You Bought the Books. Nobody Is Reading them!

The filings of the largest consolidators tell a consistent story.

Acrisure grew revenue from $38m to more than $4bn in about a decade. In April 2026 S&P moved its outlook to negative after the S&P-adjusted EBITDA margin fell about 600 basis points to 21% in 2025. Well, they have started on the journey with Palantir, but still some distance to cover!

 PIB Group completed a record 31 acquisitions in 2025 and lifted revenue from £529.8m to £644.7m. Organic revenue growth was 1% in the first half of 2025, and 1% again in the first half of 2026.

Hub International closed 49 acquisitions in 2025, with brokerage revenue up 10.1% to $4.75bn. Its latest private raise valued it at $29bn ahead of a planned listing.

Steadfast transacted A$1.4bn of GWP on its client trading platform in FY25, a minority of the premium its network places.

The supply of deals is also thinning. OPTIS counted 695 announced agent and broker transactions in the US and Canada in 2025, down 11.7% on 2024 and 24% below the five-year average. Acquirers priced future cross-sell into the multiples they paid. Few have built the mechanism to collect it.

The constraint is arithmetic, not intent. A UK SME package at £1,500 premium and 20% commission earns the broker £300 a year to service, renew and advise. A proper gap review takes two to three hours once the schedule, endorsements, claims history and peer exposures are pulled together. At a loaded cost of £35 to £45 an hour, that is around a third of the year's income spent before the client conversation starts.

A small US commercial account at $8,000 and a 10% renewal commission faces the same maths. Reviews are rationed to the largest accounts, and the long tail renews as it was.

The cost of that rationing is measurable. Hiscox found 74% of SMEs globally, and 77% in the US, are underinsured. The evidence for most of those gaps already sits in documents the broker holds.

The data is fragmented. Acquired firms still run Applied Epic, AMS360, Acturis or OpenGI as they were bought. There is no consolidated client view.

People are committed, however scalability is the challenge. The handlers who know the clients run the renewals. Moving them onto a data programme costs commission now for benefit later.

The bar for advice is rising. Consumer Duty requires evidence that recommendations deliver fair value. US carriers working under the NAIC model bulletin on AI expect the same audit trail from distribution.

Internal builds are slow. Hiring data engineers, integrating each estate and governing models typically takes 15 to 18 months before the first renewal pack reaches a handler

Broker IQ is an intelligence layer across every acquired book. The partner owns the data work and the run. The broker's handlers own the client.

Diagnose (10 weeks, fixed fee). Ingest one acquired book as-is, score every client for gaps and under-limits against peer cohorts, and size the prize in the broker's own data.

Build (3 to 4 months). A Client 360 across AMS estates. AI extracts cover, limits and exposures from schedules, endorsements, PDFs and emails, and benchmarks each SME by trade, size and location.

Run (managed service). A pre-renewal pack reaches the handler 60 to 90 days out: the gap, the evidence, a premium indication and a short talk track. Pack preparation is right-shored. The conversation stays local.

Share the upside. Fees step down as gain-share on incremental commission steps up, so the partner is paid for placed premium.

McKinsey estimates AI can lift agent productivity by 10 to 20%. The larger prize is commercial: every handler can advise on every renewal, not only the top decile

The business case

Illustrative group: 80,000 SME clients and $112m annual commission. We assume 40% of clients carry a placeable gap, conversion of presented gaps rises from 6% to 14%, each new line earns $450 of commission, 90% of added lines renew, retention improves by one point in each of years two and three and released handler time is valued at $40 an hour with half redeployed.

By year three the owned book adds $6.3m of revenue a year, about 5.6 points of organic growth, from clients the group has already paid for. Partner-led delivery reaches first value in a quarter and returns $8.8m over three years. The in-house route returns $2.6m, because its first year goes on integration and hiring.

Consolidators have spent a decade buying books on the premise of cross-sell. The firms that collect it will work on the book at every renewal and will buy the capability rather than spend two years building it. A ten-week diagnostic on one acquired book answers the question with the broker's own data.