The MGA market is experiencing unprecedented growth, driven by new entrants, evolving customer expectations, and increasing demand for speed and specialization. But as the industry expands, many MGAs are reaching a critical inflection point — one where spreadsheets and legacy systems can no longer support the complexity or pace of the business. This session explores how leading MGAs are adapting to this new era of opportunity, leveraging modern core systems to manage growth more effectively, and laying the groundwork for long-term scalability and success. In this dynamic discussion, Origami Risk’s Sarah Savarese and Mindi Zissman, President of Zissman Media and Risk & Industry Specialist, unpack what it really takes to sustain growth in a competitive landscape. Together, they’ll explore how technology can empower MGAs to compete smarter, deliver better customer experiences, and meet rising operational demands. From real-world examples of MGAs that have transitioned beyond manual processes to practical steps for getting started, attendees will gain a perspective on the strategies driving success today. Whether your organization is just beginning to outgrow your homegrown solution or preparing to modernize its entire core system, this session will help you identify the “why now” behind digital transformation — and the risks of waiting too long. You’ll leave with a clear understanding of how modernization supports agility, scalability, and performance, and how to take the first steps toward a stronger, more sustainable foundation for growth. What’s driving MGA market growth — and why traditional tools like spreadsheets and legacy systems are holding many organizations back. How leading MGAs are embracing modern core systems to simplify complexity, accelerate decision-making, and improve customer experiences. Steps to begin your modernization journey, from assessing readiness to building a roadmap for sustainable growth. The “why now” behind digital transformation — and how investing in the right technology today sets the stage for long-term success. wistia-player[media-id=’cnnt11qvww’]:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url(‘https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/cnnt11qvww/swatch’); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:51.46%; } Everyone. Welcome to our webinar on Beyond Excel, scaling for the next wave of MGA growth. My name is Aubrey Eyer, and I’m thrilled to be your host today. Today’s program is a conversation between Origami Risk Expert, Sarah Savarese, and Mindi Zissman. We’ll have a live Q and A at the end. If you’d like to ask our speaker anything, please submit those questions through the q and a function on the Zoom toolbar, and we’ll address those at the end of the presentation. So we’ll start that conversation now. Welcome to the Origami Risk webinar, Beyond Excel, Scaling for the Next Wave of MGA Growth. I’m Mindi Zissman, and I’m excited to be here today to moderate today’s session. Really, what we’re going to talk about is what got us here won’t get us there. Based on that headline, we’re really excited to talk about the delta between the gaps and the opportunities for MGAs when it comes to digital transformation, spreadsheets, and a turnkey digital back end. Today, we’ll talk about what that next phase looks like, the shift from spreadsheets to manual workflows to scalable, data driven infrastructure that supports long term profitability. I want to introduce Sarah Saverese from Origami Risk. Sarah. Hi. How are you, Mindi? Good. How are you? Good. Good. Good to see you. Thanks for joining us. Sure. Happy to be here. Great. So we’ll dive in. The MGA space is really expanding rapidly, as we know and have discussed before. So as businesses grow, so do the operational complexities of those MGA businesses. From your perspective, Sarah, how does an MGA truly acclimate to that growth, and what distinguishes those that are scaling strategically versus those that are just kind of like getting bigger and still struggling kind of on that back end? Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, MGAs, it is still an incredible growth period. You know, we hear about it a lot. I think there’s been a little bit of a slowdown recently, but in both premium volume and complexity, I think I read that they’ve hit nearly seventy billion in written premium just last year, which is, I mean, tremendous. Right? Right. And so now we have to ask ourselves, okay, it’s not just enough that there’s more opportunity, but how do you operationalize that opportunity? Right? Because with all of this growth, there’s also increased risk. So there’s more programs, there’s more carriers and brokers and of course, all those data sources that all of that brings. So, you know, the complexity is really going to compound quickly. As you’re bringing all of that together, you need to make sure that you’re scaling strategically and that you have visibility into all of those data sources and bringing it together as best as you can. The MGAs that are centralizing their underwriting, their policy, in some cases, claims data. We see more and more MGAs recently who are interested in bringing their claims in house. Needing to