Insurance Technology Trends & Observations for MGAs

MGAs, or Managing General Agents, are in the unique position to act on behalf of their clients, the insurer. Their specialized expertise is often leveraged by clients in not only a wholesale broker capacity, but also in general underwriting. Due to the competitive nature of the MGAs industry, it’s critical to stay ahead of trends in insurance technology (InsurTech). Keep reading to see what we identified as three ongoing trends in the industry:

#1: Refine Your MGA Business Strategy to Prioritize Critical Components and Reduce Friction in Your Processes

Give your subject-matter experts the experience and skills to improve overall risk assessment and productivity. Select a partner with technology solutions that automate and streamline the underwriting process, which is, historically, a manual, tedious and time-consuming process. It’s advised to employ experts in the property and casualty space to keep your business operations streamlined and reduce effort and time to achieve policy issuance. This includes resources in risk mitigation expertise, implementation, custom portal development and more.

At this stage, examine your current efforts and find areas where you’re burning valuable hours to complete tasks. Our team leverages Insurity to accomplish automating underwriting, rating and issuance, as we find it reduces the time investment on a business’ end.

#2: Incorporate Application Programming Interfaces (API) into Your Long-Term Vision

When planning for the future of your organization, incorporate Application Programming Interfaces (API) into your goals. Use this opportunity to choose a core platform with proven technology. Research the timeline of product updates for your platform, so you can make sure there is consistent commitment to grow and improve the technology you’re investing in. Consider focusing on ease of integration, and open as many avenues as possible to incorporate valuable data that impacts your ability to create, track and pay claims efficiently. Leverage the best available cloud-based solution that gives you flexibility to scale along with your business’ growth. Cloud and API technologies are here to stay, so the time to act on this is now.

#3: Select Partners and Products that Offer Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Solutions and Strong Post-Implementation Support

Select a partner with a detailed and proven project delivery methodology that delivers faster and more consistent results. Whoever you partner with, try to find a project management team that leverages optimized implementation processes to get your business where you need it to be. Be sure that your team has applicable domain knowledge for your business and a technology skillset to enhance your valuable investment.

Consider utilizing managed services or assigned resource support teams post-project implementation to make sure your solution remains a success.  It’s also critical to look for options that provide both on-shore and off-shore models to help with the operational care for applications, as well as regulatory reporting, customized contract enhancements, technical interfaces, and upgrade readiness validation.

No matter what type of insurance, be it homeowners, commercial property, builder’s risk, personal articles floaters or flood, at Sikich, we are here to help build and implement your Insurtech strategy. Request a consultation today.