Insurtech Bertie broadens out to brokers

MGA-focused insurtech platform Bertie is expanding into the broker market.

Founder and CEO Luke Aitkins told Post that MGAs remain the company's bread and butter, adding: “We've moved into the broker market as well, because there are a lot of potential clients there. The system has been built so that we can do anything within the Lloyd's market.”

Aitkins said the team behind Bertie initially set out to simplify and speed up the placement process for MGAs and ended up looking at a range of existing solutions before compressing them down into what he claimed is the first end-to-end platform of its kind in the market.

“Rekeying is a real problem for the industry. A lot of data can be lost or made inaccurate by these manual processes which are changing things throughout the life cycle.”

Bertie covers the process from submission ingestion to underwriting and pricing, issuing policy documents, cash-matching and producing bordereaux. It includes a pricing engine, the ability to work offline, and tax and regulatory support, and Aitkins stated that, while property and casualty is its main focus, any business lines can be written.

Bertie's main aim is to cut out the need for users to rekey information, instead using a single capture system so that underwriters only need to input data once.

Launch

Aitkins, who previously worked as chief technology officer for MGA Aspect, worked on Bertie for 18 months before officially launching the platform in March.

“The response has been great,” he said. “We have been targeting the smaller end of the MGA market and are now starting to move into larger players as well.”

Aitkins explained that the platform was in a testing phase for about 12 months ahead of the launch, with the team tackling a number of “unexpected roadblocks” and hurdles.

“The tax systems in particular can be challenging, especially as you start putting business through into Europe, where everyone has their own different rules and regulations. That's part of the burden we can now take off MGAs, because when they're moving into new areas, we already have a system that works and is tried and tested.”

Bertie is based on public information around how the Lloyd's market operates, including the Core Data Record and Market Reform Contract. Aitkins said it also follows the standard industry best practices within financial services, and used some of the learnings from Blueprint Two, which was shelved by Lloyd's earlier this year.

At the time of the launch, the company said it wanted to disrupt the MGA market. Asked how Bertie was planning to do this in practice, Aitkins said: “We want to allow companies to offer the absolute best service they can and these things can often only really be done by improving the operating systems in place and reducing the cost of processing, so that they can then offer their premiums at the lower rate as well. Anything we can do to improve the system makes a difference.”

He noted that the business is not in an “aggressive rush to scale up quickly”, instead focusing on “taking on the right clients”.

Aitkins further argued that there is a lot of opportunity for innovative businesses in the insurtech space at the moment. “It's important that the industry starts to adopt better digitisation, which I think everyone's very aware of,” he concluded.

Originally published in the Insurance Post on 9 April 2026 by Ida Axling.