Howden Group, the London-based insurance broker that’s chasing an initial public offering by 2030, is in talks to raise several billion pounds in new private capital as it seeks to maintain its breakneck expansion.
The group, which is already backed by Hg, General Atlantic and Canada’s La Caisse, is working with bankers at Morgan Stanley on the project that will also bring in new external shareholders, people with knowledge of the process said.
The slated capital raise, likely to be one of the largest ever undertaken by a private UK business, is a key pillar of founder and Chief Executive Officer David Howden’s long-term plan. That strategy, set out by the company in a document shared with investors, involves taking the company public and achieving a £50 billion ($67.4 billion) valuation.
The funds raised with the help of Morgan Stanley will be used to slash the substantial debt pile accumulated by the group after an acquisition spree that’s seen it swallow about 250 companies over the past five years. They would also help fuel the company’s next leg of growth, investing in the business, luring new talent and enabling existing employees to trade shares.
“We bought companies in lots of countries, we’ve got lots of different systems in place,” Howden said in an interview, while declining to comment on the capital raise. Now the challenge is “how do we make sure actually that we pull all that together, not only a way that’s controlled, but that’s also efficient.”
A representative for Morgan Stanley declined to comment.
The group was last valued at £10 billion following an internal share sale in 2024 but the impending capital injection would help it on its way to a market capitalization within fighting distance of its largest publicly traded rivals. Achieving its targeted valuation would also propel the firm’s eponymous founder, who retains a minority stake, into the ranks of the UK’s billionaires, the people said.
Founded in the 1990s by David Howden, himself a descendant of a British insurance-broking dynasty, the firm now employs more than 24,000 staff in offices from Tokyo to Miami. Its core business involves placing complex risks with specialty insurers and reinsurers, writing cover and even advising insurance groups on capital and deals.
Howden has assembled a team of key lieutenants as he plots the group’s path to the top tier of insurance broking, including David Shalders, a former operations chief of the London Stock Exchange Group Plc and Susan Panuccio, who until recently oversaw finances at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The latter was introduced through a common friend, former editor of UK newspaper The Sun, Rebekah Brooks.
