We were pleased to catch up with David Burke, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Alta Signa, at a pivotal moment in the company’s growth journey. Growing sustainably, and securing strong partnerships with capacity providers and other stakeholders has been critical to establishing Alta Signa as a fast-evolving, truly European boutique MGA with close-to-source underwriting at the heart of our business model.
With David’s extensive financial and operational expertise, he has played a central role in building the foundations for growth and ensuring the business is positioned for long-term success.
Alta Signa’s continued focus on underwriting excellence is also underpinned by its independent capacity panel and close-to-source underwriting model, which ensures agility, transparency, and alignment between underwriting teams, brokers, and capacity partners. We asked David to reflect on the journey so far.
Looking back, what were the key milestones in Alta Signa’s early development, and how did your dual role help to shape the MGA’s foundations?
David Burke: “It’s been a quick and very eventful five years since I started on this journey with Gerard and the team, and not all of it has been plain sailing! We had great success early on building out the multi-jurisdictional underwriting teams across Europe. This meant partnering with advisors across the continent and getting to grips with local market practices and requirements. While in theory Europe is one big open market for us, with no barriers to cross-border trade, the reality is a little different, with each jurisdiction having its own quirks and requirements.
From being a start-up business and now, five years on, a scale-up, we need to make sure every euro of capital is put to good use, be that investing in new underwriting teams to help us diversify our market offerings, such as the marine team we hired based in Genoa in late 2023, or our partnership with Insly to provide our FIN PRO and Cyber teams with a fully end-to-end platform to help them make better decisions faster.”
As CFO and COO, how do you balance financial discipline with the operational agility needed to grow a boutique MGA?
“As a fast-growing business, we sometimes need to cut our cloth with regard to what to invest in and where we can risk our capital. Our team is very entrepreneurial in spirit, and this is essential for our culture of innovation and agility. While most of the team have come from large corporate backgrounds, an entrepreneurial spirit is needed to succeed in our nimble MGA environment.
Over the past five years, there has been a lot of rolling up sleeves to get the job done. It has been incredibly rewarding to see those efforts translate into real results, and to build a business that remains lean, responsive, and close to its markets.”
Partnerships are vital to your success: what do you see as the most important factors in maintaining these relationships?
“We have partnered with a number of strong and well-rated insurance carriers, and we are only as good as our paper. We are a very carrier-centric organisation. These partners have entrusted us with a portion of their balance sheet, and we need to make sure they are protected, and we achieve this through our superior underwriting discipline and risk selection. This enables them to make healthy underwriting profits and reward us with profit commissions, which allows us to further invest in our people and systems to grow.
Our platform providers are also key to our proposition to the market and to our carriers. Our independent capacity panel gives us flexibility and allows us to select the most suitable partners for each line of business, strengthening our resilience and our value proposition.
We aim to have market-leading service standards for our broker partners and want our underwriters to be in a position to provide informed underwriting decisions as efficiently as possible.Through continued investment and development of our underwriting platforms, we are well on the way to achieving this, but Rome wasn’t built in a day!”
What are the biggest opportunities and challenges you see for Alta Signa and the wider MGA market in Europe over the next few years?
“The FinPro market has been very challenging over the past 12–24 months, and growth opportunities are limited. However, Alta Signa has developed a solid platform for success and a strong market presence to enable us to further expand our product offering, helping us become more meaningful to our broker partners. The launch of the marine line of business in late 2023 was a real game changer for us in terms of our growth trajectory and diversification of our book. We will look to grow our product offering over the next couple of years and are always on the lookout for opportunities to bring new teams on board.
Our close-to-source underwriting model will remain a cornerstone of this approach, ensuring decisions are made by experienced underwriters who understand their local markets and broker relationships.
At the same time, looking ahead we will continue to invest in our technology platform to ensure that we are operating as efficiently as possible. We are investigating how AI can be utilised to help our underwriters make better decisions faster. Combined with our independent capacity model, these investments will position Alta Signa to lead the next phase of MGA innovation in Europe.”
Many thanks David for taking the time to chat! Find out more about our team and our products: