The Growth Challenge for MGAs and the Role of Automation
Imagine your MGA lands a new program, and submissions double almost overnight. The brokers are excited, the pipeline is full, but your underwriters are buried in email, ops is chasing documents, and carriers are pressing for clean bordereaux. The instinct may be to hire, but adding staff means months of recruiting, training, and overhead before you see relief.
This is the central MGA growth challenge: how do you scale premium without scaling headcount?
The old playbook, “add people as the work piles up”, isn’t sustainable. Modern MGAs need a smarter operating model that combines automation, role-based controls, and targeted business process outsourcing (BPO) so the team focuses on judgment, not repetitive tasks.
Why More People Isn’t Always the Answer
Staff growth doesn’t necessarily equal productivity growth. In fact, for many MGAs, piling on headcount only adds new bottlenecks:
- Training slows production as experienced staff are pulled into onboarding.
- Inconsistent processes emerge when each person invents their own workarounds.
- Duplicate entry and rework creep in, consuming hours each week.
- Manual approvals increase the risk of authority breaches and compliance gaps.
Relying on people alone makes growth fragile. To scale premium sustainably, MGAs need to put repeatable processes into systems, so people can focus where they add the most value.
Driving Underwriting & Ops Efficiency with Automation
“Automation” is a word MGAs have heard before, but most have also seen tools that overpromised and underdelivered. The difference is automation built specifically for insurance operations.
Take submission intake as an example. Instead of messy spreadsheets and email attachments, guided forms capture exactly what’s needed for each product, while validations – like address normalization or NAICS code checks – prevent incomplete submissions from moving forward. Broker portals keep documents tied to the right submission, eliminating the endless digging.
Rules and authority tiers are embedded, so appetite screens filter non-starters while qualified risks move quickly. Role-based workflows keep handoffs smooth, with clear accountability and SLAs. Decision support tools aggregate loss runs, rating factors, and exposure summaries in one view, speeding decisions without replacing the underwriter. And because reporting is integrated, bordereaux and regulatory submissions flow directly from the same data spine, rather than being rebuilt in spreadsheets at month-end.
Automation doesn’t replace people, it frees them from repetitive tasks so they can make better, faster underwriting calls.
Where MGAs See the Payoff
The benefits of automation appear across the lifecycle. Submissions are filtered before they reach underwriters, so effort isn’t wasted on risks outside of appetite. Standardized intake and automated document generation speed up quoting, while authority rules ensure compliance at bind. At renewal, exposures are prefilled and material changes flagged, cutting turnaround from days to hours.
Reporting also shifts from a burden to a strength. Bordereaux, carrier reports, and premium tax schedules generate automatically from policy data, and cash movements reconcile faster. What once took days in spreadsheets now takes minutes in system-generated outputs.
The result: shorter cycle times, lower costs per policy, cleaner audits, and higher broker satisfaction.
The Role of BPO in Scaling
Even with best-in-class technology, some tasks are better handled by specialized teams who can operate at scale. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is how MGAs avoid hiring for high-volume, rules-driven work.
Tasks like submission cleansing, document follow-ups, policy packaging, accounting reconciliation, and regulatory reporting prep can all be offloaded to BPO teams. When integrated directly into role-based workflows, outsourced staff work from the same queues and to the same SLAs as internal staff; so from the broker’s perspective, service is seamless.
This approach allows MGAs to handle surge capacity during peak quoting and renewal seasons without inflating payroll. In-house talent remains focused on underwriting analysis and broker relationships, while BPO absorbs the repeatable volume.
The Operating Model That Wins
The modern MGA separates judgment from process. People own judgment: pricing exceptions, broker strategy, complex risk analysis. Systems own process: submission intake, routing, validation, documentation, reporting. And BPO absorbs volume, handling repetitive, rules-driven tasks at scale.
This separation creates compounding benefits: faster quotes and shorter cycle times, lower costs per policy, cleaner audits with transparent approval trails, and happier brokers who see fewer delays and errors.
What Good Looks Like
Benchmarks from high-performing MGAs highlight the opportunity:
- Straight-Through Processing (STP): 25–40% of submissions in targeted programs can auto-route to quote or decline with no UW touch.
- Turnaround Time: Quotes delivered in under 48 hours for standard risks; same day for renewals.
- Touch Reduction: 30–50% fewer manual touches per policy.
- Reporting Efficiency: Bordereaux compiled in minutes, not days.
These are not theoretical figures, they’re achievable outcomes when structured intake, rule-based workflows, and targeted outsourcing are implemented with discipline.
The Business Case for Change
Consider a typical MGA with eight staff managing 6,000 submissions and binding 1,200 policies per year. With a growth target of +40% premium in 18 months, hiring alone won’t keep pace. Automation and BPO create leverage by allowing the same team to handle materially more work, with fewer errors and faster cycle times.
The gains add up quickly:
- +25–35% throughput with existing staff.
- 20–40% faster cycle times.
- Significant reduction in manual errors and audit findings.
- Noticeable lift in broker satisfaction.
Even conservative improvements more than cover the investment, leaving margin to reinvest in growth.
Closing: Scaling Smarter, Not Just Bigger
Scaling without headcount isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s becoming the standard. Brokers want faster answers. Carriers want accurate, timely reporting. Investors want leverage. MGAs that keep adding people to chase growth will hit ceilings faster than their peers.
The ones that win separate judgment from process: underwriters focus on complex analysis and strategy, systems handle intake and compliance, and BPO absorbs repetitive tasks.
At West Point, we make this model work with insurance-native automation, role-based controls, and integrated BPO. The result: faster quotes, lower costs per policy, cleaner audits, and happier brokers, without ballooning overhead.
Ready to scale? Contact West Point today for a demo and see how our technology and BPO services are a fit for you.
