Mastering Automation. An MGA Success Story

Brady Underwriting

Brady Underwriting has quickly established itself as a leading MGA in the Irish market. From it’s origins as a brokerage, Brady Underwriting recognised the value of technology at the heart of it’s business. By partnering with Vistre, the team at Brady successfully leveraged the new Vistre software platform to rapidly deliver a suite of products for their broker network as well as direct to consumer.

We recently spoke to Diane Philips, Underwriting Manager with Brady Underwriting, to gain a deeper insight into their journey with Vistre.

When entered the MGA market, can you outline your initial challenges that you faced?

Yes, Brady Underwriting was a new MGA and we required a software platform that allowed us distribute as a Lloyd's Coverholder through two main distribution channels:

Via a broker network
Direct to consumers online.

We knew from the outset that we needed the ability to scale up and automate as much of the product portfolio as possible and to make it suitable for online distribution. We also needed to grow the broker network and streamline our dealings with them, from underwriting, to claims, user administration and finally settling accounts.

What were the key aspects that drew you to Vistre?

Vistre was designed to have flexibility in distribution channels allowing us to sell via multiple direct websites and to the broker market. As a result, we started with one product and quickly grew to 6 products over the course of about 3 years as capacity opened up to us.

Can you step us through the process you followed for launching a product?

Yes, we recently launched a new Miscellaneous Professional Indemnity scheme on Vistre as a new product in our portfolio. The process to go live is quite straightforward and as with our previous products, there hasn’t been a scenario that Vistre could not handle.

Agreeing the scope. The starting point is agreeing the appetite, rate card, question set and referral triggers with the capacity. Vistre provided us with some guidance on what they needed and it was pretty straightforward due to their understanding of the insurance landscape. Face to face meetings and online meetings make the implementation easier, it is key that everyone has common understanding of the scope and needs of the project.
Beta: From the delivery of theses initial items we had a short 2 week wait to see the first beta version. This can be an iterative process as, sometimes, things can make sense in an excel spreadsheet but need to be adjusted in practice. For example, phrases may need to be tweaked or triggers to be added as you see the product evolve on the platform.
Producing documentation: Each provider has unique style guidelines and content requirements in how their documentation should appear. This particular build was a dream but, in the past, we have had some non-standard requirements which were more of a challenge. We discovered though, that the Vistre platform was set up to deliver multiple template styles to get our product signed off with our capacity.
Full demo version: the final hurdle is always working through the quote process, ensuring an intuitive and seamless flow for the broker and our underwriters. Often, we had to demonstrate the product flow multiple times to stakeholders, and have time with it ourselves for some UAT. This always brings forth improvements and helpful reactions to how things work, because in our experience, every time we launch a product it there are unique business and underwriting requirements. Vistre were quick to make adjustments and they delivered the platform always on time and always within budget.
Go Live: the final step of setting up the tenancy in a live environment and linking it appropriately is the easiest part for us as it is handled almost entirely by the Vistre team.

What kind of affect has this automation had on your business?

Efficiency: Our individual underwriters can now touch 100 case tasks a day on Vistre versus an average of 30 in a manual scenario. This creates a major efficiency in our overhead and profit margins.

Financial: Scalability. Our GWP grew year on year by about 40%. The product features delivered a high retention rate on renewals (83%) and high conversion rate on New policies (25-30%).

What are the key takeaways you would relay to MGA’s considering automation?

Vistre provides us with great data that helps us react to outcomes which in turn helps us with product pricing.
Having Vistre quickly understand our needs and help us turn our plans into a profit making reality has been transformative to our business.
The Rating ability of the system is highly configurable allowing us to have very sophisticated and bespoke outputs depending on the insurer we are working with.
Accounts and bordereaus are made so easy, with broker accounts management completely within the system. We can issue customisable bordereaus to capacity with minimum fuss and intervention.
Broker feedback has been great. The system helps us be reactive and improved our customer service abilities and that feeds into a more supportive broker channel and greater loyalty in the long term.
On time delivery of our product on each and every occasion.

Having vistre as our underwriting platform has streamlined our job and made developing our business so much easier. They have been solutions orientated and the product has proved configurable in the myriad requirements of our insurer partners. They have been helpful, flexible and responsive. The product has received great feedback from brokers and they say that the communication is quick and streamlined, the interface very easy to use and they feel like we are a broker focussed MGA, which all makes us look good!

Diane Philips (Underwriting Manager) Brady Underwriting

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