The Excess and Surplus (E&S) lines market has had a remarkable run. For six consecutive years through to 2024, U.S. E&S direct premiums written grew at double-digit rates reaching nearly $98.2 billion in 2024, up from $75.5 billion in 2022, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence's 2025 U.S. Excess & Surplus Market Report. Even as growth has moderated in 2025, AM Best confirmed that the E&S market continues to absorb a greater number of risks better suited to the surplus lines environment, and the structural shift in the market's role within the broader P&C industry is firmly established.
But this is not simply a premium growth story.
Andrew Martin, Consultant at Eliot Partnership's New York office and a specialist in E&S and specialty insurance leadership hiring, is clear on this point. The growth in E&S demand, the influx of new capacity, and the increasing complexity of the risks entering the market are not just commercial developments they are catalysts for structural change. The way E&S businesses are built, led, and staffed is being fundamentally rethought.
For boards, CEOs, and leadership teams operating in this space, the strategic question is no longer simply "how do we grow?" It is: "Are we structurally capable of growing and sustaining that growth over time?"
This piece examines how the E&S boom is reshaping organisational design, what it means for leadership teams, where firms are investing wisely and where they are leaving themselves exposed, and what the most forward-thinking organisations are doing differently.
The Rise of MGAs, Syndicates, and New Entrants
The single most visible structural consequence of the E&S expansion has been the proliferation of new market participants.
The U.S. MGA market wrote an estimated $114.1 billion in direct premiums in 2024, growing 16% year-over-year and outpacing the broader property-casualty market for the fifth consecutive year, according to Conning's Managing General Agents: Built for What's Next (2025). That growth is being driven by a convergence of forces: continued migration of underwriting talent from carriers and brokers to MGAs, sustained premium flow into the E&S market, and rising investor appetite for specialty risk platforms.
AM Best identified 198 MGAs that began writing after 2022, and those new entrants already account for 14% of total MGA market premiums a remarkable pace of market formation. In the U.K., MGAA membership reached 249 members in 2025, a 58.5% increase since 2019, according to data compiled by Genasys. Business Insurance has reported close to two dozen new entrants on the casualty side alone in recent years, many operating on MGA structures with various capacity arrangements behind them.
Lloyd's is a parallel story. Interest in establishing and investing in Lloyd's syndicates accelerated sharply in 2024, with new participants attracted by strong underwriting returns and adequate rates. The market's gross written premium rose 4.2% to £57.9 billion in 2025, with 10.3% volume growth reflecting both new participation and expansion by existing syndicates. The market's concentration is dispersing: AM Best noted that the top 25 surplus lines groups, which historically accounted for 70–80% of surplus lines premiums, saw their combined share fall to 65.8% in 2024 the lowest concentration in decades. As AM Best Associate Director David Blades noted, this "declining concentration at the top of the market reveals the impact new market entrants and companies with expanded surplus lines-focused strategies have had."
The practical consequence for any business operating in this space is clear: the competitive landscape is becoming more fragmented, more specialised, and faster-moving. The era of a handful of large carriers setting the pace of competition is being replaced by a more dynamic market populated by nimble, specialist platforms each fighting for the same narrow pools of risk, capital, and talent.
From Traditional Carriers to Agile Operating Models
This fragmentation has triggered a broader rethink of how E&S businesses structure themselves.
The traditional layered insurance operating model characterised by hierarchical decision-making, generalised underwriting teams, and lengthy internal approval chains is ill-suited to a market where speed, specialism, and distribution relationships are the primary competitive levers.
What is emerging in its place are leaner, more focused structures. Specialist teams with concentrated risk expertise. Faster underwriting decision-making. Closer alignment between underwriting and distribution functions, which in E&S are often inseparable from competitive advantage. The ability to build and maintain strong broker relationships is no longer an ancillary function; for many E&S platforms, it is the business model.
McKinsey's research on agile operating models in insurance has documented that when agility is embedded across the value chain through cross-functional teams, clearer accountabilities, and faster decision pathways insurers can improve both customer experience and speed-to-market significantly. The E&S market is now making that transition not as an aspiration, but as an operational necessity. Platforms that cannot quote quickly, respond to brokers decisively, and adapt their risk appetite faster than competitors are losing ground.
What this means structurally is that organisational design is being treated as a strategic question. The firms gaining share are not those with the most resource; they are those structured for speed and flexibility, with underwriting, distribution, and strategy operating as integrated functions rather than siloed departments.
Leadership Teams Are Being Reconfigured
The shift in operating models is forcing a parallel shift in leadership architecture.
For most of E&S's history, the dominant leadership profile was defined by deep technical underwriting expertise. The best underwriters rose through the ranks, and leadership meant commanding the technical respect of a specialist team. That profile remains valuable. But it is increasingly insufficient.
