Top insurance brokers, No. 9: Lockton Cos. LLC

2024 brokerage revenue: $3.89B
Percent increase: 11.3%

Gross revenue at Lockton Cos. LLC topped $4 billion for the first time last year.

Revenue for the privately held brokerage was up 13.8% in 2024 to $4.04 billion. Brokerage revenue increased almost 11.3% to $3.89 billion, keeping the company No. 9 on Business Insurance’s ranking of the world’s largest brokers.

Virtually all of Lockton’s growth came from existing operations, said Chairman and CEO Ron Lockton.

U.S. brokerage revenue, which makes up roughly three-fourths of Lockton’s top line, rose 21.2% to $2.84 billion.

Non-U.S. revenue grew 13.5% to $1.05 billion, the first time it exceeded $1 billion, Mr. Lockton said.

“Lockton is a little bit different in that it really built out a global footprint,” said Timothy J. Cunningham, managing partner at Optis Partners LLC, an investment banking and financial consulting firm in Chicago.

Most of the broker’s similar-sized peers concentrate mainly on U.S. business.

Retail brokerage revenue increased 16.3% to $2.33 billion, while wholesale revenue grew 3.6% to $193.8 million.

Reinsurance revenue increased 25.2% to $390.4 million. The reinsurance business also helps distinguish the brokerage among its peers and helps diversify its revenue base, Mr. Cunningham said.

“Lockton built out a reinsurance brokerage before a lot of other firms did,” he said.

After returning to the CEO role in 2023, Mr. Lockton built his leadership team last year.

“This first year, the focus has been primarily on leadership and talent. I knew that we were going to need the right leadership team,” he said.

He accomplished that largely through internal promotions, together with “a couple of people that have joined us from the outside to fill planned successions or retirements at a high level.”

Longtime London-based partner Chris Brown was tapped in August to be CEO of Lockton International, overseeing Europe, Latin America, Asia, Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand, and the Middle East and North Africa. The role had been vacant “for some time,” Mr. Lockton said.

“Chris has been with us since the founding of that international business in 2006, and he was the absolute right person for that role,” Mr. Lockton said.

In August, Tim Ryan was named U.S. president, reporting to Mr. Lockton. “There’s probably nobody in our company that knows us better and is better prepared operationally to lead the business in the U.S.,” Mr. Lockton said.

Mr. Ryan then moved to build out his own leadership team, promoting Chris DiLullo, who most recently was industry practice leader in Lockton’s Northeast region, to the newly created role of U.S. industry practices leader.

Under Mr. DiLullo, specialties will continue to be an increasing focus, Mr. Lockton said. “We’re setting the business up for future growth and being intentional about it,” he said, citing construction and health care as two examples. Newer specialties include technology, a global space practice and a global parametric practice.

Lockton also named Claude Yoder, who had been Lockton Re’s global analytics leader since 2019, to the newly created role of chief data, analytics and digital officer as the broker established a Digital Office “to drive innovation in data, analytics, and technology strategies across the Lockton enterprise,” Mr. Lockton said.

Lockton is taking a “measured approach to how we think about and leverage AI,” he said. “We’re focusing on having the right internal architecture and the resources necessary … preparing internally for what’s to come with AI so that we can deploy it quickly.”

Lockton’s fiscal year ends April 30, so it just recently closed the books on fiscal 2025 and is now in the first quarter of fiscal 2026.

Most recently, he said, commercial insurance markets have been moderating. “In April, we saw a softening across pretty much all of our lines. We didn’t see it till very late in our fiscal cycle. It was property, builders risk … we saw just a tiny slowdown in transactional liability. That’s probably more related to what’s happening politically, tariffs and other things. I feel like it’s too early to declare a major change to the market, but we’re definitely seeing softening and stabilization.”

“We have seen some softening in the market … there have been pockets of softness,” said Harrison Brooks, a partner at Atlanta-based Reagan Consulting Inc.