bring all of that data together and gain the transparency that they need so that they can truly make faster and more informed decisions is really a key priority. And of course, helpful in scaling strategically, as you mentioned. Right. Okay. Great. Do you have any examples of that that you would want to share? Yeah, for sure. So I think the greatest example I can give you, we have one client. When they onboarded with us, of course, if you’re a new MGA, you need to be getting premium on the books as soon as possible. Until you’re doing that, you’re not happy about it. They onboarded with us. They actually launched their first program series in just ninety days. And they continue to launch additional series. Some we saw in as few as sixty days. Wow. And over a four year time period, because they’ve been with us for a bit now, Signed nearly thirty program series, almost sixty lines of business, different types of lines of business in that time. And, and the the premium growth was a tremendous as well. So achieving thirty two million in, gross written premium just the first year, which almost was double their target. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Really, really great. And then continuing to surpass their targets in in years after that as well, I I think, one eighty four million, the following year and, you know, and continuing to grow, which has been tremendous and great to be a part of, but also really speaks to, how having, flexible technology can help you scale, of utmost importance to those MGAs that are getting stood up and really helping them get that premium written quickly. Wow. That is speed to market, if we’ve ever heard of speed to market. Right? That’s the definition. So I think actually that’s a great, you know, launching pad kind of for where we need to go next is, like, if MGAs need to go digital, like, what does that actually mean in practice? Right? Like, how can someone have returns like what you were the, you know, the example and the the, you know, case study, the real, you know, origami client that you just gave us? What does that mean in practice? How does technology actually support a growing and scaling business and then help them become profitable, which was one of the other stats you shared as well, not just scale fast, but also do it at the right way at the right time and be as profitable as possible? Yeah. That’s a great question. And really, it’s, you know, for some MGAs, perhaps go digital and for many, it might just be embracing digital. Right? Like, it’s not enough to say, oh, yep. Check that box. I have that. But what am I doing with that software? What is that software going to allow me to do? So we’re really looking at MGAs as they’re becoming more technologically mature, being able to shift from more of a reactive kind of a stance to more of a proactive one. So being able to anticipate where they might hit some bottlenecks or experience some trends, whether in industry, their book of business, what have you. And being able to respond to that sooner than they would have been able to before. They’re also being able to bring their data, their operational data together. Right. That’s the key. I feel like. Right. Right. So you can surface up some of these trends in these different things better. It’s just a way to help make all that you’re doing operationally quicker, you know, even if it’s reporting, compliance, or you know, so many different things that go into your business. If you have that one single source of truth, that’s important. I think it’s important to note too that going digital doesn’t mean replacing people with digital. I think there was a lot of concern about that. Maybe a little bit we’ve read so much about that. It’s really being embraced as amplifying capacity and supplementing what those human people are able to do. And that humans are so important. There’s those real human qualities that can’t be replaced by software, but we can certainly amplify their their capabilities. So spend less time trying to chase down that data because now you have that single source of truth. Right? And more time actually working with the people that you’re building those relationships with and also more time analyzing the risk. So Right. Those are all all important parts of it. And as you mentioned, even with, like, that not that technology replaces humans, but hopefully, as the workforce of insurance, right, continues to have a gap of the need Here, we need more workers doing more things that hopefully that will help, again, not replace, but help, you know, cover some of you know, bridge that gap of the the deficit in the workforce. