BIBA 2026: Key Insights

BIBA 2026 returned to Manchester Central on 13 and 14 May 2026, and the Genasys team spent both days of BIBA 2026 doing rather more listening than talking. The conference drew more than 9,900 insurance professionals and over 220 exhibitors under the theme Time:To,¹ and a stand at an event that size is less a sales channel than a listening post.

We came to Manchester with brochures and a demo. We left with something more useful: a clearer read on where the broker and MGA market is actually heading in 2026. This article is that read.

The timing helped. On the first morning of BIBA 2026 the Government used the King's Speech to announce an Enhancing Financial Services Bill, the central legislative ask of BIBA's 2026 Manifesto.² That announcement set the tone for two days of unusually candid conversation on the floor.

There was a contradiction running through the week. The headline numbers looked reassuring. Lloyd's had just posted a record result and broker confidence sat near record highs. Yet the conversations on the stand were tense in a way the headlines do not capture.

That gap, between the reported picture and the lived one, is the thread running through everything below. The broker and MGA market in 2026 is not in crisis. It is in transition, and transition is harder to manage than either boom or bust.

Genasys builds cloud policy administration software for insurers, MGAs and brokers, so the conversations we have at BIBA tend to get technical quickly. People talk to us about the systems underneath their business. That is a useful vantage point, because the systems are where a lot of the 2026 strain is showing up first.

What follows is not a write-up of who spoke when. It is ten things the Genasys team heard, argued about and tested in conversation across the stand. Some confirmed what we expected. Several did not.

We have tried to keep these honest. Where a point is backed by 2026 data we have said so and cited it. Where a point is simply what brokers and MGA leaders told us at BIBA 2026, we have said that too. The two are not the same and the difference matters.

None of this is a sales pitch. A few of the ten points below are uncomfortable for a software company to write down, because they are about the limits of technology rather than its promise. We have left them in, because pretending otherwise would waste the thing a stand at BIBA 2026 is actually good for.

1. The broker market is under more pressure than the headlines suggest

The first thing that became clear at BIBA 2026 is how wide the gap has grown between the market's headline mood and its working reality. Broker confidence reads well on paper. Aviva's 2026 Broker Barometer found 95% of brokers expect their business to grow over the next twelve months.⁵ On the stand, the same people were a good deal less relaxed.

The pressure they described was margin pressure. A soft market is pulling rates down across most commercial classes while wage and operating costs keep rising. Paul Goldwin, Insurance Partner at PKF Littlejohn, put it plainly in 2026, noting that soft market rates continue to squeeze broker margins while wider economic pressures add strain to operating cost bases.⁴

The motor numbers show where this leads. EY forecasts that UK motor insurers will pay out £1.11 in claims and expenses for every £1 of premium earned in 2026, up from £1.01 in 2025 and 97p in 2024.³ A book that was marginally profitable two years ago is now structurally loss-making, and brokers feel that through reduced insurer appetite and harder placement.

What the headlines miss is the mood underneath. Brokers told us they have moved from chasing new business to defending the book they already have. Aviva's Barometer shows the same shift, with retention now ranked above acquisition for the first time in several years.⁵

The instruction for a partner like Genasys is clear. Brokers under margin pressure do not want a transformation programme. They want fewer hours lost to manual work and a lower cost to serve. That is a narrower brief than the one the market was selling in 2023, and a more honest one.

2. Digital transformation fatigue is real, but so is the urgency

If one phrase came up more than any other at BIBA 2026 it was some version of "we have been burned before". Brokers and MGA leaders have lived through transformation projects that ran long, cost more than promised and delivered less. The scepticism is earned.

The data backs the scepticism. KPMG's 2026 report on insurance transformation, drawing on a survey of more than 250 insurance leaders, found that only a quarter of transformation initiatives are considered highly successful by the businesses that ran them.⁶ BCG, citing its wider research base, puts the failure rate of core transformation programmes in insurance at 74%.⁷

So the fatigue is rational. The difficulty is that the same people who are tired of transformation also know they cannot stand still. KPMG found that insurers plan to direct around a quarter of operating expenditure toward technology, and nearly eight in ten have adopted or are about to adopt new digital procurement platforms.⁶ The market is still spending. It is just spending warily.

