Back in 2018, all Lloyd’s Managing Agents bought into the market’s new reporting system, DA-SATS. Clearly named with its acronym in mind, the ‘Delegated Authority: Submission, Access, and Transformation Solution’) solved nothing. Renaming it Delegated Data Manager a few years later didn’t help. It was scrapped last year.

Multiple shortcomings held back DDM. Foremost was the unfortunate fact that it didn’t connect to anything else. That meant rather than reducing duplicative data entry effort, DDM created more.

Lloyd’s wanted all its coverholders on a single platform, but it built something no one wanted. It’s a shame, because the Blueprint visionaries who dreamed up DA SATS had the right idea.

I read last week that the target state is for MGAs to be “the digital front end for underwriters.” Oxbow Partners’ rather excellent Lloyd’s and London Market CEO Agenda for 2025 further declares that digital front-end era end will be characterised by live, dashboard-based performance monitoring of MGA portfolios by carriers. The Oxbonians predict that lousy data crammed into pitiful bordereaux will be superseded.

Regular readers of Insurance Technology Diary will know that these words warm me to the core. To my surprise, however, Oxbow contends in the same breath that “carriers cannot influence the overall technological capabilities of coverholders or their ability to support API connectivity.”

Odd, I thought. Surely they can.

They cannot dictate like Lloyd’s did. Every underwriter deserves, and should insist upon, a single platform designed to suit the unique eccentricities of the class they underwrite. It’s very hard to force ‘Fleet gross tonnage’ into a field intended to record ‘Nature of commercial activities’.

But even if the platform has the flexibility to be adapted for each class, line, and user (as any respectable workbench should), there’s another drawback. No MGA wants to be tied to one market’s technology (even if that market is a Market). It very much limits their ability to manoeuvre. If a major market draws back (as some carriers did a couple of years ago, during the hard-market-anticipating Great Bonfire of the Delegated Authorities), the MGA is stuck with some tech they cannot use.

All that said, markets can definitely tell MGAs what they require, broadly, from their distributors’ tech. They can even give them a list of suppliers that can deliver it.

“We will give you this capacity if you can deliver real-time risk data via API in XYZ format” is not unreasonable, not when the carrier is supplier-agnostic (and almost all of them are; the exceptions tend to be those building their own, which they shouldn’t; see above).

We can then deliver, together but individually, on Oxbow’s rather enticing vision for the future of DA underwriting. The best way to do it is to start doing it.