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View from the top: Karl Hennessy, McGill and Partners - Business Insurance Skip to content Register for free Search Search Log In Risk Management Cyber Risks Pricing Trends Mergers & Acquisitions Technology Sponsored Content WSIA RISKWORLD Workers Comp & Safety Workers Comp Cost Control Pain Management Workplace Safety International EMEA Asia-Pacific Latin America People Events BI Intelligence Top 100 Agents & Brokers Best Places to Work 2025 Lists Directories Insurance Pricing BI Stock Index Magazine Current Issue Past Issues Subscribe Women to Watch ALL INsurance Resources Risk Perspectives Sponsored Content Webinars White Papers Risk Management Cyber Risks Pricing Trends Mergers & Acquisitions Technology Sponsored Content WSIA RISKWORLD Workers Comp & Safety Workers Comp Cost Control Pain Management Workplace Safety International EMEA Asia-Pacific Latin America People Events BI Intelligence Top 100 Agents & Brokers Best Places to Work 2025 Lists Directories Insurance Pricing BI Stock Index Magazine Current Issue Past Issues Subscribe Women to Watch ALL INsurance Resources Risk Perspectives Sponsored Content Webinars White Papers Risk Management Cyber Risks Pricing Trends Mergers & Acquisitions Technology Sponsored Content WSIA RISKWORLD Workers Comp & Safety Workers Comp Cost Control Pain Management Workplace Safety International EMEA Asia-Pacific Latin America People Events BI Intelligence Top 100 Agents & Brokers Best Places to Work 2025 Lists Directories Insurance Pricing BI Stock Index Magazine Current Issue Past Issues Subscribe Women to Watch ALL INsurance Resources Risk Perspectives Sponsored Content Webinars White Papers Risk Management Cyber Risks Pricing Trends Mergers & Acquisitions Technology Sponsored Content WSIA RISKWORLD Workers Comp & Safety Workers Comp Cost Control Pain Management Workplace Safety International EMEA Asia-Pacific Latin America People Events BI Intelligence Top 100 Agents & Brokers Best Places to Work 2025 Lists Directories Insurance Pricing BI Stock Index Magazine Current Issue Past Issues Subscribe Women to Watch ALL INsurance Resources Risk Perspectives Sponsored Content Webinars White Papers View from the top: Karl Hennessy, McGill and Partners by Gavin Souter Karl Hennessy Agents and Brokers McGill Apr 24, 2026 Karl Hennessy, president of McGill and Partners and CEO of its U.S. business, joined the brokerage in London shortly after it was founded in 2019. He originally led its specialty business but has headed its U.S. insurance and reinsurance business in New York since 2023. Previously, he held various executive positions at Aon, was a partner at Jardine Lloyd Thompson and worked at other brokerages in London and New York. His experience runs from marine, through structured credit, alternative risk, and both insurance and reinsurance. He recently spoke with Business Insurance Editor Gavin Souter about the firm’s strategy, its recent collaboration with American International Group and the outlook for the market. Edited excerpts follow. Q: McGill from the beginning has sought to build itself as a next-generation broker. What does that look like from a U.S. buyer’s perspective? A: When we started the business, we were very clear that we didn’t want to acquire firms or build on a legacy infrastructure. We wanted to start fresh and do things differently. We looked carefully at how brokers were structured and organized and were very particular about building something that was different. We are geographically agnostic and agnostic between insurance, reinsurance, marine and nonmarine. The thesis is to attract really talented people and create an environment where they can focus on helping clients and linking risk with the appropriate capital wherever that might be. Over the last four or five years, the pace of change and adoption of technology like artificial intelligence has been incredibly fast. We’ve been able to adopt new technology quickly and apply it to our business. Most recently, you’ve seen the transaction we’ve done with AIG. That’s been leveraging AI and our digital placement infrastructure. Q: What would be an example of how you’re using AI at the moment? A: Taking the AIG transaction, we presented our entire portfolio and had it analyzed to understand the underlying risk, model it and come out the other end with an agreement to automatically write risks on a go-forward basis. We’ve been able to set eligibility criteria so that when a risk comes into our digital infrastructure and matches that criteria, they will automatically write a line on that business. We previously launched Auton as a digital follow-form transaction in the London market. When a risk comes in, the system analyzes whether it falls within underwriting criteria and, if it does, automatically offers a line. The AIG transaction takes that to a higher level, with more capacity across more lines of business. It’s based on collecting good data, digitizing it and structuring it so it can be underwritten and analyzed at speed. Q: Would you anticipate doing that with other insurers? A: I would not rule it out. There is a recognition in the insurance community that there is a difference between lead market capacity and follow capacity. What we’re doing is delivering follow capacity extremely efficiently. There’s an acknowledgement in the market that there’s a difference between portfolio underwriting and risk-specific lead underwriting. They both have a part to play, but in the industry we need to bring greater efficiency to clients. At the moment, that efficiency is not there, and this is a major step forward. Q: Will clients see pricing benefits from that? A: If you’re bringing efficiency to the market, you reduce costs and increase competition. Over time, that should lead to pricing efficiency, which would inure to the benefit of clients. Q: You seem to focus on specialties? Where do you see growth opportunities? A: We are a specialty broker. We’re not trying to be all things to all people. In specialty areas, we focus on marine and its subsections, complex property in energy, renewables, nuclear, structured credit and financial risks. Even within broader classes like property, there are specialist areas, for instance, semiconductor production or construction, where we want to participate. In terms of growth, renewables still has significant opportunity. Marine is already a strong area for us. We can also see how specialty products developed in one market can be applied in others. Casualty is strained in some areas, so finding capacity for difficult-to-place risks is important. Captives are another key area. Large firms are looking to drive down their cost of risk and are looking for greater resilience, which is leading to the creation of more sophisticated captives. Q: What are the biggest concerns you’re hearing from clients? A: We live in volatile times. Clients are looking to grow their business, increase market share and drive margin, but they’re also focused on reducing their total cost of risk. It’s not just premium spend; it’s retention as well. They are also concerned about missing out on the adoption of technology and what it can do. Resilience is a major issue — how to build something that can bounce back after an event. That raises questions about retentions, captives and which markets they transact with. There is also a lot of focus on where the market is heading. There is greater transparency and more granularity now, and not everything is moving in the same direction at the same time. Clients are giving greater consideration to how to differentiate themselves so that if pricing moves against them, they can avoid some of that momentum. Q: How do you see the pricing environment evolving? A: It varies by sector and product. We had a period of soft rates in financial lines, particularly directors and officers liability, cyber rates have come off considerably, property rates have been softening, with reductions ranging from substantial to more moderate, depending on the sector. At the same time, some classes remain challenging, such as umbrella liability and certain industries like trucking. It depends on where you sit in the market and your ability to differentiate yourself in that marketplace. From a reinsurance perspective, there are significant reductions in reinsurance costs, and generally, that tends to work its way through. Property rates have come down significantly, but not every risk or sector will be treated the same. 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