Why Mga Submission Intake Breaks And What To Fix First

Why MGA Submission Intake Breaks, and What to Fix First

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As Executive Vice President of Sales at Upstage, Brian Lawing works with carriers, TPAs and MGAs on claims and submission intake automation. Summary: Submission intake is where an MGA's capacity is won or lost. Every hour an underwriter spends assembling a broker package is an hour not spent deciding whether to write the account, and the accounts that get squeezed out are usually the complex ones worth writing. Here's what breaks during binding season, why it breaks, and what to fix first. Ask any MGA why submissions take days to turn around and you’ll probably hear about volume, brokers, or binding season, but the real holdup is almost always intake. Each submission shows up as a stack of separate files in different formats that no system can read, so an underwriter has to open every file, figure out what’s missing, and retype the fields into the policy system before anyone gets to look at the risk. Last binding season, an operations lead at a specialty MGA told me about a problem that hits her at the end of almost every day, usually right around 4:45 p.m. A 50-page submission lands with half the application fields blank and the loss runs scanned at an angle, and the broker is telling her the business is hers if she can quote it. She knows the account might be worth writing, but she also knows how long it would take to pull together, so it goes on the stack to wait for tomorrow, which arrived with a fresh pile of its own. The part most teams underestimate is what “the stack” does to risk selection. When intake eats the day, the clock runs out before the best risks ever surface. The straightforward accounts move through because they’re easy to read, while the complicated ones, which usually deserve an underwriter’s attention the most, sink to the bottom and get declined by default. That declination is a capacity decision wearing the costume of an appetite decision, and nobody in the building can see the difference from the outside. That’s why intake is where an MGA’s capacity is won or lost, since every hour spent assembling a submission is an hour that isn’t spent deciding whether to write it. What slows down insurance submission intake? Intake slows down for a specific and repeatable set of reasons. Whether it be too many files per submission, no two carriers formatting a loss run the same way, applications completed to varying standards, and documents that arrive as images rather than text. Each one adds a manual touch, and the touches compound across every file in the queue. A standard broker package is rarely a single document. It’s usually a bundle of ACORD applications , loss runs from every prior carrier, statements of value as spreadsheets, declaration pages, certificates of insurance, supplemental questionnaires, bordereaux on delegated business, and the email thread the whole thing came attached to. 7 bottlenecks in MGA submission intake

Bottleneck What happens Why it delays intake

1 File volume per submission A single account arrives as a dozen or more separate documents across several formats. Somebody has to open, read and sort every file before the account can be assessed.

2 Inconsistent ACORD completion Forms 125, 126, 130 and 140 arrive partially filled, with fields left blank or answered in the margins. Missing data is found late, and the follow-up to the broker restarts the clock.

3 Loss runs from multiple carriers Each prior carrier formats claims history differently, and older runs are scanned rather than generated. Claim counts and incurred amounts have to be read and normalized by hand before they can be compared.

4 Statements of value as spreadsheets Property schedules arrive as workbooks with custom columns and no consistent structure. Location, construction and value data has to be mapped manually into the fields the rating process expects.

5 Scanned and photographed documents Dec pages, certificates and contracts show up as images, including phone photos from a broker's desk. Nothing in an image is searchable, so every value is read visually and retyped.

6 Attachments spread across a thread The package arrives over several emails rather than as one submission. Assembling the complete package becomes its own task, and incomplete submissions sit in the queue looking complete.

7 Rekeying into the policy system Extracted values are typed into the policy or agency management system by hand. The slowest step in intake is also the one where errors enter, and errors surface downstream during review.

None of these are underwriting problems, but every one of them eats into underwriting hours. How do MGAs increase underwriting capacity without hiring? MGAs add capacity by taking manual touches out of each file, not by adding people to the queue. If you cut the hands-on handling of a submission from an hour down to a few minutes of exception review , you’ve added underwriting capacity without changing headcount, because that capacity was there all along, just tied up in document handling. The instinct is usually to fix the visible end of the process with a new rating engine, a faster quoting tool, or a better broker portal. Those are all worth having, but they inherit whatever comes in the front door, so a clean quoting workflow fed by a messy intake still moves at the speed of the intake. Fixing the front means the documents arrive structured and connected. Each file in a package gets classified by type, the fields that matter get extracted according to a schema rather than a fixed template, and then the files get checked against each other: the loss runs against the prior-claims answers on the application, the statement of value against the dec page. Whatever doesn’t match gets flagged before the underwriter opens the file, and the output lands in the format the existing system expects. Upstage Studio runs that as a configurable workflow, and each submission it processes is linked to the same insured, broker and policy records. That matters because an MGA's document mix changes as the book changes, and a workflow that can't be adjusted by the people who understand the book is a workflow that ages badly. The underwriter stays in the seat, but what’s...