Powered by rapidly advancing technology and driven by some of the brightest minds in the industry, managing general agents (MGAs) continue to disrupt the entire P&C insurance industry seemingly leaving no stone — or coverage line — unturned. With triple-digit annual growth and premiums eclipsing $100 billion, their momentum is accelerating as new MGAs proliferate and established MGAs expand to deliver innovative solutions backed by new capacity to address an array of increasingly complex and emerging risks. A prominent leader at wildly successful MGAs with roots at traditional P&C markets shares the secrets of the MGAs’ success, including insights that will help all players — from newbies to established multi-line carriers — find new ways to build effective partnerships, choose resources, leverage technology, and tap into the broader insurance ecosystem to drive the next generation of solutions needed to address emerging exposures. Speakers share the key elements powering MGA’s phenomenal performance — including creating dynamic ecosystems that optimize outsourcing, minimize costs, and deliver critical resources, and deploying technology for immediate impact and sustainable gains. Attendees will learn how to maintain a lean but highly effective structure, achieve unprecedented speed to market, and instill a can-do culture with no fear of failure — all of which are critical to unleashing the creativity needed to address rapidly evolving cyber exposures, expanding catastrophe-related property perils, and other difficult emerging risks. The speakers also reveal how the “flip side” of compressed timelines for developing and delivering breakthrough solutions also means realizing that failure happens faster — both in terms of rolling out new products, such as parametric arrangements, or making technology investments. Yet, this turns out to be a huge advantage. Indeed, accelerated setbacks often make high-performing MGAs more resilient — able to quickly take away lessons, regroup, mobilize, and reboot or gear up for the next challenge. In this webinar, we cover: How the MGA model supports a different route to market for writing emerging risks. How innovative MGAs are leveraging new algorithms and technology to make faster and better underwriting decisions, drive innovation, and achieve rapid growth with smaller service teams. Finding ways to evaluate new technologies (including AI) and potential partners with a risk-reward lens to create the ideal ecosystem. Insights on how the insurance ecosystem is evolving in ways that make critical resources and essential risk capital more accessible to start-up MGAs. Join Pat Safino, COO at Aurenity, and Chris Bennett, Chief Strategy Office from Origami Risk, to learn how the industry’s most agile players are moving from risk-averse to risk-immerse — and shaping the next generation of insurance innovation. Welcome everyone to the Business Insurance Webinar sponsored today by Origami Risk. A quick rundown of ON24’s tools as this is our new webinar platform to make this a great experience for you. A few housekeeping things. If you would like to see who the speakers are, I’m highlighting them here now, you can see. If you would like to ask a question at any point throughout this webinar, please enter it here where I’m highlighting now. We will have a few polls today and you won’t need any special tool for that. That will actually be within the slides, and when I prompt you, you will be able to vote on your screen for the poll. So stay tuned for that. The slides and speaker boxes can actually be enlarged by pulling your cursor over the bottom right hand of that box that you want to enlarge and dragging it open and bigger. So you can do that again with the slides box and the speaker box. Alternatively, you can close the box out if you don’t want it open by hitting the X on the corner. Today’s webinar, From Risk Averse to How MGAs Are Driving Innovation to Tackle Complex and Emerging Risks. We are here and we are going to unpack why and really how MGAs are moving and growing so fast, while the rest of the insurance industry sometimes feels like it’s stuck in slow motion. We’ll talk about the habits and choices that give MGAs an edge, how they can continue pushing solutions into the market faster and the role that technology plays in them doing so. Today is going be a practical look at why risk immersive actually means what risk immersive actually means day to day. I’d like to now introduce our panelists and let them say a couple words about themselves and their organizations. Tim Slevin, we’d love to hear from you. Yeah, good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are in the country. My name is Tim Slevin. I am sales executive here at Origami Risk working with our prospective MGA clients. I’ve been working with MGAs and an MGA IT now for almost a decade. I’ve been an insurance IT since two thousand and nine and unbelievably now I’ve been working in insurance or insurance IT for twenty years. So I came up through the insurance sector on the agency side here in Massachusetts and then I moved into IT back in two thousand and nine and specifically insurance IT. Awesome! Thank you Tim. Patrick Safino. Hi, good afternoon everyone. Joining you here from Hartford Connecticut. I’m with Aurenity. We are a wholesale E and S MGA, and I’m excited to be here to join you guys today and share a little bit about our business. Started my career at Accenture and was there for a bunch of years and then eventually moved over to Travelers Insurance. So I’ve been in