AIG’s Lexington Insurance Company has launched the Lexington Middle Market Casualty team, a group of dedicated underwriters focused on providing insurance coverage exclusively to small-to-medium-sized commercial enterprises (SME), substantially expanding the company’s market reach beyond upper middle-market and large enterprises.

The team, which is headed by Paul McLaughlin, senior underwriting manager for Lexington, brings together underwriters from Lexington Casualty and its affiliated Western World Small Commercial Brokerage teams to focus on providing general liability coverage to commercial enterprises with annual premiums between $7,500 to $75,000. The group will provide coverage to classes of business in construction, manufacturing and the commercial, service, retail and real estate industries.

“The launch of Lexington’s Middle Market Casualty team is an important next step in expanding our presence in the SME space as part of our overall Middle Market strategy,” said Lou Levinson, president and CEO, Lexington Insurance Company. “This is a new team focused on a segment that makes up a large portion of U.S. private sector GDP. We see tremendous opportunity to help our wholesale brokers and their clients in this segment gain more certainty and resilience in their coverage needs.”

Neil Smallcombe, head of Lexington Casualty, added: “Business issues and risks for small and medium-sized businesses can be as complex for their management teams as risks faced by larger companies. Lexington is providing its capacity, claims capabilities and longstanding expertise with the largest, most complex risks in the market to sophisticated, smaller operators across important commercial classes.”

McLaughlin said the group has started working with select brokers to reach this pool of clients and the “opportunity for smaller enterprises to access Lexington’s expertise and capacity has been a welcomed development for the market.”

The Lexington Middle Market Casualty team is the latest business unit to launch in the last two years to focus on SME products available to select wholesale brokers and their clients, following Lexington’s launch in 2021 of its LexPro management liability unit and Western World’s recent launch of its Garage team.

Source: Lexington Insurance