Business Automation for Insurance Brokers and MGAs

The Pressure on Brokers and MGAs

Brokers and MGAs are information businesses. Every submission, quote, renewal, adjustment, report and claim is a set of documents and data that has to be read, checked, re-keyed, compared and chased. The broking or policy system holds the record. The work in between still runs on email, PDFs, spreadsheets and carrier portals, with people as the integration layer.

That was manageable while volumes and headcount grew together. They no longer do.

• Talent is the constraint. Brokers consistently rank finding qualified people as their biggest priority, ahead of technology. Every experienced handler or underwriter spending their day on admin is capacity the business cannot replace.
• Admin crowds out the work that earns. Industry research puts the share of underwriting time spent on administrative tasks at around 40%. The same pattern applies on the broking side.
• Service and reporting suffer in the gaps. Referred risks wait days. MGA reporting to capacity providers runs weeks or months behind, and errors made at intake surface much later.
• Most firms have not started. Surveys suggest the large majority of brokers have no automation in place. The most common reasons are not knowing where to begin and worrying about integration with existing systems.

Where Manual Work Concentrates

These are the workflows we typically review first. The pattern is the same in each: high volume, inconsistent inputs, several systems, and people doing the translation in between.

• New business intake. Submissions arrive by email in every format. Someone extracts the information, checks it, and keys it into the system before any judgment is applied.
• Quoting and renewals. Obtaining terms from several carriers, chasing responses, comparing quotes with different conditions by hand, and repeating most of it at renewal.
• Mid-term changes. Small, frequent and interruptive. Individually trivial, collectively a large share of account-handler time.
• Reporting to carriers. For MGAs, assembling monthly bordereaux from the policy system into each carrier’s format, then correcting the resulting queries.
• Claims intake. Logging the claim, checking cover, notifying the insurer, chasing updates.

Compliance evidence runs through all of these, file by file, and any automation has to be explainable and leave an audit trail.

What We Do Differently

Most automation offerings to brokers and MGAs are platforms, bots, or development teams. We are none of those. Work Upgraded provides one senior owner for the automation initiative: someone who decides what is worth automating, redesigns the workflow, leads implementation with your internal team and chosen vendors, and stays until the new process becomes the way the work is done.

Judgment stays with your people. Underwriting decisions, advice, placement strategy, and claims handling are not targets for automation. The target is the administrative and information work around them.

Your systems stay in place. Whatever broking or policy administration system you run, the work is to remove the manual layer between email, documents, portals and that system, not to replace it.

Business case first. We measure the baseline and quantify the value before anything is built. Initial initiatives are typically focused and may involve roughly 20 to 100 hours of specialist implementation work, targeting a 3 to 6 month payback. Those are working qualification benchmarks, not quotes or guarantees.

Adoption is part of delivery. A tool the handlers route around has not delivered anything. We design the process with the people who run it and measure the result after go-live.

How It Works for a Broker or MGA

The same SCALE Framework we use everywhere, applied to your operation.

1. Study: map one workflow as it actually runs, across teams, inboxes, portals and your system. Measure volume, time, errors and turnaround.
2. Choose: identify the contained opportunities, size them, and rank by impact, effort, risk and payback. Decide what to pursue, investigate or stop.
3. Architect: redesign the workflow with controls, exceptions and an audit trail, and define the right solution approach.
4. Launch: lead implementation with your team and specialists, test against real files, and roll out team-by-team.
5. Embed: training, ownership, a few clear KPIs, and the governance to keep improving.

Start with a free Workflow Review of one workflow, move to a Decision Sprint to decide across an operating area, or go directly to an Execution Mandate when the need is already clear.

Example Outcome

Insurance Invoice and Document Processing: 40% less manual work, processing completed 35% faster. Invoices and supporting documents arriving in multiple formats, manually read, matched, coded and approved, redesigned and automated with the client’s own team and vendor. The same shape as premium invoicing, carrier statements and policy documentation in a brokerage or MGA. See Results.

Intake, renewals and carrier reporting are structurally the same problem: unstructured documents in, structured records and decisions out, with people doing the translation in between.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you understand the difference between a broker and an MGA?

Yes. A broker acts for the client and sells advice and placement; an MGA underwrites on a carrier’s capital under delegated authority. The workflows overlap, but the economics, the systems, and the reporting obligations differ, and so does the business case.

Will this replace our broking or policy administration system?

No. The system of record stays. Most of the value is in removing the manual layer around it.

Are you proposing AI underwriting or AI advice?

No. Underwriting judgment, advice, and claims decisions stay with your people. AI may be one component where it is reliable and explainable; workflow automation and integration often matter more.

How do you handle compliance and audit requirements?

Every redesigned workflow is specified with controls, exception handling, and an audit trail, so it can be explained to your compliance function and your regulator. That is part of the design, not an afterthought.

Where should we start?

With the workflow that costs the most capacity today. For most brokers, that is renewals or mid-term changes; for most MGAs it is intake or carrier reporting. A free Workflow Review gives you a brief and a recommendation to pursue, investigate, or stop.

Sources

The figures on this page come from independent industry research:

• Around 40% of underwriting time spent on administrative tasks: Accenture, "Why underwriters don't underwrite (much)"; 30 to 40% of time in commercial operations on retyping and manual analysis: McKinsey, "From art to science: the future of underwriting".
• Talent ranked ahead of technology as brokers' top priority: Mission poll of UK brokers at BIBA 2026, via Insurance Business.
• Referred risks taking a day or longer: Insurance Times eTrading research.
• Bordereaux reporting lagging by 30 to 90 days: InsTech, "The bordereaux bottleneck".
• The large majority of broking firms without automation in place, and the barriers of integration and knowing where to begin: Open GI survey of 207 broking firms.
• Claims process needing improvement (MGA view): MGAA / Clyde & Co, MGA Opinion Report 2025.