The broker consolidation wave has become one of the defining trends in UK insurance. Private equity-backed groups continue to acquire firms at pace, while the number of genuinely independent mid-sized brokers continues to shrink.
Yet at BIBA 2026, several senior figures offered sharply different views on what that growth is actually achieving. For some, scale is creating stronger businesses. For others, the industry has become so focused on consolidation that it has stopped asking who ultimately benefits.
Not every broker believes acquisitions are always the answer.
"There are a lot of very acquisitive brokers in the market at the moment," said Matt Davies, partner at Lockton. “There's a lot of cash flowing around our market. You've got the aggregators powered by private equity and by the need to deploy and utilise capital, and they have an appetite to rapidly scale their businesses."
Davies said consolidation had dramatically reduced the number of brokers capable of serving larger corporate and commercial clients. Lockton's response has been to focus on delivering specialist expertise and continuity rather than acquisitions, with a focus on organic growth and long-term client relationships rather than dealmaking.
"There's only one thing that's constant in this world and that's change," he said. "But we aim to be that consistent presence. We keep our best people in front of our clients and focus on hiring top tier talent. We try not to get distracted with the other stuff."
Richard Talbot-Jones, director at Talbot Jones, questions something more fundamental: what additional scale is actually supposed to achieve. He has completed, and considered future, acquisitions himself but remains unconvinced that growth automatically improves outcomes for clients.
"We're just over a million GWP, so what's the point of buying another broker so we could be a million and a half?” he said, noting the extra work that would come from scaling.
Talbot-Jones questions whether the industry's fixation on scale is always aligned with the interests of clients. He worries that long-standing relationships, often built over decades, can be treated as transferable assets when they are anything but.
"I've got some clients I've known for 15 to 20 years, some of them are friends now," he said. "I would like to think that if we sold, the new owners would look after them the way I did."
His broader concern is that brokers remain bound by a duty that does not always sit comfortably alongside the commercial incentives driving consolidation.
"You've always got a tension between the need for clients to renew or buy from you, but you shouldn't be acting like a salesman. You should be acting as an agent, a steward of the client's trust."
Jensten takes a different view. For the acquisitive broker, the question is not whether scale matters, but what it enables.
Rob Organ, group CEO argued that the pressures facing brokers, particularly around attracting and retaining talent, have made investment in people increasingly important.
"The core of our business is our people and that's our heartbeat," he said. "The pressures we face around attracting and retaining talent, it's a tough marketplace."
For Gareth Birch, chief executive of Broking, the more important question is whether growth helps brokers serve clients more effectively. In a market being reshaped by technology, consolidation and changing client expectations, he argued that brokers must remain focused on the value they create rather than growth for its own sake.
"Don't get too many big ideas, just remember who we are, the value we add to our clients and continue to deliver that really, really effectively, diligently, day in, day out."
The broker consolidation wave will continue. The economics behind it remain compelling and show little sign of changing.
But what emerged from BIBA 2026 was not a debate about whether consolidation will happen. It was a debate about what it is supposed to achieve.
For some, scale creates stronger businesses and broader capability. For others, the industry risks becoming so focused on growth that it loses sight of the relationships that made those businesses valuable in the first place.
Consolidation may be buying businesses, but it is also buying relationships. Whether those relationships are being protected is another question entirely.
