Broker portals burst onto the insurance landscape a few years ago, heralded as the new efficiency driver for MGAs and insurers. But, while they’ve succeeded in streamlining broker submissions for underwriters, portals have simultaneously created a headache for brokers, who must enter the same information into numerous quote forms to achieve a good cross-section of the market. This inefficiency is causing MGAs and insurers to miss out on potentially thousands of pounds of broker business.
Now, AI has a solution.
Broker portals: An efficiency tool?
Managing the flow of quote requests has always been challenging for MGAs and insurers, who must ensure customers receive competitive quotes quickly but without an unmanageable administrative burden for those involved. Broker portals were developed to solve this problem by providing a central online hub where brokers could input quote requests, track progress, access policy information, and make changes to existing policies.
By moving the process online, portals reduced the need for numerous phone calls, email chains, and document attachments. For MGAs and insurers, data would flow into their systems in the right format, ready to be processed and analysed by underwriters, without the need to transfer and re-key data across different systems.
A broker headache
But, in solving the data headache for MGAs and insurers, portals increased the headache for brokers, who found themselves grappling with numerous platforms, some difficult to use, all with different sign-in details, interfaces, and data entry requirements. The only way to accelerate the process is to cut and paste between them, but even that isn’t straightforward when swapping between numerous different portal designs and requirements.
The reality for brokers is that most portals have turned out to be a huge drain on efficiency, sucking up time they could spend on winning new business and servicing clients. Repeatedly rekeying the same information also increases the chance of manual error and incomplete responses, often demanding more follow up from underwriters. And critically, from the perspective of MGAs and insurers, a cumbersome broker experience could ultimately affect their reputation and ability to grow.
A hit on new business and revenues
We know from conversations with clients that many brokers bypass portals altogether and submit risk details in the most convenient format, whether PDFs, Word, Excel, or email. This eases the process on their side, but it shifts the workload back to the underwriter, who must extract and process the data before it can be assessed. As a result, these submissions often get overlooked; Insly’s analysis found underwriting teams only handle around 30% to 50% of broker submissions due to this challenge, leading to a substantial loss of potential sales.
AI: Everyone’s broker admin assistant
Now, with advancements in AI, it seems the days of the broker portal – for submissions at least – may be numbered. Tools, such as Insly’s FormFlow act like an admin assistant between brokers and MGAs, ingesting customer data in whatever format is easiest for the broker, including PDFs, images, emails, or even handwritten text, and then delivering it to MGAs in the format that works best for their quote and bind systems – achieving around 98% accuracy.
So, neither side needs to spend valuable time on inefficient data entry, and MGAs and insurers can increase their broker submission processing to as high as 90%. In addition, FormFlow can augment customer information with third-party data from public databases, easing the underwriting process and reducing administration further.
Will AI kill broker portals?
AI doesn’t mean that broker portals will become completely redundant in the short-term; they are likely to continue to be useful for tracking quote progress, making updates, and for the very large, established insurers, which may be most resistant to change. But for most MGAs and insurers, looking to turnaround quotes faster, build strong broker relationships, and win the best business, AI is a gamechanger. With data entry taken care of, both underwriters and their broker partners can focus on what they do best; delivering tailored insurance products and top-class service, while growing their businesses in the process.
For more information on Insly’s FormFlow, get in touch to book a demo, or to find out more.
