Commercial Express will move 75% of its products to Acturis by year-end. The switch signals rising competitive pressure on Open GI in the UK MGA software market.
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Managing general agent Commercial Express is switching its back-office platform from Open GI to Acturis, founder and managing director Duncan Pritchard confirmed. After five to six years with Open GI, the MGA will sign with Acturis in the coming weeks and aims to have 75% of its products live on the new system by the end of the year. The initial rollout will cover property owners, SME, and casualty lines, the core product categories for most MGAs.
Insurance software platforms carry notoriously high switching costs. MGAs typically commit to a provider for a decade or more. A move of this scale – from one dominant vendor to another – is a relatively rare event in the UK market. Commercial Express’s decision to leave Open GI after half a decade signals a concrete operational pain point, likely in product deployment speed, broker connectivity, or system flexibility. The planned 75% migration within roughly 12 months is aggressive by industry standards. If Acturis executes on that timeline, it becomes a powerful proof point for other MGAs evaluating their own tech stacks.
For Open GI, the loss is both a retention and a reputation hit. A high-profile MGA choosing a rival weakens Open GI’s narrative that its platform can handle multi-line growth efficiently. For Acturis, the win strengthens its pitch in a market where inertia often locks in incumbents. The insurance technology sector will watch whether this can accelerate a broader shift in platform share among UK MGAs.
Commercial Express is privately held, so there are no direct equity implications from the switch itself. The read-through is for the competitive dynamics between the two software vendors. Acturis faces execution risk: it must deliver on the 75% product target without integration delays or broker-side friction. A successful rollout by the end of 2024 would validate its platform for complex, multi-line MGAs and likely draw more evaluations from Open GI’s customer base.
A miss on that timeline would blunt the competitive pressure on Open GI and confirm that platform migrations remain slow and risky. The next concrete marker is whether Acturis hits the 75% availability target. If it does, the UK MGA software market may see its first meaningful churn cycle in years. If it stumbles, Open GI retains its defensive position. Either way, the decision faced by Commercial Express is the same one many MGAs will now reconsider: is staying with an incumbent worth the friction of staying?
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