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, when we’re talking about the workforce too, because there is still that talent, insufficient talent capacity out there to be had right now. We don’t have enough people flocking to work in insurance as much as we all love it. But when you get those good people, you want to be able to retain them. What we’re seeing too is a lot of the newer workforce. These are tech native from the time they’re born. Right? Sure. They don’t wanna know about old fashioned tech. It’s not Or spreadsheets. No. Spreadsheets. Right? Yeah. So so yeah. So they’re they have high technology expectations just as the policyholders do. Right. Do you have any examples, like a case study example of a client that has worked with you guys that you came to Origami to solve that, like, performance and scalability kind of like issue and one? Oh yeah. Yeah. We’ve definitely had clients. We had one who specifically that I’m thinking of who came to us with some performance and scalability issues. It’s not an uncommon story. Think a lot of MGAs hit that point. It’s okay, this isn’t quite doing what I need it to anymore. And that might be spreadsheets. That might be an existing policy admin system because there are, you know, there are plenty of MGAs who maybe were earlier adopters of a policy admin system. But now maybe it doesn’t have all of the tools or hasn’t grown with them or maybe there’s, you know, like, latency and responsiveness issues. And so their underwriters are not able to write the new business at the speed and efficiency that they want to. A lot of times we do see people too who have outgrown their systems from a data cleanliness formatting perspective. I mean, let’s face it, even with Excel, eventually you do have a limit on how many columns you can have. And keep track of, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There limits. Right. Well, on that note, know, I wanted to ask about what happens on the flip side. So what happens on the other end of the coin when MGAs don’t modernize? And you mentioned a little bit of, like, the workforce even need to shift to modernization and digital. So what are the real risks of being stuck either in an antiquated system or literally in spreadsheets? Yeah. Gosh. There’s so many. Where to start? Right? I know. I’m like, oh, but this and that. So, I mean, I think first off, because we talk about it so often and we’ve talked about it a couple of times already in this short time today, data, there’s a data risk, right? And anytime that there’s a data risk, there’s also then a reputational risk. So and and I’m not even necessarily talking about, you know, like, how secure is your data, but are you able to achieve everything that you could? Are you perceived as mature? Are you able to conduct business in the way that all of your stakeholders, whether it’s your policyholders or people that you’re submitting your border row to or that you have to be compliant with? Are they all able to say, oh, yes. They they have a handle on this and have a good reputation of someone that is mature, has it together, and that you want to do business with. Right? Like, you wanna attract more business. You don’t want your software getting in the way of looking like the mature competent business that you know you are. There’s an And that goes with talent too. Yeah. I’m sorry. Goes with talent too. Was gonna say that same thing that you’re talking about. You wanna you wanna be modernized. You wanna be a business that has its, you know, face forward looking like, you know, looking like we got it together. We know what we’re doing here, and we can move quickly. Yeah. If you wanna attract top talent, then you need to have the tools that they expect. And and without them, you’re you really are going to see more turnover. I mean, we’ve seen surveys and research that show that. MGAs also have been seen to attract more entrepreneurial staff than insurers because I mean, MGAs, they’re an exciting place to be. And I’m not just saying that because we have MGAs watching, but there’s like a real energy to an MGA, I think. And they do. They attract more entrepreneurial staff than a lot of the insurers do. What about like that point where you’re just doing so many manual workarounds that, like, you just can’t do that anymore? You know what I mean? There’s so many Yes. I’m assuming, like, think like, either reporting or other types of, like, feature that, like, you just you can’t do them either in a legacy system or in spreadsheets. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah, there’s certain things and it’s not just the number of columns that I mentioned before, right? Like your spreadsheet is not going to offer you an underwriter workbench, Everybody’s excited about underwriter workbenches these days and for good reason. You need that interface to organize your day and to bring things together for you. You’re not going to have straight through processing workflow automations, not like you would with a truly modern built for the purpose software. Portals, so much that could be done, ageism policy holder portals. And forget about things like OCR, intelligence submissions and all the different types of Automated things. Gosh, yeah. So much, So much. Yeah. Yeah. You you just It’s almost like whatever. You don’t know what you’re missing. Job. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right? Until you have it. Yeah. Okay. Last question. For MGAs that are, like, what we talked about scaling, growing, you know, and they they do know that they need to change, but they feel, like, overwhelmed by the idea of this, like, totally new back end system, you know, something brand new, something that seems like having to scale a mountain before you can settle, where do they get started? What what’s is there like an outlook to have? Is there kind of like first step? