During challenging market conditions, capacity providers need to be confident that MGAs are selling profitable premiums. They will be laser-focused on ensuring that performance is high, and all partners are seeing value.
This leaves even the best MGAs with bigger hurdles to climb. It’s not just about performance – it’s about proving performance.
They must too arm themselves with evidence to cover:
- MGAs need to prove they are on top of business - and be ready to present this from an MI perspective.
- Underwriting performance. MGAs must define where they are writing good business, with the intention of dedicating more resource to this area.
- Broker performance. MGAs should determine business that is objectively profitable, rather than what is purely high premium income.
Producing accurate and affirming MI data can be a challenge for MGAs, especially when there isn’t adequate IT resource.
For want of an alternative, the management information that MGAs require is often held precariously in Excel spreadsheets or in multiple back-office systems. As a result, pulling out the right figures for reporting to both capacity providers and brokers requires time-consuming data manipulation - expending days of manpower every month.
As this is largely a manual process, reporting is sluggish. Rather than working with up-to-the-minute information, the data presented is nearly always out of date by the time it comes to be analysed. It’s also at risk of being inaccurate, due to the hazards of mistyping, inability to obtain accurate data from insurers and TPAs, and general human error.
Reporting soon becomes a vicious cycle for MGAs. They must grapple with the data to prove they’re on top of business – but all the while, they’re investing time and resources into unreliable processes that could provide an erroneous result.
Underwriters must divert their focus away from what they’re best at – writing new business – in order to churn out this flawed, yet seemingly unavoidable, admin.
From taking on underwriting authority to having claims control and command of policy wordings, many MGAs are not only delivering a comprehensive service, but are trying to be innovative in how they approach business lines. They want to service their brokers as well as they can, and this includes introducing purposeful technology to empower insurers and brokers to dig deeper into their available MI.
Technology which enables this kind of visibility is incredibly valuable when it comes to uncovering business trends, predicting future costs, revealing cost-saving opportunities and – critically – confirming your most profitable business.
Lack of transparency is proving to be disastrous for insurers – not only when making operational decisions, but when navigating unprecedented events; for example, during the current period of recession, whereby economic hardship is likely to have an impact on the number of fraudulent claims which need to be defended against.
The traditional MI solution isn’t always the right solution.
MI solutions for the insurance market have been broadly available from major insuretech players for some years. However, they often lack appeal due to:
- High setup and cost of ownership fees. Typically, a quality MI application will cost upward of £200k to set up, with high annual fees. This makes them the exclusive domain of large insurers and brokers.
- Expensive IT infrastructure. To run the above, powerful (and often pricey) on-premise or cloud servers need to be administered.
- Significant database expertise requirements. To set up and configure each MI application, the insurer or MGA needs MI professionals who are database designers and administrators. This further increases both setup and ongoing costs.
- Time constraints. Setting up an MI application from scratch is a large undertaking and most companies work on a lead timeframe of at least 6-12 months. With business now moving at the speed of thought, such delays are unacceptable and have high loss of opportunity cost.
With the DWF approach, we can deliver a complete solution of specialist MI software and applications, without the setbacks.
DWF will:
- Reduce costs to, in many cases, a tenth of what is the norm.
- Provide, factor in, and manage all MI infrastructure for you.
- Leverage insurance MI professionals with over 20 years of software design and implementation expertise, as well as the experience of over 600 successful implementations.
- Deliver in less than a quarter of the time usually taken.
Our solutions include…
AppStudio
Visual development and processing of your information which enables you to…
- Load data from anywhere. This includes policy management systems, claims management systems, bordereau files, spreadsheets and text files – as well as data for multiple MGAs with group consolidation, where required.
- Cleanse data. Accept, reject and warn of data anomalies to help improve the quality of MI to your board, shareholders, capacity and reinsurers.
- Aggregate data with advanced insurance business logic. Comprehensive and accurate transaction level profiling of elements such as earned premium, and paid and incurred loss ratios.
- Augmentation of your data. Taking information such as postcodes and augmenting their analysis by town, city, county, region etc, to provide comprehensive demographic analyses.
The end of the AppStudio process results in a highly optimised, prebuilt data warehouse based on the leading Microsoft Cloud technology platform.
ReportStudio & Power BI Apps
Once the data warehouse has been created by AppStudio, our Excel based ReportStudio software provides:
- Pre-built triangulation reports for up to 10 years of analyses of your key data.
- Ad hoc analyses from within Excel, using advanced train of thought queries. This allows your underwriters and claims directors to query data in seconds, without having to know how to create queries or complex pivots of the information
DWF also offers a whole suite of pre-built, but customisable Power BI dashboards to deliver:
- Claims analyses
- Carrier reporting
- Broker analyses
- Underwriting performance.
The result?
For the first time, MGAs of all sizes can deliver MI in a fraction of the cost, complexity and time required - but with leading edge DWF and Microsoft MI technology, which outperforms many the expensive MI applications used by even the biggest insurers.
We are experts in your market.
DWF are a market leading provider of risk management and insurance software, and we understand the risk that incidents resulting in claims bring.
With our software, you can seamlessly produce the reports needed to verify the performance of your books of business, as well as gathering the intelligence required to combat fraudulent claims and make critical, cost-saving decisions across your entire operation.
