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Name: Acturis Group
Industry/sector: IT, software and telecoms
Date founded: 2000
The boss: Theo Duchen/David McDonald
Location: London
Latest turnover: £29.6m
Three-year compound growth rate (%): 83.99
Latest EBITDA: £13.5m

The fintech market is a lucrative area that has been embraced in a number of different ways – such as mobile apps becoming the dominant way to manage finances and CitiBank partnering Uber and MasterCard to “change the world”.

They’re recent developments though. But back in 2000, insurance-centric Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform Acturis started to offer brokers and insurers a new way to manage their productivity and performance through tech.

The first users joined the channel in July 2002 and exactly two years later the channel had gained 1,000 users. As of December 2014, Acturis had 12,000 customers signed up to its platform.

The firm claims its team is made of professionals from strategic and tech backgrounds, as well as “an entrepreneurial and energetic culture, centred on a vision of revolutionising an industry through knowledge, teamwork and enthusiasm.”

With two CEOs at the helm, Theo Duchen and David McDonald, Acturis’ leadership is potent. Duchen, a trained actuary, was previously a partner at McKinsey and Company where he was responsible for coordinating with major international brokers and insurers. McDonald, meanwhile, was also a McKinsey partner, but led ecommerce processes for the UK and was experienced in B2B management.

Describing why the business was launched, the company said: “The general insurance industry offers both enormous rewards and difficult challenges to participants. The market is attractive because it is extremely large and many players make handsome profits through efficient and innovative underwriting and distribution of products.

“However, at the same time the industry is incredibly challenging because it is inefficient. For example, multiple hand-offs, duplication, manual processes, errors, rework and incompatible systems result in overheads absorbing 34 per cent of all premiums. In other words, more than one third of a commercial customers’ premium does not go towards risk transfer, but is consumed in cost. This inefficiency results in low (or no) profitability and is compounded by poor customer service.

“The players in this segment need to seriously improve their service levels and reduce their costs or risk, over time, being replaced by alternatives. These cost inefficiencies are too great for customers to ignore.”

Seemingly ignoring inefficiencies is the last thing customers have been doing, which has enabled Acturis to retain the fourth position it bagged in 2014.

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