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, you don’t need to do it all at once. Right? Like, start small, scale smart. So, you know, we’ve we’ve seen some not uncommon to have one line of business go launch first. And, you know, and that’s that’s a comfort place for a lot of people. I think you really need to have a partner in that process, someone who’s going to work with you so that it works for your company. You also need to make sure that from an internal perspective that you have an advocate, you have people that you’re bringing along with you. Bring them in early because it’s as much of a software shift sometimes as a how are we approaching the business and how we get it done. You know, there’s definitely, like, a component of that. So bring your people along with you. Find that internal champion. Look for quick wins. You know, there’s gonna be some early successes with any type of a a software implementation project that you can use to build confidence of the people who are around you and and, and be able to build on. And and I have to say focus on your data accuracy. So I there’s a lot of great opportunities out there right now, but your data is the foundation for everything. And we’ve seen that with some of our clients too. Yes, they’re coming to us because they wanna modernize their technology and maybe there’s some tools and features and functionality, but all of that is built on data. So we’ll partner with them to make sure that they’re set up for success as best as possible. But make sure that your data as you’re bringing that data in, that you’re caring for that. And I just spoke about being a partner. That’s like in our DNA at Origami. We’re always looking to be a partner. That’s very important to us. But whether it’s us or someone else, just make sure that you partner with someone who understands MGA workflows, understands the nuances of how MGAs operate. There’s different ways to approach it. We just actually launched a new offering that because we recognize that MGAs have specific needs and priorities. So with our Direct Deploy offering, we’re looking to make sure that we care for those and build on the experience that we’ve had with all of our MGA clients to make sure that we can serve the community as best as possible. Okay. Amazing. Well, as Sarah said earlier, we know there’s explosive growth in the MGA market and firms that invest now in smarter, more connected digital systems will, of course, be the ones that are ready to, you know, take on whatever comes next in twenty twenty six and beyond. And I just wanna say thank you so much, Sarah, for joining us. Thank you to everybody here who joined as well. And this is our latest in the Origami webinar series. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Mindi. Okay. Well, thank you again, everyone. That was a great conversation. We’re gonna open up the program for q and a now, and you can type those questions into the q and a section at the bottom of your Zoom toolbar. So we’ll start with our first question now. Sarah, we had someone ask, is there any harm in starting with spreadsheets and getting a full system later? That’s a great question. And I know it’s very tempting and very accessible. I spoke a little bit ago about how your software that you use is also an extension of how you operate and how you do your business. Don’t rule out that maybe there is a software option that’s more accessible to you and more of an option than you may think. You know, don’t just, like, cross it off and assume that it’s just gonna be too complicated or pricely pricey or time, intensive or anything like that. There are there are maybe some options out there for you, and then you can just continue to build rather than having to deal with a a software shift later on. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. Thanks. We had another question come through. If I plan to position my company for acquisition, is it better to not already have Since they might just wanna use their own? Okay. So great question, and I love that you’re thinking ahead. I think what’s important there is don’t don’t hamstring yourself for that possible future. Just make sure that whatever path you go down that there is, a great ability to connect to another system, to have those integrations, to be able to leverage your data how you may need to so that if and when there’s an acquisition down the road, your data is is cleanly set up, because I mean, let’s face it. Any kind of a company that might be looking to acquire you would be interested in that. That would be a very attractive thing anyway. But that it’s, it’s clean and, structured and that it’s accessible. So, you know, as you’re looking at different systems, just make sure that that that’s a a component of what you’re getting. Okay. Thanks. Alright. Well, it looks like that was our last question. So I wanna thank you all for joining us today. And I’d like to extend a special thank you to our speakers, Sarah and Mindy. So Thanks, Aubrey. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you all for your participation, and have a wonderful day, everyone.