Howden Brand Guidelines: A 1994 London Broker That Took Back an Old Family Name

Three brokers, one room and a dog called Flight.

Howden was founded in London in 1994. Insurance Journal reported in 2020 that the group began that year as Howden Pangborn, and English Wikipedia names its founders as David Howden, Mark Pangborn and Mark Howells, with the broker Brian Marsh providing a quarter of the starting capital. The company tells the story as three young brokers and a dog called Flight in a one-room office.

The name carries older history. English Wikipedia says David Howden is a descendant of Alexander Howden, an Edinburgh shipowner who founded an insurance brokerage under the family name in the nineteenth century; the family sold that business in 1915, and Aon acquired Alexander Howden in 1997. David Howden began his career at that firm in 1980, English Wikipedia says, before moving to a smaller broker and later setting up on his own.

The young group went abroad early rather than competing head-on in the London market. English Wikipedia says it launched its underwriting arm, DUAL, in Spain in 1998 and started retail broking there in 1999, before moving into Latin America. The company says DUAL opened in Madrid and that Howden Iberia followed, and that by its tenth anniversary it had reached India and Australia.

For two decades the parent company used a different name. Insurance Journal reported that the Hyperion name came into use after DUAL’s launch in 1998, and English Wikipedia dates Hyperion Insurance Group from 1999 to 2020. On 5 November 2020 the group announced it had changed its name to Howden Group Holdings, effective immediately, Insurance Journal and Reinsurance News reported.

Broking, underwriting and reinsurance.

Howden works on several sides of the insurance market. In 2020 Insurance Journal described the group as Howden Broking, the underwriting business DUAL and the data and digital business HX, and called it a London-based, employee-owned insurance group. English Wikipedia describes it as owned by its employee shareholders and backed by long-term investors.

The company dates its spread across the world in stages. It says it opened in Dubai in 2008, entered Asia in 2011 by buying a retail broker there, served the United States at first as a London and Bermuda wholesaler working through other brokers, and expanded DUAL into the US in 2013. It says it opened offices in Colombia and Brazil the following year, set up the Howden Foundation, its charitable arm, in 2014, and launched the Howden One Network, a partner network spanning more than 120 countries, in 2017.

Reinsurance became a large part of the group through one purchase. In June 2022 Howden announced that it would buy TigerRisk Partners, a risk, capital and strategic adviser to insurers and reinsurers based in Stamford, Connecticut. On 12 January 2023 Insurance Journal reported that the deal had been completed the day before, creating Howden Tiger, which the group called the world’s fourth-largest global reinsurance broker; a separate program and managing-general-agent business, Howden Tiger SabRE, was announced alongside it. So the TigerRisk purchase was agreed in 2022 and completed in 2023.

How brokers present themselves.

An insurance broker has no product to photograph. It sells advice and access: it places cover with insurers on a client’s behalf, and it is paid for judgement and relationships rather than for anything a customer can hold. So brokers present themselves largely through people and expertise. Their websites lean on portraits of client advisers and specialist teams, and on named leaders who speak for the firm in the trade press.

Expertise is shown through publishing. Brokers issue risk-management reports, market outlooks and webinars on subjects such as cyber exposure, property values or employee benefits, and many organise their sites around industry practices, from construction and aviation to healthcare and sport, and around capabilities such as casualty, financial lines or private client. Howden’s US website, for example, is laid out by industries and capabilities in this way.

Scale is shown through maps and counts. Office networks spread across countries are a common feature, and so are round numbers of locations and people: Brown & Brown’s website gives a count of more than 700 locations and about 23,000 people. In a sector that has grown through consolidation, acquisitions announcements are a regular part of a broker’s news page, and the dates of agreement and completion are often months apart.

The rest of the presentation is about belonging. Brokers sponsor sport, the arts and community causes, run charitable foundations, and give recruiting pages much of the weight, because the people are the offer. This guide sets out what can be checked about each firm — who founded it, who owns it now and from when — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A new old name, and a US retail business.

The return to the Howden name was presented as a matter of roots. When the change was announced in November 2020, David Howden said it was “the right time for us to bring further simplicity and authenticity to the group and to take on a new old name,” Insurance Journal reported. The rename flowed through the group: the Hyperion Foundation became the Howden Group Foundation, and Hyperion X began trading as HX. English Wikipedia says Aon, which had owned Alexander Howden since 1997, did not object to the rebrand, and even sent over the portraits of Howden ancestors that had hung in the old firm’s boardroom.

The newest chapter is in the United States. On 5 August 2025 Insurance Business reported that Howden, which it described as London-headquartered, had launched a retail broking business in the US and named a chief executive for Howden US, marking its formal entry into that market. The company says it formed Howden US by bringing together Atlantic Group and Gravitas, and that within months the business had more than 1,000 people at more than 50 US locations. It says that in early 2026 its US, Latin American and Caribbean businesses were brought together as Howden Americas.

On its US website the company now describes itself as one of the world’s top ten insurance brokers, thirty years after that one-room office; that is its own description. The site is organised around industries, from aviation and construction to sport and entertainment, and capabilities such as cyber, property and private client, with separate pages for the Howden One Network and the reinsurance business.

For a design guide, Howden shows how an old family name, sold off generations earlier, can be taken back and made into the face of a modern group. Compare Aon, which owned Alexander Howden from 1997, and WTW, another large international broker. For this guide we use deep teal, stone and a saddle brown with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Howden’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.