RPC‘s insurance management consulting arm is pursuing significant expansion as it bids to hit a £50m turnover target within the next five years.
RPC Consulting managing partner Rory O’Brien (pictured) said the start-up had been boosted by its acquisition of financial modelling tool Tyche last year, which has led to new deals with high-profile insurance clients.
O’Brien told Legal Business: ‘We aim to build the business to produce revenue, a significant proportion of which will be software fees, in the region of £40m to £50m over the next five years.’
The LB100 firm posted turnover of £100.6m, an increase of 7%, in its results for 2015/16.
Legal Business understands RPC Consulting turned over well in excess of £1m in its first 12 months, but has since increased staff numbers and added new clients, including global insurance firmHiscox, which signed up to use its software in May.
Since its launch in February 2015 under the control of O’Brien, former global managing director at Towers Watson, RPC Consulting has grown from a single-partner operation to 45 employees based at the firm’s London headquarters and recently-opened sites in Cambridge and Paris.
O’Brien has a goal to increase headcount to 150 employees in five years, with RPC’s acquisition of actuarial consultancy Marriott Sinclair and its software Tyche in July 2015 giving impetus to the expansion.
‘Analysis that once took a weekend will now take minutes. We’re really confident about demand.’
Tyche tackles some of the main challenges for insurance companies responding to recent EU regulations under Solvency II – a capital requirement test introduced in 2016.
O’Brien said: ‘Tyche means analysis that once took a weekend will now take minutes. We’re really confident about the demand in the market. We have a huge pipeline and we have around 30 ongoing projects.’
In acquiring Marriott Sinclair, RPC Consulting added its three principals, Alun Marriott, Mark Sinclair-McGarvie and Jonathan Broughton, as partners. Now, Tyche is the main revenue stream for the consulting arm.
RPC managing partner Jonathan Watmough added the firm planned to use its software to challenge accountancy firms for actuarial and risk work: ‘We have some ambitious growth plans and we aren’t going to mess around. We really want to challenge the Big Four.’
matthew.field@legalease.co.uk
