Pen Underwriting has secured a new multi-year capacity arrangement with Endurance Worldwide Insurance Limited (EWIL), the London company market platform of Sompo International, doubling the capacity available for its UK property owners' practice. The three-year agreement gives Pen authority to write £120 million in premium - double the commitment agreed when the partnership began in 2023.
EWIL initially backed Pen's more complex, individually transacted property owners' policies before extending its support last year to include the MGA's digital propositions. The new deal consolidates both channels under a single expanded commitment. EWIL carries an AM Best financial strength rating of A+ (Superior) as a subsidiary of Sompo Japan Insurance Inc., affirmed most recently in March 2026. It is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the FCA, with its registered office at Mincing Lane in the City of London.
The timing is not incidental. A majority of UK properties were underinsured in 2025. The average property carried only around 66% of the cover required for a full rebuild, according to data from RebuildCostASSESSMENT.com. Construction material prices remain elevated, running around 2% above year-ago levels as of January 2026, according to Department for Business and Trade figures. The Building Safety Act and changing fire safety standards have added further complexity to reinstatement cost estimates, particularly for blocks of flats and mixed-use commercial stock.
The practical consequence for brokers is that sums insured set several years ago - and not reviewed since - may now sit well below actual rebuild costs. That gap affects both straightforward residential lets and the more complex commercial and mixed-use properties that make up a significant part of Pen's appetite. Doubled capacity means more headroom to accommodate accurate reinstatement values and higher-value buildings where previous limits were a constraint.
The property owners' practice covers commercial and residential risks, blocks of flats, standard and non-standard properties, and occupied and unoccupied buildings. Business can be placed digitally through Pen Central or via software houses Acturis and Open GI. Underwriters are available to handle referrals, more complex risks, higher sums insured, or larger portfolios.
Caroline King, Pen's head of property owners' insurance, said investment in data and analytics had enabled more risks to go through the digital trading process, with reduced referral triggers and real-time pricing adjustments based on granular data driving the improvement. Increased underwriter resource had also improved conversion on referred risks.
The EWIL deal sits within a wider pattern of multi-year capacity partnerships Pen has been building as it targets growth from approximately £1 billion in gross written premium to £1.75 billion by 2030. Earlier arrangements include a deal with SiriusPoint for its social housing practice.
Tom Downey, chief executive of Pen Underwriting, said in May 2026 that capacity providers had moved from treating MGAs as opportunistic distribution vehicles to viewing them as more strategic partners - a shift that has made multi-year commitments of this kind increasingly common across the London market. The EWIL deal is the practical expression of that shift for the property owners' practice, giving Pen the underwriting room to write business at rebuild-accurate sums insured in a market where many properties remain underinsured by a third or more.
