Top insurance brokers, No. 7: Brown & Brown Inc.

2024 brokerage revenue: $4.71B
Percent increase: 12%

Double-digit organic growth and continued overseas expansion drove up revenue last year for Brown & Brown Inc., but its most significant boost is expected to come later this year with the acquisition of the parent company of Accession Risk Management Group.

The $9.83 billion deal, announced in June, will be the largest in the brokerage’s long history of acquisitions.

The announcement followed the company’s completion of more than 30 acquisitions in 2024, with the largest of those in the Netherlands, and 13 in the first quarter of 2025.

Brown & Brown reported brokerage revenue of $4.71 billion in 2024, a 12% increase over 2023.

The company slipped one spot to No. 7 in Business Insurance’s ranking of the world’s 10 largest brokers. The addition of Boston-based Accession, which runs retail brokerage Risk Strategies Co. and wholesaler One80 Intermediaries, will add about $1.7 billion in revenue, potentially propelling it into the top five.

Risk Strategies, founded as a risk management consultant in 1997, has a strong specialty focus in addition to middle-market retail business, said J. Powell Brown, president and CEO of Brown & Brown.

“They have some specialisms that we don’t have in terms of the way they’ve developed, such as agriculture, private equity, some specialty employee benefits. It’s definitely a good combination,” he said.

Accession, held by private equity, also owns the world’s fifth-largest captive manager and has a reinsurance business, primarily focused on life and health reinsurance.

“They’re the tip of the spear in terms of sophistication for private-equity-funded brokers,” said John Wepler, chairman and CEO of Woodmere, Ohio-based mergers and acquisitions consultancy Marsh, Berry & Co. Inc.

Brown & Brown’s revenue increased 10.4% on an organic basis in 2024, but that rate slipped to 6.5% in the first quarter of 2025.

“There’s kind of a movement back towards kind of a more normal organic growth environment,” Mr. Brown said.

In some instances rates are declining rapidly, such as for properties in catastrophe-exposed areas, where premiums rose sharply in prior years, he said. Brown & Brown had strong growth in its program business over the past several years because of rate increases for cat business, but that growth has slowed.

In addition, the general economic environment is more uncertain, Mr. Brown said.

“That doesn’t mean businesses don’t want to invest; it just means they might be cautious and they might take a wait-and-see approach for a period of time,” he said.

Among its peers last year, Brown & Brown reported some of the best performance metrics, including organic growth, earnings and free cash flow conversion, said C. Gregory Peters, managing director-equity research at Raymond James & Associates Inc.

“That speaks positively about a very decentralized, sales-oriented culture, where the individual teammates or producers own their own P&L,” he said.

Insurance brokers in general have reported higher than average organic growth over the past several years; however, with the market changing and economic growth slowing, brokers are reverting to more traditional growth rates in the mid-single digits, Mr. Peters said.

The largest deal Brown & Brown completed over the past 12 months was paying about $700 million for Quintes Insurance Brokers in Waardenburg, Netherlands. Quintes has about 700 staff in 18 locations and concentrates on small and middle-market businesses.

“We’re very pleased about going into the Netherlands, and we’ve got a great group of teammates there, and a great leader,” Mr. Brown said.

While Brown & Brown is largely a commercial broker, last year it also bought The Canopy Group, a Le Sueur, Minnesota-based company with a significant personal lines book.

Personal lines makes up nearly 20% of Brown & Brown’s revenue.

Among the company’s significant hires over the past year, longtime London-based brokerage executive Steve Hearn joined as a director last year and was named chief operating officer earlier this year. Among various senior executive roles, Mr. Hearn previously was CEO of Ed Broking Group Ltd. and deputy CEO and president of Willis Group Holdings PLC.

“He’s a great addition to the team … he’s going to be involved in a lot of stuff across the organization,” Mr. Brown said.