the industry about twenty years now. Had a bunch of various roles across product development, operations, data and analytics teams, etcetera. And yeah, very excited to be here and share some of this with all of you. Awesome. Thank you, Patrick. Well, let’s get started, everybody. MGAs are playing a greater role than ever in today’s world of increasingly complex and emerging risks. How does specialization provide an advantage for MGAs in building out products faster than our carriers? Patrick, love to hear what you have to say. Sure. Yeah. I mean, it’s certainly an interesting concept, right? And I think some of it’s rooted back in the structure of MGAs and sort of how they came to be, right? If you go back to the origins of it and sort of the legal structure, it was set up many years ago for carriers to sort of extend capacity geographically, right, and without necessarily having to stand up all the infrastructure associated with it. And now, today, it’s used in a very similar way. And when you find partners and great carriers and reinsurers that want to deploy their capacity, it creates opportunities for us to get into certain markets and go out and really specialize in certain niche areas and find underwriting talent and pair it up with technology to really enable them to be successful and not necessarily be encumbered by preconceived notions about a particular market and or be saddled with technical debt that makes it harder to move quickly to market. Right. Tim? Yeah, and to piggyback on the specialization part, Mindi and Pat, you know, ten years ago or so when I started working with MGAs, of them specialized in one or two classes of business or one or two segments, right? So for example, non emergency medical transportation. I would work with an MGA and that’s all they wrote was ambulances that move folks from nursing homes to doctor’s appointments, right? So and they know everything about that, right? What are the risks? What does it need to be rated at? What are the forms that we need to put to make this program effective and profitable, most importantly, right? So when it comes to specialization, it’s hard to go out and just hire one or two people for non emergency medical transportation or hospitality, right? Whereas when there’s a group of folks who have come up in that sector, some of them working for those companies and then coming into insurance or working as an underwriter at insurance company, working in a specific class of business for ten, fifteen, twenty years, it’s easier for it’s more predictable for the carrier, I think, when they partner up with an MGA to say, yes, this will be successful because we have specialization and expertise in this class of business. Yeah, that’s a good It’s definitely something that’s emerging for sure, right? And more people want to feel understood, you know, certainly in their niche. Yeah, Patrick. Yeah, just to add a little more to Tim’s point, think, traditionally, it was a very specialized thing and it was a very unique program, Tim’s point. But as things have changed and there’s been a growing need for capacity across even broader markets now and broader product lines, I think you’ve seen it evolve to more traditional type offerings, just simple primary general liability insurance, right? Property insurance. It didn’t have to be the very specific thing that was niche because there’s a ton of underwriting talent and expertise that’s out there that really understand how to look at these risks. When you pair it up with the right technology and the right data, they can be very successful in driving sustainable profit for their carriers and reinsurance partners. It’s created a great ecosystem for everyone to be successful. Yeah, and just to piggyback on Pat’s point and kind of put a ball on it, we see the same thing, right? On the software side, I’m talking to small MGAs, I’m talking to aggregators, I’m talking to MGAs that are internal carriers, right? And it’s very much like everything else in the world, it has changed over the past ten years and Pat, I think Pat just kind of hit the nail on the head. Yeah, as complex and emerge, as risks continue to get more complex, right? This is kind of like what’s changing. Okay, we’re going to kind of pivot here to some audience feedback. Would love to hear from our audience what you’re seeing in your day to day and in your organization that you’re working in. Do you consider your organization to be risk averse or risk immerse? If everyone could just take a minute and hopefully choose A or B here live right on the screen. I’m going to give everybody a few seconds, and then we will move to the results. About half of people have submitted, so a few more moments. Everybody take your best guess here. There’s enough to be, you know, real qualitative. Okay. Let’s see some results here. Oh, spicy. About half, right? Everyone’s kind of on the fence here. Tim, what do you think? Is this what you’ve seen out there in the world? Yeah, Mindi, it’s funny. When I started thinking about this question, think about insurance and you’re like, oh, companies, MGAs, they’re all risk adverse, right? They don’t want to take any risk. They’re very conservative by nature. The fact of the matter is though, in my opinion, insurance is all about risk and transferring risk from one party to another, right? So MGAs and carriers are immersed in risk every single day and evaluating risk, right? So what they need to do as they evaluate these risks though is not take on any unneeded, unwanted or additional risk, right? So it all comes down to evaluating the risk that you’re transferring from one party to another. I can speak to this from the software side as well. I think the only organizations slower to adopt technology than insurance are the government and healthcare maybe. So we typically find that MGAs and carriers are risk averse on that side of the house, right? But I think on the day to day, we’re all immersed in risk all the time. Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m actually surprised it split. I suppose it probably ties back to a little bit of, if we look through the attendee list, sort of where people are coming from and joining us from and sort of what their backgrounds are in the business. But I think the interesting part is that regardless of whether you’re a carrier or you’re an MGA or you’re a service provider supporting one of them, I think as we start thinking about this question, immersed to me was my answer. And that’s because at the end of the day, as we see the world evolving and we see risks evolving, there has to be solutions for people’s coverage. And I think the big thing we’re all trying to solve for is how do we bring solutions to market that meet customers where they are and help them run their businesses and run their organizations effectively. And so that’s sort of like our job, right? And sometimes that requires you to be creative, and you can be creative by using different types of data and technology, but still holding on to your sort of underwriting discipline and principles that have guided you throughout your career. And it’s such an important part, but I think it really comes down to solutions, right? And that’s why I would have answered risk immerse as over averse because that’s sort of our that’s our job, right? Amazing. Okay, great. Well, let’s move on to talk about driving innovation and capacity. So while emerging risk areas like cyber, climate, intangible assets, you know, which of these areas do you see as ripe for MGA led innovation? And how do MGEs evaluate whether a new line of business or product opportunity is worth pursuing? Patrick, we’d love to hear your MGA expertise. Sure. Yeah. A very interesting question. You know, and I don’t you know, obviously, you sort of highlighted a couple of emerging areas there, but think, again, it goes even broader than that, and that, you know, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s something as specific as, you know, cyber or climate, but it could be much broader than that. And, you know, ultimately, you know, when we are evaluating new opportunities, it’s a little bit of a chicken or egg kind of thing, right? We first look for the underwriting talent, but sometimes an idea comes to us before that, right? And, so where carriers are looking to get into certain markets or we have underwriting expertise in a certain area or we have a new idea based on some data that we’ve been able to acquire that might give us additional insight into a market. I think all three of those things can sort of drive which products you sort of jump into. I think obviously all three are required in order to be successful, But sometimes the driver of what the choice is depends on which one of those arrive to your door first. But being able to be flexible and thoughtful again and be creative around the solution, I think that’s what ultimately helps us get product to market fast and allows us to be really flexible as we drive new innovation into insurance. Yeah, that’s great. And even like you were saying, it sounds like when you identify a need, right? And that’s just right? That’s always something that pushes you into another category, I’m assuming, as well. Something you see coming up over and over with either your insureds or people asking and you don’t have the solution, but you say, oh, wait, we can innovate for that. We can figure that out. Yeah, absolutely. Or it could be an existing carrier partner or a carrier we have a relationship with or a reinsurer and there’s a certain area that they’re interested in. And we’re able to go find talent to do that, and we’re happy to explore that as well. But again, it’s being nimble and flexible and really, again, it’s creative solutions to help drive Right. And what are you seeing on the tech side of the house? Yeah, so on the tech side, obviously you have to have tools that are flexible, right? So I’ll give an example. We have an MGA also in the Hartford area that we worked with and they started rolling out, their first program was cyber liability. They thought they were going come to market very hard with the cyber program and it would really take off, make a ton of money and that’s all they’d write in this new and emerging market. Well it didn’t take off the way they expected and they said, know, the property market is very soft right now, we’d like to get into commercial property and we rolled out a property program, right? So very different, the attributes and the data required to write a cyber product versus a property product are very different, the rating, the rules, the forms, all of that but we help them pivot their business, right? So now they have two divisions, they’re not just a cyber MGA, they’re cyber and a property MGA. So I think the important thing for MGAs when they’re evaluating tools and we’ll continue to talk about this through the rest of the session is evaluating vendors whether it’s policy admin, billing, claims that will adapt with your business, right? Your business is going to change, right? What we build for day one is not what you’re going