Sorry for my delay in responding, been caught up in Easter fanfare
I'm not in the UK - my business is based here in Australia but it is a private company. You are correct, there is very little by way of competition in terms of independently owned ASX listed underwriting agencies. In fact, there aren't any - for this reason this is a stock that very few retail investors will be able to understand. Further to this, because 70% of the stock is held by the Top 20, I expect the liquidity to remain very low. All of this points towards the price on market potentially increasing very quickly.
FYI most of the ASX listed companies in the insurance sector are either insurers (IAG, QBE, etc) or broking houses (PSI, SDF, AUB). I should add that quite a few of them own underwriting agencies. For example, AUB owns SURA which is quite a large underwriting agency. If you check the announcements of AUB from 01/12/2020 you'll see that they in fact bought 360 Underwriting Solutions last year.
360 Underwriting Solutions is the business to which Ensurance sold its Australian operation last year.
I haven't checked the multiples/valuations involved yet, but it wouldn't be hard to determine roughly how much money has changed hands.
Being a large insurer or broking house and owning underwriting agencies is fairly standard, as it allows the parent company to 'feed' business to its agency, which can either be snuffed out if the underwriting results are bad, or fully acquired if the underwriting results are strong. You'll also see the term "MGA" (Managing General Agency), this is the same thing as an "underwriting agency", FYI.
Here is a great articleoutlining the role underwriting agencies play in the wider insurance market. And here is a good summary of some overseas acquisition deals that have taken place.
In terms of estimating the two / three year outlook for the UK operation of ENA - I've already done this for you folks in the earlier valuation postI made. These are fairly conservative ranges but as you can see there story is only just beginning. Once ENA pushes past the 50m GWP mark the valuation will sky-rocket.
As a good example, CFC Underwriting (the largest independent agency in the UK), got a valuation of about 20x EBIT when venture cap firm bought into it a few years ago. Some links about this are here and here.
