'A little private equity can work wonders'

There’s life in the broker market yet. Private equity’s renewed appetite for UK GI brokers has been amply demonstrated this week, with companies coming in to back A&A’s management buyout, and Lark Insurance and Bollington set to follow suit. Add in Capita’s acquisition of Fish Insurance for £21m, and it seems that things are on the up. As IMAS’s Olly Laughton-Scott says, investors still see value in brokers, and thank God for that.

Talking of life in the market, take a look at Hyperion. Itself backed by private equity investor 3i, the business has gone from strength to strength. While many of the consolidators are talking big about their flotation plans, we’re tipping Hyperion to be among the first to actually pull it off.

It will be helped in no small measure by its acquisition of Windsor, if it goes ahead. The businesses are a logical fit and, in terms of scale alone, the deal would be a market changer.

Credit must go to Hyperion’s chief executive David Howden. The nature of his international business means he is less well known in the market than his peers in the UK regionals. But given Hyperion’s trajectory, that won’t be the case for long.

♦ “We are not as serious about fraud as we say we are,” says AXA’s Richard Davies of the whole industry. While every insurer, service provider and third-party agency lines up to pay lip service to fighting fraud, all too often they do all too little.

Insurers say they will co-operate with pan-industry initiatives, but fail to stump up the cash when it comes to the crunch. And this is just in personal lines fraud - commercial fraud remains practically uncharted territory.

So we’ve launched The Fraud Charter, a year-long programme intended to turn lofty ambitions into reality. With the industry’s leading counter-fraud professionals, we will identify the problems and barriers to solutions, and deliver the findings to government at the end of this year. Read about the Fraud Charter advisory group’s first meeting here.