to have two years from now, right? The software has to evolve with you and your business and it has to be something where it can evolve relatively quickly, right? If you can’t get products to market, if you can’t get new rates and rules and forms into the system, then you’re going to fall behind and it’s going be a challenge to keep up with the market. All right. Well, brings us right into our next poll, which is going to be about speed to market and our next question and conversation. How can you pivot quickly and, you know, get new products to market? So we’re going to turn this back to the audience. Do you think your organization’s tech stack helps you get new products to market fast? Yes, we have no trouble with speed to market. We’ll see how many choose that. B, it’s okay, but we could move faster. And of course, C, nope, it’s getting in the way of moving at the pace that we need. So would love everyone to take to these options here, choose one, and we’ll give you a couple minutes here, a couple of minute or two. All right. Awesome. We’re about fifty percent have voted. So I’ll give you a couple more minutes here. We’d love you all to tell us what you think. Okay. Let’s see what everyone had to say. Okay. Well, not a shocker that no trouble with speed to market is the lowest. That’s coming in about nineteen percent. It’s okay, but we could move faster, kind of that middle option, fifty seven percent. And then a little bit more, you know, almost a quarter of people saying, you know, really no, that it’s getting in the way of moving at the pace that we need. Patrick, would love you to riff on this. Let us know what you’re seeing out there. Yeah. This is another interesting one, right? And reflecting back on my experience, right, from time at Accenture to the time at Travelers and now at Erendity, had a variety of different experiences with technology. One of the fortunate things we have right now is we had we’re a de novo MGA, so it was really greenfield. And so we were able to start from the very beginning and build out our tech stack. But I’ve also been in the large carrier environment where you could have a really great user experience front end and a great rules engine and a great rating engine on all the things you needed to develop product, but it was all the integrations with the ancillary systems from accounting to billing, whatever they were downstream that really impacted you. And so I think, you know, I guess the responses here don’t necessarily surprise me, you know, and that’s typically the challenge, right? And if you get into some situations where you have a very monolithic architecture or you’re more componentized, all sort of depends how you’re going to end up answering this question. You know, but I think the thing that’s most critical for us and our success is that we’ve been able to start from the bottom up and really architect our infrastructure to meet the product needs as opposed to there was existing architecture and then we’re trying to jam a product in there. And, you know, that starts with structuring our our data model in the right way, and then everything just sort of layers on top of it from there. But the ability to get to market quickly and then to make adjustments and to tune and be able to update our rates, and to Tim’s point, move rates, move rules, move forms in is a critical component to moving quickly. Tim, anything to add? Yeah, so again, I’m not surprised by this, right? And again, Origami Risk, we really, we’re a core systems provider, right? So we provide policy admin billing claims to MGAs, TPAs, carriers, risk pools and inevitably the question we always get is, okay, when can I start using it? How quick can I get up and running? Right? And I always tell people, I chuckle as well and I say, well, the analogy is build me a house. You’re coming to me and you say build me a house and okay, what kind of house do you want? Do you want a thousand square foot ranch on a slab? Do we have a basement? Do we have custom garage? And the details matter on these things, right? So from my perspective on the vendor side, it’s gathering the details, it’s listening to the needs and the requests, the requirements of the MGA carrier TPA risk pool, understanding what they need, asking a lot of questions, we ask a lot of questions and it’s because we’re trying to solve problems advance and hopefully make lives better as we roll out new tech but there’s a lot of detail that goes into these things. So it’s understanding those details and then providing a roadmap or a plan that is accurate for an MGA or a carrier as they roll out a new line of business, right? So the details matter in these things no matter what the tech is, right? And just listening and understanding the problem we’re trying to solve and then providing that roadmap or that plan. Right. So speed is important, but not as important as quality. Patrick, did you want to say something Yeah. I would even take it a step further, too. Tim’s point on devils in the details is a critical component, for sure. Yeah. But also at the macro level, really matters too that you have a business strategy and have an associated business architecture that goes along with that because it’s you know, so so many times, you know, everybody sort of wants to blame the technology because I couldn’t get there quick enough. But part of what happens is, you know, over time, if if the business doesn’t know where they’re going and we don’t, you know, we don’t know what products we’re gonna offer, And when we’re developing the