The challenge most MGAs face is not a shortage of underwriting talent. It is a shortage of underwriting time. The people with the expertise to assess risk, price accurately, and manage broker relationships spend the majority of their working day on tasks that do not require those skills.
Data entry. Template completion. Chasing brokers for missing information. Re-keying records into the policy administration system. These tasks are necessary, but they are not underwriting. And when they consume the bulk of the day, the work that actually requires judgment gets compressed into whatever time is left.
For MGAs operating with lean teams, which is most of them, this is not a marginal inconvenience. It is a structural constraint on how much business they can write, how quickly they can respond to brokers, and how effectively they can grow without adding headcount.
The question is not whether to address it. The question is where to start.
Start with the submission intake
The most time-intensive point in most MGA workflows is the moment a submission arrives. Someone has to read it, understand it, extract the relevant data, and transfer it somewhere useful. That process is manual almost everywhere, and it scales badly. More submissions mean more of the same work, in proportion.
Automating submission extraction, using software that reads the incoming document in any format and pulls out the structured data without human intervention, is typically where the largest time savings are found. It removes the most repetitive part of the process before anything else happens.
Eliminate template-filling as a task
Once the data is extracted, it needs to go into a template or form before it can be assessed or quoted. In most teams, this is still done manually, someone takes the extracted information and populates the relevant fields. It is straightforward work, but it takes time, and it is prone to transcription errors.
Mapping this step to software means the extracted data is populated into the template automatically. The underwriter receives a completed form rather than a blank one. The 20 to 30 minutes per submission, which is what it typically takes, is reduced to seconds.
Automate the broker chase
Incomplete submissions are a constant source of friction. The underwriter identifies what is missing, sends a message to the broker, waits for a response, and follows up if it does not come. Across a week of submissions, this back-and-forth accounts for a meaningful portion of the working day.
When a system handles this automatically, identifying the gap, contacting the broker directly, and notifying the underwriter only when the submission is complete, the underwriter is removed from a loop that did not require their involvement in the first place.
Remove the final data entry step
The last manual step in most submission workflows is entering the completed record into the policy administration system. It is the most error-prone part of the process and the most easily eliminated. Direct export from the submission automation layer to the PAS means the data moves cleanly, without duplication and without the risk of mistakes introduced by manual re-keying.
The cumulative effect
Each of these steps is worthwhile on its own. Together, they transform how much an underwriting team can process with the same number of people. One Insly customer manages £18 million in premium with three underwriters, a team that would otherwise have required twelve. That is not a marginal efficiency gain. It is a fundamentally different way of operating.
Nora by Insly
Nora is the AI layer that handles each of these steps for MGA underwriting teams. Submission extraction, template mapping, broker chasing, and PAS export, all automated, with the underwriter in control of how much oversight they want at each stage. Nora works on top of existing workflows, so there is no need to rebuild what is already in place.
For MGAs that want to write more business without hiring proportionally more people, it is the most direct route to that outcome.
