Thanks to a wave of retiring baby boomers and the resulting flurry of merger and acquisition activity, the insurance brokerage space is smaller than ever. Now, a new ranking from a London research firm reveals that commercial lines business is being split in a highly top-heavy manner among those companies still in the game.
According to Finaccord, the world’s top 15 insurance brokers write more than 43% of commercial lines business in the property/casualty space. When considering the top 150 brokers, that number jumps to nearly 59%.
These 150 brokers bring in revenues of $28.5 billion in a market Finaccord estimates to have been worth around $48.5 billion in 2013, while the top 15 earned revenues of $20.9 billion.
The major players
Of these top brokers,
Aon was by far the largest competitor, earning $6.1 billion in worldwide commercial lines revenues in 2013.
Marsh took second with revenues of $5.1 billion, followed by Willis with $2.1 billion.
These top three companies write more than 25% of the commercial lines market’s business.
And while London may be considered the hub of the insurance market, Finaccord’s research reveals that 67 of the world’s largest brokerages are headquartered in the US, with 24 in the UK, 14 in France, 12 in Germany and eight in Canada.
Bernd Bergmann, a consultant with the research firm, attributes this split to the increased reliance of carriers on the broker distribution channel in these countries.
“The strong presence of North American brokers in the ranking is primarily due to the huge size of the US and Canadian commercial property and casualty markets and the fact that brokers (including independent agents) dominate distribution in both the US and Canada,” Bergman said. “In addition, a number of large brokers in North America are driving their growth through acquisitions while the majority of their counterparts in Europe rely more on organic growth.”
Finaccord did not include personal lines, employee benefits or wholesale insurance and reinsurance sales in its rankings.
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