You must choose, but choose wisely:
Part 1: Binder capacity

Forrest Gump was wrong. Sometimes you do know what you’re gonna get. Make the right choices, and your decisions will drive you inexorably towards your goals. The only challenge is to know which options will have what impacts.

Unfortunately the link between choices and eventual outcomes isn’t always clear, so the results of our decisions are sometimes hard to predict. For example, it may not be obvious that your choice of underwriting platform could tip the balance when it comes to recruiting and retaining underwriting capacity for your MGA. But it might.

It’s a seller’s market for binder capacity. Risk carriers seeking to put capital behind MGAs have literally thousands to choose from. Competition for that risk capacity is extreme, so any advantage helps. Of course you need underwriting experience and the right route to market, but what else does your MGA bring to the table?

Having the right underwriting platform will help you attract and retain capacity. Here are five reasons why:

1. The right platform allows your markets to see all the relevant data, throughout the policy lifecycle, from submission to quotation to claims. They just need to log onto the system (with read-only access if that’s suitable). It’s the real, practical benefit of straight-through processing. It gives your capacity providers the data access and insights that they need to support you.

2. Having the right underwriting platform ensures that all authorities are transparent and respected, within all workflows, right back to the carrier. That gives capacity providers a level of comfort about giving their pen away: when they hand it to you, you cannot step out of bounds (even accidentally), let alone pass it along to anyone else.

3. Having the right underwriting platform means that bordereaux are fully automated, requiring no human attention at all. Only the best platforms deliver this lightest of light touches. And with the best, bordereaux are submitted automatically, even on Sundays. Nothing suits a capacity provider better than regular reporting, since they must report up the chain.

4. The right underwriting platform eases a massive pain point for everyone: the capacity-provider audit. One COO I spoke to spent nearly a month pulling together all the relevant information for their binder auditor, and the carrier had to spend nearly as long sorting through and connecting their different bundles of data. With the right platform, it’s all there in one place, with all the terms and conditions connected, alongside the authorities and other critical information they need to see. It will remain no one’s favourite job, but the right IT, deployed from the inception of the risk, makes the audit so much easier, and can shave weeks off the task.

5. Finally, having the right underwriting platform means that capacity providers can log onto their coverholders’ platform to handle referrals directly, without the need for imports or exports or phone calls or emails or rekeying. That saves time and money. Who doesn’t like that?

People choose Risque, the intuitive underwriting workbench from Quotech, for reasons other than the fact that it will suit their capacity. But with all the other enormous benefits of adopting a system built by an underwriter, with underwriters’ workflows always in mind, it is just another reason to choose wisely, and choose Quotech.