core foundation of the platform or the technology and we don’t have line of sight into what that future looks like, that can create opportunities for some really challenging technical debt. And that technical debt wasn’t born out of the problem of the platform. That technical debt was born out of the fact that we had a team that developed us into a corner because they didn’t know what the future looks like. And so having that business strategy and that business architecture set from the very beginning is a critical component to making sure you get to market fast as well. It’s not just the technology necessarily. And so I think that’s an important part that sometimes people miss. You’ve got to be broad enough in how you define the initial products, but, you know, obviously specific enough to support them, but broad enough that you have the extensibility to easily change and move to market with new things along the lines. Yeah, Pat, just to continue this point, right, on the technology side, I want to give a real world example here. We worked with an MGA, I worked with an MGA about two years ago and their backing said you have to get this product to market by April first and here we were in December, we signed the contract at the end of December, project kicked off in January and what we have to do on the tech side is give them their options, right? Here are your We can implement it this way and these are the challenges you’re going to face as Pat talked about downstream in year two or three, right? You’re going to make a sacrifice for speed or we can develop it this way and here’s how it will set you up for the long term. And again, I come back to education, about giving them the facts and allowing them to make the decision based upon the facts, right? And I think that’s an important thing for vendors to do is look, we’re technologists, we know our software, they don’t know the software and how to develop the software, they know insurance, they know their business, give them all the data they need just like you would writing an insurance policy to allow them to make the appropriate decisions. Right. And I’m going to move us, I’m going to discipline us here and move us to the next question, which is so much of what you’re both talking about already. So let’s dive even deeper into it. How do MGAs leverage technology to achieve speed to market while still maintaining underwriting discipline? And, you know, how has that shift away from the legacy carrier systems over the last decade or so empowered, you know, MGAs to build faster and be able to pivot faster. Patrick, we’d love to hear from you and, you know, thank you, Tim, for your real world example there also. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think the thing that’s interesting is, you know, when we started our MGA, we all came from a carrier background. And having learned so much through that process around what it meant to be disciplined and how to really underwrite at a very disciplined level, and then the associated systems and operations and processes that needed to be in place. When we set up to develop our MGA, we wanted it to look and feel like a carrier. To the point many, many years ago, MGAs maybe might have been using the carrier system or they might have been just doing things manually. And I think the important thing is now with the access to different technology offerings, it makes it really easy for an MGA to set up infrastructure like a carrier that allows you to collect data, that allows you to have the right level of control over underwriting rules, allows you to change rates quickly, all the things that you need to be able to do. And you can truly operate like a carrier with the right infrastructure setup, which then allows you to obviously build new products and maintain the existing ones in a way that’s really efficient. And so it was very important for us. We came into it with a mentality of we wanted to develop a level of infrastructure and operational processes that sort of had the carrier level expectation. That’s And Pat, to Pat’s point, when I came into this about ten years ago, ninety some odd percent of MGAs we talked to were using carrier systems to issue their policy. It was very heavily, the MGAs didn’t really have much in the way of technology. Maybe they had an agency management system. Outside of maybe a Greg Thompson who I’ve worked with, rest his soul, left us this past year, he was really one of the first MGAs to say, I’m buying tech and I’m going to build tech within my MGA. And he was on the forefront of that just a little bit before even I got into this space but there was a major shift in probably twenty eighteen-nineteen I saw where MGAs where carriers were saying, hey look we’re no longer going to provide you with the system, you need to buy your system, you need to buy your technology and it was a massive shift from and a massive influx of MGAs going shoot, we need to get a policy admin platform, we need to get billing platform and what I really think enabled this was the move to the cloud, right? Not having to buy software, having to have an IT department, right? MGs are typically, again, they’re more business, they’re more insurance people, not tech people from what I’ve seen. Now that’s changing through time as well, tech focused people are getting into the game a little but the cloud enabled them to really, you know, lease software from a provider versus have to buy all sorts of backend hardware in an IT department infrastructure and again, I saw that move, you know, seven