Peter Horncastle

Peter Horncastle is a fractional Finance Director with two decades in financial management, compliance and governance across FCA-regulated financial services businesses, with particular depth in insurance: MGAs, brokers and InsurTechs.

He was Finance Director of Meridian Risk Solutions, a Lloyd's broker, from 2019 to 2021, then Finance and Compliance Director at Xceedance from 2021 to 2026, where he was also a director of two MGA launches from the group's incubator, NuVenture: BluNiche, a product-recall MGA, and Eminence Risk Services (Nivante), a care-sector MGA. He was quoted in Insurance Times in 2022 on the capital dynamics behind the MGA model.

Earlier in his career he spent time at Argenta Holdings and seven years at Hiscox, shaping his understanding of Lloyd's-market finance from the inside. He is a CIMA-qualified accountant, and studied at Loughborough University.

His own account of his specialism sits with businesses under £10m turnover and corporate-VC-backed startups: lean structures under real uncertainty, where a finance lead has to add value operationally and strategically, not just report the numbers. Recent achievements include leading the financial narrative behind the successful sale of an MGA, and expanding working capital by £800,000 during the COVID crisis.

Today he runs Agile Risk Consulting, his own sole-trader practice, taking on interim FD and CFO assignments.

Separately, he publishes as Arkai-Optrix, a site for data, research and programmes: the Risk Code Hub, a reference tool covering more than 190 Lloyd's Market risk codes, and "It isn't tokens times a number", on the economics of AI pricing.