Zurich to launch network trading branch for mid-market in Q3
05/07/2025
Zurich is building a mid-market business servicing centre for network members to go live in the third quarter.
The network trading branch in Cardiff will be staffed initially by six employees and grow from there, Morgan Lyons, head of mid-market at Zurich, confirmed.
In the first phase it will service brokers in Cobra, Hedron and Bravo Networks with discussions planned to expand to others including Movo, Momentum and WTW Networks in due course.
Step change
The shift is the result of work on a network strategy that started at the end of 2023, Lyons detailed.
“We’d seen a step change, we thought, across the network landscape,” he said. “We needed to make them more part of our core strategic relationship structure.”
The initial developments, also serviced out of Cardiff, centred on SME business. Across SME Zurich grew premium with networks by 35% last year, the figure rising to 58% with Cobra, Hedron and Bravo.
Having a sales team in Cardiff aligned to the networks and the SME underwriting team in the city “really managed to uncover lots of opportunity for network brokers”, Lyons observed.
Zurich also signed up to Bravo Networks’ Bravo Digital Trader, writing the first policy sold through the e-trade platform in March 2024.
Massive opportunity
“What we see is there is a massive opportunity for us from a midmarket regional trading point of view,” Lyon stated.
“Putting a team of mid-market underwriters into that network trading branch in Cardiff, to service those network brokers, will allow us to feel the halo effect from the growth that we’ve had with all those network members in SME, to start to uncover the more mid-market, complex business that those members control.”
Adding: “Engaging them with a team that fully understands the network proposition that we have from a Zurich point of view will allow us to write more business.”
The six-person strong team will be staffed by a mix of internal appointments and new recruits, Lyons noted, and with expansion planned will turn to the other networks.
“We will no doubt have conversations with the others at a point in time that we’ve got the scale in order to be able to apply the same offer to those networks,” he confirmed.
Target
According to Lyons, the ‘step change’ among networks actually started around three years ago as he hailed the quality of leadership which has pushed forward with “a real clear vision”.
“They were growing and changing the models, and we felt that we needed to have better relationships with them as networks in the entirety,” he acknowledged. The provider wanted to “get more insight into them and connect it to the members” he continued hence the 2023 development and now mid-market move.
The target in mid-market is double digit growth across property, casualty and motor in the 12 months after launch, across the £5m to £50m space.
Choice
The single centre with experts in the firm’s proposition is “about demonstrating our commitment to the networks and the brokers”, he maintained. “We’re excited that it’ll give us the ground to really push on like we have in SME and deliver what we’ve said we’ll deliver.”
However, Lyons made clear that it will all be underpinned by choice. No network members will be forced down the route nor lose relationships they have built up with Zurich’s regional branches.
The insurer has already been through a discussion exercise he stressed and will be guided by broker preference. “This is more about being an accelerator for growth from those
brokers that perhaps aren’t growing in mid-market with us,” he concluded. “Where it’s absolutely working we certainly don’t want to be breaking that model.”
