Fiona Marry, European CEO of specialty insurer Bridgehaven, said the MGA model represents a significant growth opportunity, with Continental Europe following the UK and US towards a more MGA-centric market, albeit on its own trajectory and timeline.
Speaking to Reinsurance News around the 2026 Rendez-Vous de Septembre (RVS) in Monte Carlo, Marry explained that Continental Europe isn’t simply a smaller version of the UK or US MGA market, and that’s actually where the opportunity lies.
She said, “The UK has an exceptionally mature delegated authority ecosystem, and the US has enormous scale and a highly developed programme market.”
Meanwhile, Continental Europe is not one market but much more fragmented, with different regulatory environments, distribution models, languages and underwriting cultures.
“But underneath that fragmentation is a very rapidly developing MGA ecosystem,” said Marry. “European MGA premium was around USD 23 billion in 2025, and it has been growing significantly faster than the US market. The headline growth is increasingly being filtered for quality: the market is becoming more concentrated, and profitability, differentiation and carrier confidence matter more than premium growth alone.
“What I find particularly interesting is that the supply-demand equation in Europe is different. There is capital, reinsurance appetite but not all capital is equally accessible to all risks, MGAs or markets — and high-quality, specialist MGAs need durable, well-governed capacity relationships.”
Marry noted that there is substantial reinsurance appetite, but less high-quality insurance paper available to European MGAs.
She said, “That creates a significant growth opportunity for a risk-taking hybrid fronting carrier to become much more than a paper provider. For instance, Bridgehaven’s proposition isn’t simply to provide a balance sheet, it’s to provide the regulated infrastructure, underwriting governance, reinsurance architecture, data, claims capability and ultimately the European platform that allows a good MGA to scale.
Marry continued, “The really interesting part is cross-border scalability. If we can take a high-quality underwriting proposition and help it move from one European market into three, four or five markets, we’re creating far more value than a traditional fronting relationship. That’s why I believe the MGA model represents such a significant growth opportunity: it lets specialist underwriting expertise, regulated capital and reinsurance capital connect more efficiently than the traditional, fully bundled insurance model ever could.”
Marry said that over the next 12 to 18 months, she expects the strongest demand and growth in Continental Europe to come from where there is a combination of structural demand, a genuine capacity gap and specialist underwriting complexity.
“Cyber would be at the top of my list, particularly because penetration across continental Europe remains relatively low,” she said. “I would also point to Financial Lines, Parametric, underinsured catastrophe-exposed perils/risks and specialist commercial/property risks.”
Meanwhile, Marry said the biggest challenges are regulatory and operational rather than related to appetite.
She explained, “Europe gives us a single regulatory architecture through Solvency II and the passporting regime, but that does not give you a single insurance market. Every market still has its own requirements around general good provisions, compulsory insurance, consumer protection, distribution and claims handling, and passporting does not remove those host-state requirements. The revised Solvency II framework comes into application on 30 January 2027, alongside enhanced supervisory cooperation and information-sharing around significant cross-border insurance activity.
“So the challenge is not finding demand, it is building one consistent European operating framework, with the local adaptation each market genuinely requires, without recreating regulated infrastructure country by country.”
