Asta MGA platform to support BPBUW and David Ashby Underwriting

Asta MGA platform to support BPBUW and David Ashby Underwriting 150 150 Haggie Partners

Asta, the leading third-party managing agent at Lloyd’s, is to provide its MGA platform and comprehensiveoperational services to the newly-formed underwriting agency BPBUW Management (BPBUW), and its first MGA client, the specialist equine insurer David Ashby Underwriting (DAU).

Launched this month, BPBUW builds-out specialist niche MGA subsidiaries, and has an active pipeline of high-quality agencies. DAU is its first, following DAU’s buy-out of a bloodstock and equestrian book of business from MS Amlin.

Asta has an equity interest in BPBUW and will provide the new businesses with a range of services including the oversight of underwriting and delegated authority as well as compliance and risk management.

Asta acts as an independent partner that provides a cost-effective and flexible platform for clients’ development and growth. With Asta’s support, BPBUW can provide DAU with comprehensive services and solutions which would be otherwise uneconomical against its projected £25 million premium income for 2020. In this way, Asta provides the antidote to scale in the potentially expensive Lloyd’s operating environment.

BPBUW chairman, Jonathan Palmer-Brown, said: “Asta is integral to our operating model. With its services, knowledge, and market connections behind us, we can provide entrepreneurial MGAs with the complete spectrum of services and systems necessary to establish and grow a successful, profitable underwriting business.”

Keith Nevett, Asta’s head of business development, and who will sit on the board of BPBUW, added: “We’re delighted to support BPBUW and its existing and future MGAs. We deliver the high-quality services the market demands, from compliance to back-office administration, at a fraction of the cost of establishing in-house infrastructure. These services will help smaller underwriting units, whether syndicates-in-a-box, MGAs, SPAs or full syndicates, to operate more cost-efficiently in the market.”