Mike Latham: Verlingue UK targets ‘Better Future’ with three-year strategic plan

Verlingue UK – the British arm of France-headquartered Adelaide Group – is gearing up to “almost double in size in the UK” through the implementation of its three-year Better Future 2028 strategy, according to the insurance and employee benefits broker’s chief executive, Mike Latham.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times, Latham confirms that Verlingue UK – which comprises around 12% of Adelaide Group’s worldwide operations and is the “largest territory outside of France” – launched its new Better Future 2028 strategy on 1 January 2025.

Internally, work began around the four pillar plan in June 2024. Although Adelaide Group initially determined the key focus areas of clients, people, company and communities, Latham explains that each territory then had to develop “its own translation” of these overarching themes.

For the UK business, Latham is set on using consistent “double digit” organic growth to double the size of the company, seeking to leverage “good client propositions and good retention” alongside “some smaller acquisitions” designed to round out and bolster selected regional offices.

For example, Latham hopes to recruit or acquire an employee benefits team to sit with the four insurance professionals based out of Birmingham, as well as acquire “broking capability” to add to the Gloucester-based employee benefits team of 12.

Ideally, Latham wants to double the size of these teams this year. “We’d like both those locations to be fully fledged offices,” he adds.

Verlingue UK also has offices in Manchester, with 90 staff, and Surrey, where 80 employees operate from. The business has no plans to extend into Wales or Scotland, Latham confirms – he believes the broker already has “good geographical reach” and “a nice cross” in the UK.

Growth agenda

Verlingue has already undergone a steady growth journey after the founding French business started to make international acquisitions in 2007 with the purchase of Manchester broker Alec Finch and Co.

The leaders of these two businesses, Alec Finch and Jacques Verlingue, were friends ahead of the acquisition after being founding parties of the Worldwide Broker Network in 1989.

Verlingue continued to buy internationally after acquiring Alec Finch, adding firms from Switzerland, Italy and Portugal to its stable. However, it did not dabble again in UK-based M&A until 2018, when it bought International Commercial Broking Group.

It was this purchase that “gave us that massive step up”, Latham notes – at the time, Verlingue’s gross written premium (GWP) amounted to £150m, while headcount was 110.

Although this was already an improvement on the £20m GWP and 30 staff the business recorded in 2007, Latham flags that this growth trajectory has continued more recently too, with the broker now handling more than £200m in GWP and employing 215 people.

Latham attributes Verlingue UK’s upwards growth, in part, to the business being family owned and run. Verlingue’s president is currently Benjamin Verlingue, for example, who succeeded his father Jacques in June 2024 – Benjamin represents the fourth generation of Verlingue who has led the firm.

Latham says: “[Verlingue is] not an aggregator. There’s not a private equity play or a future transaction. This is a generational business.

“Benjamin is still in his 30s. There’s a lot of track ahead of Benjamin. I’m sure by the time that Benjamin gets towards the end of his career, one of the children will be ready to take up the battle.

“We are really lucky. We are fortunate. We’re independent, so we can plan for the future. We do things differently. It means we have a great deal of autonomy in the UK.”

Promoting ‘from within’

In terms of how Latham plans to continue Verlingue UK’s growth journey, he intends to steer organic growth through “constantly investing in propositions [and] constantly investing in how we interact with our clients [and prospective clients]”.

He explains: “We increasingly want to do large business. We see our space in the market [as being] between the highly competent, independent brokers and the global brokers – providing resources and engagement that blend between those two things.

“We want to be in that middle ground where there’s not a lot of people.”

Latham adds that the business is “also growing quite quickly [in] the employee benefits space” because this field is “less exploited than the insurance broker element is”, making it “a big opportunity in the UK”.

For example, the broker launched a flexible benefits platform – called Vie – in October 2024.

“We’re particularly interested in exponentially expanding our employee benefits operation,” he says. “We see ourselves as one of few brokers in the UK [that] bring insurance and employee benefits together – along with trade credit.”

Other areas Latham wants to invest in as part of the Better Future approach is “risk management capability” and developing Verlingue’s environmental, social and governance credentials – this would include improving the firm’s understanding about its journey to becoming carbon neutral, accurately measuring this and reviewing its suppliers.

Underpinning these focus areas, however, is something that Latham is a passionate champion of – developing internal talent.

The broker launched its Verlingue Academy in January 2024 to support its ethos of avoiding external hires and homing in on promoting and training internal talent instead.

When looking to fill a role, if an internal candidate roughly measures up to rank seven out of 10 in terms of suitability, but an external candidate scores a nine out of 10, Latham says the business will still choose the internal individual because they are “somebody we know, we like, we trust”.

He explains: “We increase the confidence and capability of our guys to handle larger business and to take our teams on that journey, as opposed to bringing in lots of new talent.

“We like the talent we have and we want to invest in it.

“We all know there’s a shortage of talent. People call it a war on talent, which just seems to be that we all go out into the market, increasingly pay too much for people that [are] not [as] good as the people we already have.

“So, we decided to spend more around growing our own and [having] a real clear intent to promote from within wherever possible.

“Insurance is an industry, it’s not a job. We have to all take responsibility for growing our own, so that is something that we’re tackling.”

Being in ‘good shape’

As the Better Future strategy gets underway, how does Latham plan on measuring its success?

He tells Insurance Times that he does have financial targets around revenue and profitability. Although he declines to provide precise numbers, he does say: “We are forecasted to be where we wanted to be on income.

“We’re probably a little bit behind where we wanted to be on cost, in terms of there’s some inflationary factors in the UK and remuneration for the teams is the biggest part of what we do. But we’re in good shape.”

Furthermore, “we look at client satisfaction a lot”, he adds, and “we also look at [the] ratio between the clients that we win and the clients that we lose”.

He continues: “Our targets are not around new business. Our targets are not around the lapses. They are more around the difference between the two.

“So, if we were to lose more clients, we have to do more new business. If we retain our clients better, then it takes the pressure off new business because we do want to grow – we want to be double digit growth every year.”

Although Latham clearly has strategic targets to achieve per annum, he emphasises that Verlingue UK has “a long journey” ahead thanks to its roots in the Verlingue family.

He says: “We’re not in a position where [we need to] enhance our profitability to maximise our sale prices. Just not us.

“The key for us is what does the business look like in 2028? Not so much what it looks like next year.”