David McDonald’s case for doing things once

The deal took 30 days. David McDonald remembers Acturis’ first international acquisition being completed with help that extended into the nights, through legal work, negotiations and structuring. An insurance software company was crossing a border, and its investor was down in the paperwork with it. For a business built to remove administrative friction, this was a pleasingly appropriate way to expand.

By then, McDonald and his co-founder, Theo Duchen, had been at work for more than a decade. They had founded Acturis in 2000, launched a cloud platform, brought brokers and insurers into electronic trading, and built a team. The short transaction had a long prehistory. It offers a useful way into McDonald’s career: the visible moment of acceleration usually rests on something he and his colleagues have spent years assembling.

Two kinds of expertise, one awkward market

McDonald arrived at entrepreneurship with an accountant’s qualification and a consultant’s experience of how companies work. He qualified as a chartered accountant, earned an MBA with distinction at INSEAD in 1990, and spent ten years at McKinsey & Company. His career there included partnership and work in London and New York. He led the development of the firm’s e-commerce practice.

That last detail supplies the connection to Acturis. E-commerce asks how a transaction can move through a system. Insurance supplies a formidable examination paper: different participants, detailed information, underwriting decisions and documents that must agree with one another. The internet could carry the information. Getting the industry’s working practices to travel with it was the more demanding assignment.

Duchen brought the other half of the founding combination. He had led McKinsey’s UK general insurance practice. McDonald’s experience concerned digital commerce; his colleague’s concerned the market they wanted to change. Their diagnosis was practical. The UK insurance market was too cumbersome and inefficient for the businesses using it. In 2000 they founded Acturis to do something about that.

The appeal of their partnership is its specificity. Two former consultants chose a sector where they could connect their experience to a recognisable problem. Insurance would supply years of details to work through. There was very little danger of running out of administration.

The cloud arrives before the habit

The Acturis platform went live in July 2002. A real-time premium-finance integration followed that October, with commercial electronic trading integration arriving in September 2004. These milestones describe a business being built connection by connection. The platform had to become useful at the points where insurance work actually changed hands.

Cloud software also needed explaining. Duchen has recalled how difficult it was to get brokers to listen to a startup in the early years, when online hosting was unfamiliar to much of the market. That makes the launch date more telling. McDonald’s team was asking customers to change both their working tools and their assumptions about where those tools should live.

In 2012, Acturis received the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation for its cloud computing system. The achievement had an unusually concrete description: consistent information captured by brokers could be passed electronically to trading partners, allowing underwriters to receive better information and documentation to be prepared quickly. Faster service emerged from a sequence of connected improvements.

For McDonald, this was a substantial change in professional position. At McKinsey he had developed an e-commerce practice. At Acturis he was sharing responsibility for a product customers would use, and keep using. The argument for better processes now had to survive contact with the working day.

Give the people a piece of it

The founders’ account of Acturis also made room for the people building it. By their 2013 joint interview, investing in employees and allowing them to benefit from a stake in the business were established parts of the story. Software required technical work, but the founders were also building an organisation in which colleagues could participate in the result.

That year, Acturis joined the Future Fifty programme and won Company of the Year in the mid-sized category at the Growing Business Awards. Accepting the latter, McDonald credited the team’s talent and development. His explanation of the company’s progress included a compact phrase: “recruiting and developing great people”.

“recruiting and developing great people”

David McDonald, on Acturis’ progress, 2013

The idea later appeared in the company’s operating details. Its reporting described employee briefings, feedback and appraisal, alongside a share option scheme intended to broaden participation in success. These are the recurring arrangements behind a founder’s speech about people. They give the sentiment somewhere to go after the award dinner.

Tony Goddard’s career supplies a human timescale. He joined Acturis in 2001, shortly after graduating from Durham, and spent two decades leading development of the platform before becoming its CEO in early 2023. McDonald and Duchen continued as Group co-CEOs. A colleague who arrived near the beginning had progressed into leading the platform business.

