Fast-growing specialist MGA, Alta Signa, wanted a more sophisticated technology solution to improve speed to market, build process efficiency, and give the business flexibility to evolve and scale its in-person distribution model. After a detailed evaluation, it chose Insly due to its ability to manage the whole insurance lifecycle and MGA expertise.
Just a few months after going live, Alta Signa has already seen a significant reduction in manual processes, a faster underwriting and quote process, more efficient claims, and greatly enhanced data management and reporting. When asked for his advice to other MGAs, Alta Signa IT & Operations Manager, Alex Cuadros, commented:
“My advice would be to consider Insly as a potential candidate, due to their wealth of MGA experience and the strength of the technology, which is affordable, very flexible, and easy to use, plus the team is wonderful to work with. Whatever your project needs, Insly can make the difference.”
Relationship-based approach, backed up by tech
When he founded Alta Signa in Brussels in 2019, Gerard Van Loon had a clear strategy: to serve Continental Europe through an in-person underwriting network, working locally with brokers. Focused on professional cover, Van Loon knew that a relationship approach would enable the business to reach small to medium enterprises more effectively, enabling the business to diversify risk, and price products more accurately.
At the same time, technology was always critical to the success of the business model, to provide speed and efficiency in the back-end to scale in-person underwriting. Having originally developed a proprietary cloud-based system, as Alta Signa expanded to €36m GWP, serving seven countries, the team realised it needed a more sophisticated platform and set out to find a third party to meet its needs.
“We wanted something more efficient and flexible, where we can better assess our risks, do more accurate pricing, and that will enable us to build products more efficiently,” explains Cuadros.
A tech upgrade for an ambitious MGA
Alta Signa wanted a full-cycle system that had strong automation across its business processes, including underwriting, a strong rating tool, comprehensive document functionality, and data-driven reporting for itself and its partners. In terms of ROI, it wanted to reduce the time to market of new lines of business and create more efficient internal processes, while retaining the human element that is crucial for speciality lines.
“With these kinds of products, the underwriting process is especially complex with many steps, a concrete methodology, and underwriting guidelines, which mean we need to be transparent and keep track of a lot of documents,” says Cuadros. “While we cannot fully automate the end-to-end process, we can streamline and automate some steps, for example, risk analysis where underwriters spend more time.”
Flexibility was also critical so that the team could adapt the system to respond to a dynamic and evolving market, as well as new requests from carriers.
“Tomorrow we may receive a requirement to better assess or track our portfolio exposure, and we need to include these elements or new data into the platform. So, we wanted to have something flexible and quick,” says Cuadros.
With an eye on the present and the future, the ability of a system to integrate with other third-party systems was also vital, to ensure that Alta Signa would be free to optimise further in the future.
“We are not living in an isolated world, and there are a lot of good products out there in the market,” says Cuadros. “So, we wanted to pick best-in-class and create an ecosystem that best serves our business interests, through easily connecting through other data and service providers.”
A smooth implementation
After an extensive evaluation process, Alta Signa decided that Insly best met all its criteria, and was confident that the team had the experience and expertise to manage the implementation effectively:
“We wanted to find an experienced operator in the market that could help us to do that transition,” says Cuadros. “Insly has a wealth of experience working with MGAs and we were very confident that we could meet all of our targets and objectives.”
The implementation involved capturing Alta Signa’s specific requirements and then mapping these into the platform. Cuadros says the team was highly impressed, describing communication with Insly’s technical architects and project managers as “very fluent,” while the data migration went smoothly.
“The migration was excellent,” continues Cuadros. “It was done in just one shot and lasted about eight hours. We didn’t find any important issues, which meant we could roll out the new platform as planned, with no further delays.”
Integration with other systems and onboarding employees have also been relatively pain-free, aided by training and materials provided with the help of the Insly team.
Early wins
Alta Signa has already seen key wins, including a reduction in manual processes and rekeying data. Quotes and documents are now generated automatically, plus products can be launched faster, due to product schema which provides underwriters with templates on which to customise to clients’ specific needs.
“The underwriting process has been shortened significantly and is more efficient, thanks to features such as document creation, risk analysis sheets, and pricing being embedded in the platform,” says Cuadros. “This has made underwriters’ lives much better.”
The business has also seen big improvements in its claims process, which is now linked directly to accounting and reporting, so the team can automatically create reports such as settlement and claims bordereaux. Content management has also improved greatly, as all documents are now stored and searchable within the system, creating what Cuadros calls a “single source of truth”, assisting day-to-day operations and regulatory compliance.
Endless possibilities
With Insly up and running, Alta Signa is already working on new features and functionality and has big plans. For example, it hopes to roll the platform out to its brokers and carriers, to give them greater connectivity.
“In an ideal world, we want to create a broker portal where they can create quotes,” says Cuadros. “And we want to give access to carriers, so they can track the performance of our portfolio, via reporting and dashboards, saving a lot of back-and-forth.”
The team is also working on incremental efficiency improvements, for example, policy documents to be automatically sent to relevant parties, and automatic referrals when new business needs further approval. Both will save further valuable time for underwriters.
“We are just starting with the foundations and then adding other blocks on top, while we scale and generate more revenues,” says Cuadros. “And it’s like a virtuous circle because as we grow, we need new functionality and then new features help us to be even more efficient.”
With Insly’s modular system, businesses can choose the elements that suit their needs now, and then scale as these needs evolve. Thanks to our flexible platform, plus our team of insurance and technology experts, implementation is hassle-free. Book a demo now and find out how we can help you reduce manual processes and improve efficiency.
