Capacity in the specialty insurance market has never been easier to find. Linda Bichener (pictured), co-founder and co-chief executive of Elitium Specialty, believes that abundance is the problem because access to capital does not guarantee access to genuine trade expertise.
"It's not harder to access insurance," Bichener said. "There's lots of capacity out there, and lots of people are able to find it. But by finding capacity you don't always find the expert attached to it as well."
That gap matters because manufacturing remains a substantial and complex part of the UK economy. The sector directly contributed approximately £217 billion in output and supported around 2.6 million jobs in 2023-24, even as output in energy-intensive industries such as basic metals and chemicals has fallen by roughly a third since 2021 amid high UK electricity prices.
Bichener spent 26 years at a large managing general agent (MGA) before co-founding Elitium with Leah Miller in February 2026, backed by MGA capital partner, Mission. The London-based MGA underwrites commercial combined insurance for manufacturing trades, including plastics, metalworking, printing and woodworking businesses, alongside cover for well-maintained unoccupied property risks in the UK.
The launch adds to a wider trend of specialist MGAs entering the UK market as carriers look to delegate underwriting authority to teams with narrow, well-defined expertise. Bichener said Elitium's strategy is to stay within the boundaries of what it genuinely understands rather than expand broadly. "We don't profess to be experts in everything," she said, "but what we are experts in is manufacturing trades and occupied properties."
The gap Bichener describes sits between what online insurance portals are built to capture and what specialist underwriters understand intuitively about a trade. She points to plastics manufacturing as an example. Many plastics businesses carry out an element of recycling as standard practice for sustainability reasons, yet a standardised portal question may simply ask whether the business does "any recycling."
"The broker might tick no, because they've not declared they do any recycling," Bichener said. "But the client might think, that's part of my trade and you specialise in my trade, so why doesn't this reflect what we actually do?" That kind of differentiator, she added, comes from people actually understanding the trade rather than relying solely on a portal, and is where the gap can sometimes appear.
Bichener described Elitium's role as acting like "an extension" of broker teams rather than simply supplying capacity. She argued that clients are ultimately less concerned with comparing quotes than with confidence that a claim will be paid, which she said depends on cover genuinely reflecting how a business operates day to day.
Bichener was clear that she is not arguing against data and digital underwriting tools, which she described as "fundamental." Her concern is what happens when data is used without underwriting expertise alongside it.
"Two risks on paper can look exactly the same," she said, returning to her plastics example. "But when you actually look at the way they run the business, their history, their people, their risk management – some of that can't be captured in a portal or a proposal form. It's actually getting the expertise to work with the data together [that] is your winning formula."
She likened the balance between automation and human underwriting to consumer choices at a supermarket checkout.
"I certainly wouldn't use a quick [self-service] checkout for buying a car," she said. "My concern would be for more complex risk – are we trying to shoehorn trades into one of the boxes because their actual trade is not there?"
Bichener believes the specialty market has become easier to access but harder to navigate as the number of niche appetites and product options has grown.
"There's more choice than ever, which is obviously a positive," she said. "But the downside to that could be trying to navigate through all the different types of appetite. Choice is great, but clients want to know which one's right for them."
Bichener believes specialist underwriting depends as much on industry knowledge as insurance experience. While insurance technical knowledge "can be taught", she argued, practical understanding of how an industry operates is much harder to acquire. She said the business would only expand into new classes if it first brought in people with genuine expertise in those sectors.
Bichener argued that trade fluency builds trust with brokers and clients in a way insurance qualifications alone cannot. "If you can't picture yourself in that premises, then you don't quite have all of the information to hand yet," she said, adding that specialist underwriting depends on maintaining a close understanding of how the industries being insured continue to evolve.
In a softening market, Bichener believes specialist underwriting expertise is becoming an increasingly important differentiator for brokers looking to offer clients more than price alone. Data and automation have an important role to play, she said, but are most effective when paired with underwriters who genuinely understand the trades they are pricing.
