Virginia Simpson

Founder, SignalWork Limited

Ginny is the founder of SignalWork. She built her early career in management consulting at IBM Global Services and Deloitte, developing the financial and analytical architecture that still anchors her practice, across London and Cape Town. She moved from there into senior operating roles, taking interim executive mandates in healthtech and impact ventures, among them KareInn, later acquired by Person Centred Software, and iCareHealth, later acquired by the Access Group.

She founded SignalWork to bring those strands together: the financial and operational rigour to fix how an organisation is run, and the funder intelligence that provides the evidence base for its highest-value strategy and income decisions. She leads the firm's income strategy work. On a recent engagement with a global institution, she built that evidence base, confidential funder and stakeholder interviews set against a five-year financial review, that took its board to a clear set of decisions on what to fund, what to stop, and how to pay for the next phase. Her work is built to be acted on, not filed.

Clients include the Centre for Public Impact, Carbon Trust, Tony Blair Institute and Co-Impact, the global pooled fund that has deployed over $350 million. Across more than 500 confidential interviews with funders, board members and institutional leaders, conducted off the record before strategy is set, she has tested one conviction: most funding barriers are perception problems, not performance problems. SignalWork exists to close that gap and to build the systems that keep it closed.

She works between Cape Town, the United States and the UK.