As our own research on insurance leadership has noted, boards hiring for 2026 and beyond are asking fundamentally different questions than they were a decade ago. The environment demands leaders who can navigate multiple dimensions of complexity simultaneously not just underwriting judgement, but commercial growth, distribution strategy, P&L ownership, and the ability to attract and develop specialist talent.
In E&S specifically, this is manifesting in concrete ways. Roles that were previously defined almost entirely by underwriting authority Head of Underwriting, Chief Underwriting Officer are now being spec'd with explicit expectations around broker relationship management, portfolio strategy, and business development. CEO and MD roles in E&S platforms are increasingly being filled by executives with hybrid profiles: technically credible enough to command respect internally, but commercially driven enough to build a book and own a P&L.
The move away from siloed leadership towards integrated teams is also accelerating. Underwriting and distribution leadership that once operated in parallel with formal handoffs and little strategic alignment is being replaced by shared ownership of growth targets, combined accountability for client outcomes, and leadership structures that deliberately blur historical functional boundaries.
For executive search, this is creating genuine complexity. The specification of the ideal E&S leader has widened considerably, and the pool of candidates who genuinely possess the full combination of required attributes has not kept pace.
The Rise of the "Hybrid" E&S Leader
The defining talent challenge in the E&S market right now is the scarcity of what might be called the "hybrid" leader an executive who combines deep technical underwriting credibility with genuine commercial acumen and strategic growth capability.
This profile is not new in concept. The insurance industry has long valued leaders who can straddle the technical and commercial worlds. What has changed is the urgency and specificity of that demand. In a market where new platforms are competing intensely for the same risks, where broker relationships are the primary route to distribution, and where P&L ownership is a baseline expectation rather than a senior milestone, the hybrid leader is not an ideal it is a requirement.
The challenge is that most leaders in the market were developed in environments that optimised for one dimension or the other. Strong underwriters built their careers in deep technical specialisms. Strong commercial leaders came up through distribution or brokerage routes. The overlap executives who are technically credible enough to lead underwriting teams and commercially effective enough to drive strategic growth is a relatively thin stratum of the available talent pool.
A 2024 McKinsey Global Insurance Market Report found that 40% of an insurer's performance is driven by the lines of business and geographies it chooses to enter a finding that underscores how critical strategic and commercial judgement at the leadership level has become. For E&S platforms, where risk selection and market positioning are existential decisions, that judgement cannot sit with the CEO alone. It needs to be distributed across the senior leadership team.
This creates a significant implication for hiring strategy. Firms that continue to hire for one dimension either the technical specialist or the commercial operator are building teams with structural gaps. The question is not whether those gaps will become visible, but when.
Where Firms Are Over-Investing in Talent
One of the clearest patterns in E&S talent markets right now is a heavy concentration of investment at the very top of the organisation.
The competition for proven, senior E&S leaders has intensified substantially. Individuals with strong track records of building and managing specialty books particularly in high-growth lines such as casualty, cyber, construction, and professional liability are in exceptionally high demand. Compensation benchmarks for top-tier E&S executives have risen accordingly, and search timelines for senior mandates have lengthened as the available pool has thinned.
This is a rational response to a competitive market. Boards and investors are deploying significant capital into new E&S platforms and want experienced leadership in place to protect that capital and drive returns. The instinct to hire proven performers at the senior level is understandable.
But there is a risk in allowing that instinct to dominate all talent investment decisions. When firms concentrate hiring effort and budget at the very top and give relatively little attention to the layers below they create organisations that are dependent on a small number of individuals. Fast-scaling environments often expose this dependency quickly. A senior hire who is outstanding at building a book may not be equipped to develop the team structures and capabilities needed to sustain that growth at scale.
The broader talent shortage in the industry amplifies this risk. The U.S. insurance sector is projected to lose around 400,000 workers by 2026, driven by an aging workforce retiring faster than it can be replaced. Senior E&S talent is particularly concentrated in a generation approaching the later stages of their careers. Firms that have not built the next layer of leadership beneath them will face a compounding problem when that generation steps back.
Where Firms Are Under-Investing
If the over-investment pattern is at the top, the under-investment pattern is at the mid-level and in the enabling functions that allow organisations to scale.
The mid-level leadership tier senior underwriters, team leads, emerging commercial leaders is where succession pipelines are built. It is also where the next generation of E&S hybrid leaders will come from. And it is the level that most E&S platforms are currently neglecting.
Part of this is structural: in a fast-moving, deal-driven market, there is always more urgency around the next senior hire than around developing the person who might be ready in three to five years. Part of it is cultural: E&S businesses built around technical credibility often promote strong underwriters into leadership roles without adequately developing the commercial and strategic dimensions that those roles now require.