The conversations on the stand resolved this tension in a consistent way. Nobody wanted a multi-year rip-and-replace. Plenty of people wanted a specific, bounded problem solved within a quarter, with a result they could measure. The appetite has not gone. Its shape has changed.

For a software vendor this is a useful correction. The honest pitch in 2026 is not transformation. It is a sequence of small, provable wins that compound. Brokers have heard enough promises. What earns trust now is a working result inside ninety days, then the next one.

3. MGAs are the most energised part of the room

Walk the floor at BIBA 2026 and the energy is not evenly distributed. The MGA conversations had a different temperature. Where many brokers were defensive, MGA founders and underwriting leaders were expansive and noticeably more comfortable talking about technology.

The structural picture explains the mood. The MGAA now represents more than 250 member MGAs underwriting over £18bn of premium between them.⁸ Delegated authority has been the fastest-growing distribution model in the UK market for several years, and the MGA segment behaves accordingly.

That confidence showed up in the questions. MGA contacts did not ask whether they should modernise their policy administration. They asked how quickly a new product could be configured, rated and launched, and whether the platform could carry binders, bordereaux and capacity reporting without manual rekeying. Several raised flexible policy administration with us unprompted, which rarely happens.

It is worth noting that the MGAA had its own presence at BIBA 2026, with members exhibiting together on stand E70.⁹ The segment is organised and increasingly tech-literate, and it knows what it wants from a platform.

For Genasys the read is straightforward. The MGA market is buying for speed to market and for the ability to launch and iterate products without engineering bottlenecks. An MGA lives or dies on how fast it can stand up a new programme. That is a clean, well-defined brief, and it is where a lot of 2026 growth energy sits.

4. Compliance is consuming disproportionate resource

Compliance came up on the Genasys stand at BIBA 2026 with a consistency that was hard to ignore. The complaint was rarely about any single rule. It was about the cumulative drag of Consumer Duty obligations, FCA reporting and audit trails on teams that are not getting any bigger.

The regulator has acknowledged the problem. The FCA's Policy Statement PS25/21, published in December 2025, removed the minimum 15-hour annual CPD requirement and introduced an optional lead-firm model for product approval, with further simplification promised through 2026.¹⁰

BIBA has pushed in the same direction. Its 2026 Manifesto, titled Economic Resilience, asks the FCA to keep simplifying the rulebook and to reduce the frictional cost of regulation.¹¹ The frustration behind that ask is real. Jill Hambley, Managing Director of UKGI Group, said commercial business has essentially been pulled into a framework originally designed for consumers.¹²

What brokers told us at BIBA 2026 matched that exactly. Consumer Duty was written with retail customers in mind, yet the evidencing burden lands just as heavily on commercial teams placing complex risks. The result is skilled people spending their week assembling audit files rather than advising clients.

The technology lesson here is specific. Brokers do not want a compliance module bolted on as an afterthought. They want the audit trail, the product governance record and the reporting to be a by-product of doing the work, captured automatically rather than reconstructed later. Compliance that is designed in costs nothing extra to evidence.

5. Appetite for AI is cautious, not absent

AI was the most discussed topic at BIBA 2026 and also the most carefully discussed. The enthusiasm of 2024 has matured into something more measured. Brokers and MGA leaders are interested, but they want a bounded use case and a clear answer to the question of what happens when the model is wrong.

The wider data explains the caution. Capgemini's World Property and Casualty Insurance Report 2026 found that only 10% of insurers are successfully scaling AI, that 42% track no formal AI performance metrics and that 60% remain at the exploration or proof-of-concept stage.¹³ The gap between AI conversation and AI delivery is still wide.

