will cover property, specialty, credit and casualty business through a single underwriting relationship.
Elisabeth Groehe has joined as chief underwriting officer of OAK Partnerships. She will also serve as joint active underwriter of Syndicate 1440 alongside Roland Morse, chief underwriting officer of OAK Enterprise. Groehe has more than a decade of underwriting leadership experience in the portfolio insurance market.
The launch adds a third strand to a group that has expanded quickly at Lloyd’s. OAK Global’s flagship unit, OAK Reinsurance, writes primary reinsurance through Syndicate 2843. In 2025, it launched OAK Enterprise, writing property and specialty retrocession through Syndicate 1440, which began underwriting on January 1, 2026. That syndicate is managed under a turnkey arrangement with Polo Managing Agency, and is backed by capital providers including Bain Capital.
OAK Partnerships will now share Syndicate 1440 with the retro business.
Cathal Carr, founder, chief executive and group chief underwriting officer of OAK Global, said the new unit would bring the group’s technology-enabled underwriting to a new set of partners.
“For our capital providers, this will further diversify OAK Global’s offering by adding a lower volatility underwriting strategy and risk profile that is highly complementary to our existing reinsurance and retrocession portfolios,” said Carr.
OAK Global is positioning its data and technology at the centre of the offer. OAK Partnerships will use the group’s proprietary technology platform and industry dataset for risk analytics. It plans to share portfolio analysis, benchmarking and insight with its partners.
Groehe said continued improvement in the quality and availability of granular risk data made this the right time to bring OAK Global’s mix of data intelligence and underwriting talent to portfolio insurance.
For MGAs and other delegated authority partners, OAK Partnerships offers something in demand: long-term, multi-class capacity from one Lloyd’s syndicate, backed by Lloyd’s security, licensing and ratings. Partners writing across several classes often have to assemble capacity from multiple carriers. A single relationship covering property, specialty, credit and casualty can simplify that, and reduce the risk of losing one line mid-programme.
The commitment to share portfolio analytics could also appeal to MGAs looking to demonstrate underwriting performance to capacity providers, which has become more important as Lloyd’s scrutiny of delegated authority business has increased.
The question is scale and durability. The delegated authority market has plenty of capacity on offer, and partners will judge OAK Partnerships on how long it stays committed through the cycle. Carr’s description of the business as a lower-volatility strategy, complementing the group’s more volatile retro book, suggests OAK sees it as a stabiliser for its own portfolio. That is an incentive to stay the course.
