Welcome to Howden – the new name for Aston Lark

As the Corporate & Commercial division of Howden UK & Ireland, we’ll use our strong insurer relationships and market access to achieve the most effective outcomes for your business, whether that’s eliminating gaps in your insurance cover, reducing premiums, offering expert risk management support, or ensuring a claim is settled quickly and efficiently.

All commercial sectors

Our teams work across all commercial sectors and industries, including hospitality and leisure, manufacturing, construction, retail, technology, real estate, rail, motor trade, haulage, financial services, professional services and more.

For businesses large and small, well-established and start-up, we provide guidance on all aspects of commercial insurance, including a number of specialist product lines:

Added value

We’re proud of our comprehensive range of risk management solutions, designed to help you identify, manage and reduce your risks, ensuring your business can run smoothly, in a balanced and cost-effective way.

Our rapidly expanding network of regional offices enables a local service where required, complemented by teams of specialists in certain locations – meaning we can support your business anywhere in the UK.

And with a dedicated and experienced in-house Claims team on hand, we’re there when your business needs us the most.

The Howden difference

Howden really does bring something different to the table. Not only are we one of the largest insurance groups in the world, but our employee ownership has created a culture where we’re driven to think bigger and empowered to challenge convention.

We’re not afraid to break new ground when it comes to creating the best solutions for our clients.

Addressing risk

Risks exist in all businesses and the purpose of insurance is to transfer a risk from a business to an insurance company. Insurers therefore assess the likelihood that a risk will turn into a claim, and the insurance premium they charge and the coverage they provide will be impacted by the severity of the risk.

As brokers, our role is to present your business to insurers in a way that compels them to want to provide you with a competitive quotation. Fully understanding your risks is therefore key. If your current broker isn’t asking in-depth questions about your current risks and approach to risk management, how are they convincing underwriters that the risk of you making a claim is reduced? The Howden team will undertake a thorough analysis of risks on your behalf to ensure your business doesn’t pay more than necessary.

Market leverage

Not all brokers are equal. It’s important for businesses to work with a broker that has sufficient scale to leverage competitive terms from insurers. Brokers across the market enjoy different relationships with different insurers, and these relationships are strengthened by scale.

Certain brokers can better negotiate insurer quotations, and an insurer might even offer a quotation for a risk they aren’t usually keen to quote, purely on the strength of their trading relationship with the broker.

In the UK, Howden places more than £2bn of gross written premium into the market annually, on behalf of more than a million clients, and we therefore enjoy premier status with many insurers.

High impact broking

Insurance companies offer quotations based on the quality of a broker’s submission. If a broker doesn’t provide sufficient detail and doesn’t highlight positive risk features in a way that persuades underwriters to quote, your business might be missing out.

Your insurance broker should be creative and innovative to overcome challenges. At Howden, we call this ‘High impact broking’ - using strategies to achieve success where other brokers have failed.

Your broker should be happy to provide you with a copy of their market presentation, and you should be given the opportunity to review it prior to their market exercise, to ensure you’re satisfied with the quality of content being submitted and to assess their ability to present your risk in a compelling way to the market.