Thirty days to cross a border

Acturis’ next geography required help as well as ambition. Summit Partners made a minority investment in 2010, when the founders wanted an experienced partner for international expansion. Its work with management included examining acquisition opportunities and helping complete the purchase of Nordic Insurance Software, Acturis’ first international acquisition, in January 2014.

That was the deal McDonald remembered completing “in only 30 days, start to finish”. The detail he emphasised was the investor’s practical availability. International growth involved people willing to handle the legal and structural work when it needed doing. His recollection makes the partnership sound rather less ceremonial than a handshake photograph.

Germany, France and Canada became part of the group’s expanding footprint. In Canada, the logic can be followed through successive purchases. Acturis entered the broker software market through Power Broker in 2019. In April 2021 it announced an agreement to acquire Brovada from Willis Towers Watson.

Brovada connected broker management systems with insurer portals. The proposed acquisition extended an existing relationship: Brovada already integrated with Power Broker. McDonald explained the opportunity in terms of deeper connections and more electronic trading. The international strategy kept returning to the founding problem of information moving between organisations.

The United States added another connection in 2023 with Broker Buddha, a commercial insurance client-engagement platform. Its co-founder and CEO, Jason Keck, publicly thanked McDonald, Duchen and their colleague Hayden Parra after the transaction. Expansion brought new companies into the group, along with the people who had built them.

The founders stay in the picture

The Group title matters when following his career. Acturis had become a collection of businesses with their own products, territories and leaders. McDonald’s continuing role sits across that wider group. It gives the founding partnership a different setting from the early platform years, with decisions about international development alongside the needs of the established UK business.

Ownership changed as the group grew. In 2019, Summit exited its investment when Astorg acquired a minority shareholding. Then, in July 2024, Astorg announced an agreement to increase its stake to approximately 52%. The founders, management and colleagues would remain substantial minority shareholders and continue working with the investor.

By the 2024 announcement, Acturis reported 1,200 colleagues across seven countries and more than 100,000 users in over 40 countries. Those figures belong to the group, whose operations had spread well beyond the original UK platform. McDonald’s responsibilities had grown with that wider organisation.

His statement about the agreement named the values he wanted associated with it: “Integrity, Innovation, and Client Service.” He linked the partnership to support for existing customers and the development of Acturis’ international offering. The immediate agenda included the people already using the software, alongside the markets the group hoped to enter.

There is an interesting continuity here. McDonald and Duchen brought in investors, acquired businesses and developed other leaders while remaining part of the group’s leadership. The original partnership survived the organisation’s expansion. Sharing the chief executive title had become a lasting feature of their company’s structure.

The bill for staying useful

For the year ended September 2024, Acturis Group reported revenue of £165.5 million, up from £144.1 million the previous year. McDonald’s account of the results also addressed what went back into the business. Reinvestment in platforms and technologies reached £22.3 million, compared with £19.3 million in 2023.

He connected that spending to electronic trading, tools for building and maintaining products, AI and data services, and customers’ digital development. These are ongoing obligations. A company selling working infrastructure has customers whose requirements keep changing after the first installation. The investment figures put a price on continuing to respond.

The group was still changing in 2026. Nordic Insurance Software and ICE InsureTech united under the ICE-Tech brand in January. In February, Acturis announced Great Place to Work certification for a second consecutive year, including recognition in the UK, Canada and France. The product organisation and the workplace both remained subjects of attention.

September brought a planned standalone UK cyber offering from Markel and the launch of Sompo Marine Cargo trading on the Acturis platform. Eligible cargo risks could be quoted and, subject to underwriting criteria, bound digitally while retaining access to specialist underwriters. The example brings the story back to the transaction itself: technology helping different participants work together.

McDonald’s career now runs from accountancy through e-commerce consulting to a quarter-century of insurance software. The work has acquired more countries, more colleagues and a larger investment budget. Its recurring subject remains recognisable. Someone needs information. Someone else has it. Between them sits a process that can be made easier. There is quite a career in taking that seriously.