Senior voices at BIBA 2026 set a realistic tone. Dave Martin, Managing Director of UK Commercial at Aviva, told the conference the industry will always need underwriters, before adding that the inconvenient truth is that AI tends to be more accurate.¹⁴ Ken Norgrove, CEO of Intact Insurance UK, was blunter still, saying AI will change how the industry operates but is not yet having a transformative impact.¹⁵

The use cases brokers raised with us were narrow and sensible. Document ingestion, bordereaux processing and renewals triage came up repeatedly. These are bounded, high-volume tasks where a wrong answer is visible and correctable. Nobody on the stand wanted AI making unsupervised underwriting decisions.

The regulatory backdrop supports the caution. The FCA has confirmed it will not write AI-specific rules, relying instead on existing frameworks.¹⁶ For Genasys the lesson is to treat AI as plumbing rather than magic. Embed it where it removes a known, repetitive task, keep a human accountable for the outcome and measure the result. That is what the 2026 buyer will pay for.

6. Integration headaches remain the number one technology complaint

Strip away AI and the most common technology complaint at BIBA 2026 was older and more mundane. Systems do not talk to each other. Brokers described rekeying the same client data across quoting tools, policy administration and finance, and losing hours to it every week.

The scale of the problem is easy to underestimate. BCG estimated global insurance IT spending at around $210bn in 2023, with only about 13% of that earmarked for transformation.¹⁷ The overwhelming majority goes on keeping existing systems running. The industry is spending heavily and mostly standing still.

The cost of poor integration is not only wasted hours. It is data quality. Every manual rekey is an opportunity for error, and errors propagate into pricing, into reporting and into the audit trail. ACORD reports that firms adopting its Gen 2.0 data standards have cut unallocated cash by up to 70% and reduced manual processing effort by around 60%.¹⁸ Clean data movement pays for itself.

This was the most practical thread of the week. Brokers were not asking for novelty. They were asking for a policy administration platform with an open, well-documented API that connects to the tools they already run, so that data is entered once and flows everywhere it is needed.

Genasys has written before about the hidden cost of poor system integration, and BIBA 2026 confirmed it is still the issue brokers feel most directly. The lesson is that integration is not a technical detail to settle late in a procurement. For many firms it is the whole point of changing platform at all.

7. People still want to do business face to face

For an industry that talks constantly about digital distribution, BIBA 2026 was a reminder of how much business still moves through a handshake. The clearest evidence was the stand itself. Conversations that had stalled over email for months were settled in ten minutes in Manchester.

The numbers around the event support the point. BIBA 2026 drew more than 9,900 professionals, and the previous edition set an attendance record.¹ An industry that had genuinely gone digital-first would not fill a convention centre in Manchester every May. Brokers still value the room.

Aviva's research found the same instinct. Its 2026 Broker Barometer reported that strengthening relationships with insurers was the single highest priority brokers brought to BIBA 2026. Dave Martin of Aviva noted that brokers wanted to use their time in Manchester to build stronger ties with insurers for the benefit of shared customers.¹⁹

EY makes the structural version of this argument. In its 2026 Global Insurance Outlook the firm writes that insurance is essentially a human business and will remain one in the age of AI.²⁰ Relationships are not a nostalgic add-on. They are how trust and information actually move through the market.

For a software company this is a healthy corrective. Technology should make the human conversations easier, not replace them. The platforms that win in 2026 are the ones that hand brokers their time back, so they can spend it where the value is, in the room with a client or an underwriter rather than at a keyboard.

8. Pricing and capacity volatility is reshaping product thinking

A recurring theme in the more senior conversations at BIBA 2026 was volatility, and what it does to product design. After several hard years the market is softening, and softening unevenly. That unevenness is forcing brokers and MGAs to think harder about how products are built.

