Growing the pie
For someone now arguing brokers have a central role to play in insurance innovation, Julia Henderson, Bermuda CEO of McGill and Partners, admits joining their ranks was never part of the plan.
“I did not have being a broker on my bingo card,” she told Bermuda:Re+ILS.
Henderson had spent much of her career on the other side of the table, running companies and risk capital, working in technology and MGAs and developing insurance-linked securities (ILS) solutions.
“I thought the manner in which brokers were traditionally structured was fundamentally unaligned with what I thought was best for clients,” she said.
McGill and Partners challenged that assumption. Henderson was attracted by a structure she describes as collaborative and client-centric, combined with technology embedded into the business from the outset.
A year into the job, however, the bigger revelation has been about the role broking itself can play: “Having started my own companies, worked in tech and at carriers, I actually think innovation truly lives in the hands of the broker.”
Turning ideas into markets
Henderson is careful not to suggest brokers are necessarily where original ideas are born. MGAs, entrepreneurs and technology businesses are often the specialists identifying risks and developing products around them. “I’m not saying the innovation is created by the brokers, but it’s accelerated and driven by them,” she said.
Henderson explained her reasoning for this with MGAs as an example. She described working with some newly established MGAs who’ve had a good idea, but that does not automatically make a viable insurance product. Someone still has to translate that proposition into a structure an insurer understands, determine where it fits within underwriting appetites and ultimately bring together risk and capital on terms that work for both. Henderson has seen that process across areas including credit, carbon credits and parametric insurance.
This is where the broker can take the wheel: “It’s the work in that translation and ability to take a rough mould and shape it into something that would fit within an insurer’s appetite that can really push innovation forward in the market,” she said.
Her experience on the MGA side has reinforced the point. Even with deep expertise and direct knowledge of insurance markets, Henderson found going directly to carriers significantly harder without a broker.
That intermediary role becomes more important as the capital supporting insurance becomes more diverse. Traditional balance sheets, ILS investors, fronting carriers and other sources of capital have different appetites, constraints and expectations. Connecting them effectively requires more than simply finding a buyer for a risk.
Technology, Henderson believes, should make that process more efficient.
That does not mean making the broker redundant. Instead, technology can remove friction from transactions where human intervention adds little, leaving brokers to concentrate on areas where their knowledge of markets, structures and clients matters.
“Technology is just enabling broking at a much more thoughtful, faster pace,” Henderson said, giving the McGill and Partners and AIG relationship, which utilises agentic AI for risk mapping and real-time monitoring, as an example.
Growing rather than dividing
That ability to create and enable new business could become particularly important as competition increases across re/insurance. “This is a softening market we’re going into in almost all lines of business. A typical response is to pursue a bigger share of that pie, even though it’s somewhat shrinking. I think brokers have a responsibility to do the hard work to expand the pie: how do we build out this business to be broader, wider, better for both carriers, underwriters, and ultimately clients all across the value chain,” Henderson said, pointing out that this was one of the attractions of joining McGill and Partners.
She said expanding that pie cannot simply mean pushing new products into the market regardless of their economics. Innovation that generates premium but leaves carriers overexposed is ultimately self-defeating.
“We’ve seen some brokers in the past push out new products to the market that were irresponsibly structured, meaning that they were more likely to take a loss and hurt the carriers, which hurts everyone in the long run,” she said.
The same tension exists around price. A broker’s responsibility to its client naturally includes securing competitive terms, but Henderson argues that the cheapest answer today might not always produce the best outcome tomorrow. “It’s our job to do the best thing for our clients. Sometimes that is getting the best price by pushing as hard as you can. But other times, it’s about making sure that you have that capital available for you and your business long term.”
It is an outlook informed by years of underwriting. Henderson describes herself as a “recovering underwriter”, occasionally having to remind herself that it is no longer her job to decide whether a risk should be written. The broker’s job, instead, is to ensure the parties understand the risk and can make an informed decision.
An origination market
For Bermuda, Henderson believes there is an opportunity to apply that philosophy much more broadly. The island is already one of the world’s most important centres for reinsurance, retrocession and alternative capital. Yet its broking community, she argues, has historically been more associated with accessing that capital than originating entirely new areas of business.
“A lot of the brokerage offices on island are focused really on retro or industry loss warranties, which is great, but what attracted me to McGill was my focus on being able to bring new lines of business to that. I think we could, as a brokerage community on island, do a better job of thinking through originating new lines,” she said.
Henderson sees particular potential around specialty credit, including structured risk transfer and credit risk transfer, where she says interest from both clients and underwriters is growing. More broadly, she sees scope to use insurance balance sheets in increasingly sophisticated ways to support financial products and risks that have historically sat elsewhere.
Bermuda has an unusual advantage in doing so. Capital, underwriting expertise, broking knowledge and regulatory experience are concentrated within a remarkably small physical market.
Henderson credits the Bermuda Monetary Authority with helping create an environment capable of balancing innovation with discipline. But there is also something less formal at work: proximity. Many of the markets capable of supporting new structures are within walking distance of one another. Henderson said that “being able to just walk into someone’s office or grab a coffee with them is really wonderful. You can get some really cool stuff done”.
The opportunity for brokers now is to turn more of those conversations into new markets. Bermuda has long excelled at finding capital for risk. Its next chapter might increasingly be about finding new risks for that capital and building the structures that allow both to meet.
Read the full Bermuda:Re+ILS Annual 2026 here.
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