Acrisure targets SME brokers in M&A drive

US-based Acrisure has moved further into the UK market with Russel Scanlan acquisition, it was bought for an undisclosed sum last week.

Mark McIlquham, president of Acrisure UK retail, said: “We’re looking for other prominent SME brokers that are geographically spread across the UK and Ireland. Russell Scanlan is a SME broker with good private clients. That’s an area that we want to grow, and we’re looking for complimentary businesses.

“We’re very interested in the affinity space behind high net worth and the right parts of personal lines if they fit our model.”

MGA interests

Acrisure is also keen on developing its MGA proposition, earlier this year it bought Volante..McIlquham commented: “We are very interested in the MGA space, we already own MGA’s, and we’ve got Volante in the pipeline.”

McIlquham also mentioned that Acrisure already has further acquisitions planned.

He said: “There are lots of businesses out there that have looked to sell to our competitors, but they didn’t like their [business] models and instead liked ours. Acrisure can provide something different for them.”

McIlquham said potential sellers are attracted to the ‘stock and cash’ buying model Acrisure operates and noted that the broker does not put any debt into the businesses it buys.

He added: “Getting Acrisure stock into the hands of the people that sell their businesses to us is an important part of the model. An acquisition that has been funded in the US will be the same as every other acquisition that we’re going to do in the UK.”

Five-year target

In January 2022, Acrisure told Insurance Age about its expansion plans and revealed its $1bn target in gross written premiums within five years.

McIlquham said: “I’m still very confident in the target. The more conversations we have and the stronger the pipeline develops, the more confident I get, but other companies also have similar aspirations.

“We’re not private equity owned, we’re own by management. It’s a very different exit for people that can retain their brand, retain their businesses, and carry on them as they did before.”

Different propositions

Acrisure previously claimed in January 2022, that it had different propositions to offer the traditional consolidator, which could “disrupt the UK market.”

McIlquham explained the differences: “There’s a tech element for everything we do within Acrisure. If you look across a lot of our competitors, they are all similar and we genuinely believe there’s an opportunity to digitise what we’re doing in the insurance brokerage market.

“There’s an opportunity to cross sell using artificial intelligence. When we do that with our agency partners in the US, we’re looking to replicate that model in the UK, so I think there is an opportunity to disrupt with different technology.”

Acrisure specialises in financial services, with products including real estate services, cyber services, and asset management. It controls around $30bn (£22.1bn) of GWP globally.

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