When Phil Barton (pictured) first launched Partners& in 2020, he was clear in his ambition to return to the true heartland of insurance broking – the formation of long-term, lasting relationships built on trust. Almost five years into the mission, it’s a proposition that is resonating well across the market as the firm goes from strength to strength, blending organic and inorganic growth, attracting top-tier talent and delivering GWP of £143 million in 2023.
Barton noted that, at its core, broking is a very simple business and “if you look after your clients and the people who serve them, you won’t go far wrong.”
There’s a variety of factors behind the improved metrics at Partners&, Barton said, but it all comes down to understanding what clients want. While most brokers can do the technical and functional aspects of insurance well, they haven’t necessarily developed a more holistic understanding of the wider and emerging risks facing their clients. With that in mind, Partners& has made investments in its own intellectual property around the way it advises clients.
“We’ve built our own advice model, the Partners& Difference, which enables much deeper discovery sessions to be undertaken with a new or existing client,” he said. “Over the last two years, we’ve also built a distinctive client journey because some of the feedback we received from clients was that they don’t hear from their broker until eight weeks before renewal. So, we’ve concentrated our client journey around the whole year, with eight specific touch points with a client in year one.
“It’s very intensive from our perspective, but it enables us to fully understand our client’s challenges and plans. I believe that when we sit down with a client, our role is to enable them to deliver their plan. Our objective is to build resilience so they can anticipate and navigate emerging risks as they occur. So, we’re not really selling insurance as a broker… our objective is to get under the skills of clients, to challenge their understanding of their risk, and then build a tailored support program to help them navigate it.”
Barton highlighted that where Partners& exercises its client journey, it sees retention rates in excess of 97%, which reflects the demand from consumers for real partnership with their brokers. At its essence, a partnership is a balanced relationship that is mutually beneficial and delivers value over the long-term, he said, and you can’t create that relationship unless you respect your clients and your team, and you listen to them.
“We set out with a very distinctive purpose to challenge the market,” he said, “We love insurance and we love the role of the broker, but too often clients are disappointed. We have set out on a mission to change that for the better… I do think the market has become incredibly transactional and very focused on the short-term. And I think that’s a problem for the marketplace because most clients want to build lasting relationships.”
The claims proposition has been a keen focus of improving that relationship – and this was exemplified by Partners&’s acquisition of Bickley Loss Adjusters which specialises in commercial and domestic complex property claims.
Having built out its broking business, with 500 people in 32 offices from Inverness in the north to Newquay in the south, and a budgeted revenue of £60 million for 2024, the next focus for Partners& is to build out an equally high-quality specialist MGA. The group already has a small MGA focusing on very niche risks including fine art, jewellery and whiskey cask collections, Barton said, but it has big plans for growth underway, supported by the Bickley acquisition bringing new loss adjusting capabilities into the team.
“We have a team of 25 loss adjusters, half of whom are liability adjusters, the other half of whom are property adjusters,” he said. “And we have built out the claims proposition for our MGA and perhaps done it the other way round to most MGAs who start out with a talented underwriter who has often stepped away from a large corporate underwriting role to build out that business. But we’ve actually determined that we want to invest in our claims capability first, to enable our MGAs to be high quality from day one.”
It's all about laying the right foundations, he said, because too many businesses try to “harvest the crop before they’ve allowed the sun and the rain to do their work”. For his team, the conviction as always been that it’s by delivering great solutions for clients over the long term that you can deliver sustainable profit and build a sustainable business.