Lloyd's results show the turn. The market posted a £10.6bn profit for 2025 with a combined ratio of 87.6%, but rates fell 3.7% over the year after seven years of increases, and Lloyd's forecasts gross written premium of around £64bn for 2026 at a softer combined ratio.²¹

The direction of travel was confirmed days after the conference. In its May 2026 market message Lloyd's warned that first-quarter rates had come off faster than anticipated and urged syndicates to build realistic plans as rate adequacy for 2027 comes under threat.²² Brokers placing risks in 2026 are working in a market that is repricing under them.

What brokers told us on the stand followed from that. When rates move quickly, the ability to restructure a product or stand up a new scheme without delay becomes a competitive advantage. A firm that needs an engineering project to change a rating factor is too slow for this market.

This is the clearest product brief Genasys took from BIBA 2026. Flexibility in how policies are configured and rated has moved from a convenience to a requirement. The market is volatile enough that the firms able to reprice and relaunch quickly will take share from the firms that cannot.

9. The talent pipeline is a quiet crisis

Almost every longer conversation at BIBA 2026 reached the same place eventually. There are not enough people. The shortage spans underwriting, compliance and technology, and it is quiet only because the industry has not made much noise about it.

The CII has put numbers to the problem. Drawing on its workforce research at the launch of its Birmingham City University talent pilot in December 2025, the CII noted that one in four insurance employees is over 50, that more than 70% of insurers report shortages in data and technology skills, and that just 4% of young people see insurance as an appealing career.²³

EY frames the underwriting side of this starkly. In its 2026 Global Insurance Outlook the firm warns that a large number of skilled staff are approaching retirement, especially in underwriting, while insurers still struggle to find the people they need.²⁰ The knowledge walking out of the door is not being replaced at the same rate.

Brokers connected this directly to technology when they spoke to us. A stretched team cannot afford a platform that takes months to learn. They asked about onboarding time, about how much training a new joiner needs and about whether the system reduces the load on experienced staff rather than adding to it.

For Genasys the lesson reframes what good software is for. A policy administration platform is not only a processing engine. It is a way to make a smaller team viable, to shorten the time a new starter needs to become productive and to hold institutional knowledge in the workflow rather than only in people's heads.

10. The gap between ambitious firms and the rest is widening

The last thing BIBA 2026 made clear is also the most uncomfortable. The market is splitting. There is a visible distance between firms investing in modern platforms and firms patching what they already have, and that distance is growing.

The research describes the same divide. Capgemini found that the insurers it calls intelligence trailblazers achieve up to 21% higher revenue growth than their peers.¹³ BCG is blunter, arguing that core system modernisation has become an existential question and that firms which delay risk sliding toward irrelevance.⁷

Consolidation is widening the gap further. McKinsey reports that insurance M&A deal value reached roughly $104bn in 2025, up from $88bn the year before, with the average deal markedly larger.²⁵ Scale players are using acquisition to pull ahead, and a modern platform is what lets them absorb a target without inheriting its mess.

On the stand the split was easy to see. Some firms talked about 2026 in terms of what they were building. Others talked about it in terms of what they were holding together. Those are different conversations, and the firms having the second one know it.

The honest lesson for Genasys is that this gap is not a marketing opportunity to be enjoyed. It is a real risk to a chunk of the market. The firms on the wrong side of it are not unaware. They are stuck, usually because their current systems make change expensive. Making that change affordable is the job that matters.

What This Means For Us

Ten takeaways from two days is a lot to hold at once, but they point in one direction. The broker and MGA market is not in decline. It is changing shape, caught between headline numbers that look healthy and a working reality that is genuinely harder.

Lisa Sturley of the FCA told BIBA 2026 that this is a time for brokers to lead.²⁴ The conversations on the Genasys stand suggested brokers and MGAs are ready to, provided the technology underneath them helps rather than hinders. That is the bar we took home from Manchester.

If any of these ten points sounded like your 2026, we would like to continue the conversation that BIBA 2026 started. You can see how Genasys approaches cloud policy administration for insurers, MGAs and brokers, or talk to the team directly. The stand has packed up, but the listening has not.