WEEKEND READ: How a Six-Year-Old European Insurance Company

6 September 2026 | EBM Weekend Read By Nick Staunton, Editor-in-Chief

There are not many businesses that can go from an idea to a $2bn valuation in seven years. McGill and Partners has done exactly that. Founded in London in 2019 by former Aon executive Steve McGill and backed from the outset by private-equity firm Warburg Pincus, the specialist insurance broker has grown into a global business with more than 600 employees, revenues of more than $250m and more than 1,000 insurance and reinsurance clients. Now Swedish investment group EQT has agreed to acquire a majority stake for $2bn, giving McGill a new financial backer and raising a bigger question: what exactly has made this young insurance company so valuable?

Built to Challenge the Insurance Giants

McGill and Partners was deliberately created as a challenger. Steve McGill had spent decades inside the insurance industry, including as an executive at Aon, one of the world’s largest insurance brokers. Rather than replicate the corporate model of the established brokers, he and his founding team set out to build a specialist business focused on complex risks and sophisticated clients.

That distinction matters. McGill does not compete by trying to sell standard insurance policies to millions of customers. It operates in specialty insurance and reinsurance, dealing with risks that are often difficult to price, structure or place. Its expertise covers areas ranging from aviation and shipping to cyber risk and highly complex commercial exposures. In an industry where relationships and specialist knowledge can determine whether a complicated risk can be insured at all, experienced people remain an important competitive advantage.

The result has been unusually rapid growth. EQT says the company has gone from an idea in 2019 to a global specialty broker with more than $250m in revenue across seven countries. It describes McGill as a potential “category of one” in specialty broking — a business built around specialist talent, technology and a deliberately independent culture.

Why Insurance Brokers Are So Attractive

The deal also tells us something about private equity’s growing appetite for insurance services.

The attraction is relatively straightforward. Brokers generally do not carry the insurance risk themselves. Instead, they sit between clients and insurers, arranging coverage and earning fees or commissions for doing so. That can produce attractive recurring revenues without requiring the balance sheet of an insurance company.

It is one reason private equity has been moving aggressively into financial services. EBM has previously examined private capital’s growing relationship with insurance, particularly the way investors have increasingly viewed insurance businesses as sources of stable, long-duration revenues and capital. Brokerage is a different model, but the underlying attraction is similar: financial services businesses with specialist expertise and recurring income can be particularly valuable to investors looking for scalable platforms.

The McGill transaction comes at an interesting moment, however. Specialty insurance prices are currently under pressure because of increased competition and relatively few major losses. At the same time, large brokers have faced questions about whether artificial intelligence could eventually automate parts of the brokerage process. The fact that EQT is prepared to pay $2bn anyway suggests it believes McGill’s growth story is about more than the current insurance cycle.

The Technology Advantage

One of the most interesting aspects of McGill is that it has something many older financial-services businesses do not: no legacy technology infrastructure.

Because the company was created from scratch in 2019, it did not inherit decades of fragmented systems, databases and acquisitions. Steve McGill has argued that this has allowed the company to invest in data and technology without having to carry the technological baggage of an older broker.

That could become increasingly important.

Insurance broking is still fundamentally a relationship business, but it is also an information business. Brokers need to analyse enormous quantities of data, understand complex risks, compare markets and construct policies for clients. The more of that process that can be digitised or supported by AI, the more efficiently a specialist broker can potentially operate.

EQT has explicitly identified technology and data as priorities following the acquisition. Its plan is to invest further in digital solutions and analytics while expanding McGill’s international client base.

In other words, EQT is not simply buying a successful insurance broker. It is betting that the company can become a technology-enabled insurance platform.

America Is the Next Big Test

The next phase of the story is likely to be American.

McGill already operates internationally, with offices in the US, Bermuda, Ireland, Australia, Switzerland and Sweden alongside its London headquarters. EQT says it sees “huge market potential” in the United States and intends to accelerate the firm’s expansion there.

That makes strategic sense. The US has the world’s largest insurance market and an enormous concentration of sophisticated corporate clients, financial institutions and specialist risks. It also offers a deep pool of insurance talent and capital.

For a London-based broker specialising in complex risks, expanding further into America therefore represents a natural next step rather than a radical change of direction.

It also reinforces London’s continuing importance to global specialty insurance. Lloyd’s remains one of the world’s most important marketplaces for complex risks, and EQT explicitly talks about using McGill to connect international clients more deeply with the Lloyd’s and London market.

From Startup to Asset

There is a fascinating private-equity cycle underneath the transaction.

Warburg Pincus helped create McGill and backed it from inception. The unusual structure allowed the firm to incubate the business while Steve McGill and his team built it. Seven years later, Warburg is selling its stake to another major investment firm at a valuation of approximately $2bn.

For Warburg, that represents the successful exit from a high-conviction investment. For EQT, it is the beginning of the next stage.

The founders and management are not walking away. Steve McGill will continue as chief executive, chairman John Lloyd will remain involved, and management and employees will retain meaningful ownership alongside EQT. The structure is therefore designed to preserve the entrepreneurial culture that helped create the business in the first place.

That may ultimately be the most important element of the deal.

The Bigger Picture

McGill and Partners is a useful example of where European financial services can still create extraordinary value. It did not need to become the next Aon or Marsh by copying them. It found a specialist corner of a huge market, recruited experienced people, built modern technology from scratch and concentrated on clients with complicated problems.

Seven years later, that strategy has produced a $2bn business.

The deal also demonstrates why private equity continues to look beyond traditional buyouts. The most attractive targets are increasingly companies that combine specialist expertise, recurring revenues, technology and international expansion — businesses that can be scaled without necessarily becoming dramatically more complicated.

McGill now has to prove that the model can work at a much larger scale. EQT wants to accelerate growth, expand in the US and invest heavily in technology. The challenge will be doing all three without destroying the independence and specialist culture that made the company attractive in the first place.

That is the real $2bn question.

McGill may have been built in just six years. The next six will determine whether it becomes one of Europe’s great specialist financial-services success stories — or simply another successful private-equity exit.