A 2024 LinkedIn Learning survey found that 94% of employees stay longer at companies that invest in their development data that the insurance sector has been slow to internalise. Mid-level talent that does not see a structured pathway to senior leadership is increasingly willing to move, particularly as the proliferation of new MGA and specialty platforms has created abundant external options.
The operational and support functions enabling E&S businesses to scale technology infrastructure, data and analytics capability, compliance and regulatory expertise are equally under-resourced at many firms. These functions do not generate revenue directly, but they underpin the ability of underwriting and distribution teams to perform at speed and volume. Firms that build excellent underwriting capability but do not invest in the infrastructure required to support it tend to hit growth ceilings that are invisible until they have already been reached.
The Structural Risks Emerging in the Market
Taken together, the patterns above point to a set of structural risks that are becoming increasingly visible across the E&S landscape.
The first is over-reliance on a small pool of senior talent. When an E&S platform's competitive position is built primarily around one or two exceptional individuals whether a founder-underwriter, a star commercial leader, or a key broker relationship holder it creates fragility. The departure of those individuals, whether through retirement, recruitment, or burnout, can destabilise the business. In a market where senior talent is hotly contested, this is not a theoretical risk.
The second is weak succession planning. Pinsight has estimated the cost of a failed leadership transition at three to five times annual salary when broader business effects are considered. At E&S leadership compensation levels, a single failed senior transition can represent a material financial event quite apart from the strategic disruption. Firms that have not built deliberate succession processes below the board level are accepting that risk.
The third is misalignment between growth ambitions and team structure. Many E&S businesses have set aggressive premium targets and built senior leadership teams capable of winning business but have not built the organisational depth required to manage, retain, and develop that business sustainably. The result is that growth creates internal strain rather than internal capacity.
The fourth is cultural mismatch in fast-scaling environments. E&S platforms that grow rapidly by acquisition or aggressive hiring can find themselves with senior teams that share a growth mandate but not a shared way of working. Cultural fragmentation at the leadership level particularly in organisations where underwriting authority is the primary source of power can undermine both performance and retention.
What This Means for Boards and CEOs
For boards and CEOs navigating this environment, the E&S opportunity is real and the window for differentiation is open. But capturing it requires a shift in thinking from hiring as a tactical response to growth, to organisational design as a strategic priority.
Several principles are emerging from conversations with the most effective E&S leaders and boards.
- Rethink organisational design, not just the next hire. The pressure to fill senior vacancies is constant, but the most durable competitive advantage is built through deliberate organisational architecture clarity on how underwriting, distribution, and strategy interact, and how decisions are made across those functions. Hiring without a clear design creates accumulation, not alignment.
- Build balanced leadership teams. The hybrid E&S leader is scarce. Rather than searching indefinitely for a single individual who combines every required attribute, effective boards are building teams where those attributes are distributed. A technically dominant underwriting leader paired with a commercially strong distribution executive, supported by robust analytics and operational capability, can perform as well as or better than a single generalist leader.
- Invest in both immediate capability and future pipeline. The firms that will be best positioned in five years are those investing now in mid-level leadership development structured mentoring, rotational exposure across underwriting and distribution, and deliberate succession processes. This is not a cost; it is a hedge against the talent dependencies that threaten short-term growth.
- Ask better questions when hiring. The right questions for an E&S leadership hire are not just about track record. Can this leader scale a business, not just manage it? How do they operate across underwriting, distribution, and strategy? What does their team look like behind them and how do they develop people? A strong portfolio track record is necessary but not sufficient for a leadership role in a fast-scaling environment.
Organisational Design as Competitive Advantage
Andrew Martin's core insight that the E&S market is evolving structurally, not just commercially is increasingly validated by what is visible across the market. Premium growth is real, but it is the surface layer of a much deeper set of changes in how E&S businesses are built, led, and staffed.
The firms that will define the next phase of E&S market development will not simply be those with the most capital, the strongest carrier relationships, or the most aggressive growth targets. They will be the firms that build organisations capable of sustaining growth through agile structures designed for speed and flexibility, leadership teams with genuinely hybrid capability, and talent investment that extends beyond the senior tier.
Organisational design, long treated as an operational concern, is becoming a source of competitive advantage. For boards and CEOs in the E&S space, that recognition and the willingness to act on it before the structural gaps become visible may be the most important strategic decision of the next three years.
Eliot Partnership is the only global executive search firm dedicated exclusively to the insurance and reinsurance industry. We work with the world's leading E&S carriers, MGAs, specialty platforms, and Lloyd's syndicates to build leadership teams equipped for what's next. To speak with our North America team about E&S leadership hiring, contact us at eliotpartnership.com.
