Marco Capital's planned acquisition of Pro Global creates a combined group of roughly 1,400 staff across 15 offices spanning the UK, Europe, North America, Latin America and Australasia - and the executives behind the deal are clear about who they see as the primary audience for what it unlocks.
Speaking to Insurance Business UK after the agreement was announced, PoloWorks chief executive Paul Andrews and Marco Capital chief executive Simon Minshall said existing broker clients should see no disruption from the planned integration. The more significant question is what the enlarged group can offer brokers that neither business could deliver independently.
Andrews said Pro Global's presence across markets including London, New York, Cologne, Buenos Aires and São Paulo changes PoloWorks' geographic reach "in a single pen stroke" - a shift that he argued addresses a practical problem for smaller brokers trying to expand.
Increased FCA scrutiny of how principals manage their appointed representatives, alongside the additional complexity of accessing European and other international markets since Brexit, has made entering new territories more difficult for firms without the scale to build the required infrastructure themselves.
"We can become a great enabler" for brokers that lack that scale, Andrews said.
Minshall said the opportunity also extends to the range of services brokers can offer their own clients, including managing general agents, captive insurers, prospective Lloyd's syndicates and businesses requiring US claims support.
"A lot of the syndicates come through brokers," he said, "as do captives, as do legacy transactions. So the opportunity set for brokers just to meet their clients' needs with us is now bigger."
The same access argument is being extended to brokers at an earlier stage. Alongside MGA incubation through Pro MGA, syndicate and MGA incubation via Polo Managing Agency and a Guernsey-based captive operation, Andrews revealed a broker startup incubation capability that has not yet been formally taken to market.
He pointed to movement among senior broking teams across the market as a potential source of demand, with individuals who control established client relationships increasingly having the opportunity to establish businesses independently. The plan is to combine client finance capabilities with existing systems, including the DXC Assured platform, to support those businesses, with a broader go-to-market push targeted for next year.
The proposition is the same in principle as the international access offer: providing infrastructure that would otherwise require significant investment to build from scratch.
The deal's value to brokers will ultimately depend on execution rather than ambition, and Andrews was direct about the standard he expects the combined business to be held to.
"Nothing's going to change - that's what they should judge us on," he said. "We're going to make sure our broking clients are experiencing the same excellent service they've always had. If anything, there's an opportunity for us to talk about additional ways that we can bring new people, process and technology to that. So it should be an enhancement, not a deterioration. At worst, business as usual, at best an enhancement of our capability that will help them."
Andrews argued that Marco Capital's approach to expansion is "proposition-led" rather than focused simply on adding revenue streams, with acquisitions intended to build complementary capabilities around a defined strategy. The businesses will be integrated quickly rather than operating indefinitely in parallel, with formal change control already under way and planning for a combined 2027 strategy beginning in the final quarter of this year.
"This isn't a case of what are we going to do over the next two years," Andrews said. "We know what we're going to do. We've just got to action that."
That confidence will be tested against a broader industry debate about what consolidation actually delivers. Greater scale can create access to technology, expertise and international infrastructure - but whether those benefits reach brokers in a meaningful way, or simply add another layer between them and the capabilities they need, is a question the combined group will need to answer through its conduct rather than its communications.