or eight years ago. Okay, great. And we’re going to kind of talk about that next as well, talking about the MGA ecosystem. So moving away from speed a little bit. MGAs, you know, rely on a network of partners to do their work, right? Tech providers are one, TPAs, reinsurers, data vendors. Patrick, you’ve talked about a few of these. How do you build and manage this, you know, ecosystem for MGAs? And more importantly, how do you know which tech to choose to bring that ecosystem all together so everybody’s really on the same page with the same view? Patrick, do you want to take that Sure. Be happy to. Yeah, it’s a really important point, and it’s a foundational aspect of everything we do, right? And some of it goes back the conversation we were having before about the flexibility around bringing new products to market and how do we find the opportunity. Sometimes that opportunity just they find us because they want to come out and they want to take their underwriting expertise and they want to bring something to market, and there’s a set of tools or data that they’re used to using, we have to be able to bring that in and use it. And the ecosystem has to be flexible in a way that we can interface with multiple providers, whether they be software providers or offshore vendors or data folks or whatever the case may be, because the plug and play nature sort of changes by each product we launch. We’re working on building a property product right now. And so now it’s like, okay, we need to evolve one of our commercial prefill pipes, so to speak, to expand it, to bring more data in. And we’ve got to connect to AIR from Verus to do cat modeling, right? And if you don’t have a central hub and an ecosystem set up in a way that lets you do that plug and play, those things can become very, very difficult and challenging and then push out your product development timeline way longer than it needs to be. And so the way we sort of designed everything was with this in mind, so you can plug and play different components across. And so I think it’s actually one of the most critical aspects that gives you that flexibility to do multiple different types of products, but also get them to market as quick as possible. Yeah, and I think on the partnership side too, right? Or on the vendor side, it’s understanding what your solution does well, what box does it fit in, right? We’re a policy admin system, we rate, we quote, we bind, we issue, we report data. We’re not a telematics vendor, we don’t have AI here or there. And it’s being able to say no, we don’t do that, right? That gives you credibility. If a vendor tells you repeatedly yes to everything, then you should be concerned, right? And what I’ve done through my, again, time in insurance IT is build up a network outside of my vendor, right? It’s, hey, who can I go to? I need actuary, Pat can call me and say, hey, we need some actuarial help. Who can I call? Well, you should talk to Matt over at Martin and Company, right? Or I need some help with ISO. Talk to Brian Hen at InsoServe, right? The guy knows ISO inside and out. It’s being able to refer people to quality people that you know can make them successful, right? And then all of a sudden you have this entire ecosystem and network of people that are all working together and helping Pat and other MGAs become more successful. Yeah, it’s an interesting, the whole build versus buy debate that we’ve all had for years and years. I think many generations ago, it was always a build mentality, and the build mentality was there because there was such specific sort of expertise that was needed to develop these systems. But the reality now is that there’s enough folks out there that understand the industry and can build the technology in a way that a lot of these things you can purchase. And then if all of them know how to sort of operate around each other and can work together, it makes for a really successful environment. And, you know, the thing that we knew from the get go was that we didn’t want to be a technology company. We were an underwriting company, right? We were all about underwriting risk. And so what we’ve done is find folks that are either in the insurance ecosystem or one of our partners, frankly, started off in the banking industry, and then we were able to leverage their technology to an insurance application. And those are the things that we look for in technical partners, is how can they plug and play and provide that interoperability in our ecosystem. One thing I want to talk about too here, Mindi, is I want to give another real world example. We talked to MGA, on the vendor side, the competition is similar from MGA to MGA, right? They’re evaluating software and they’re looking at what they need and some vendors are better at things than others, better lines of business, international versus domestic, ISO versus E and S, right? So there’s a whole bunch of things that go into this and I don’t envy folks that have to evaluate software make those decisions. But what I tell people is somebody presented a business case to us and I listened to what he said and he said, How long do you think that would take to build based on your experience? And I said, That’s four to six months. That’s kind of just what my gut tells me with this, the information you’ve given me here in this twenty minute conversation. And he said, okay, he goes, I’ve talked to five vendors, four of them have told me four to six months and another one told me thirty days and I said well then you really need to ask some questions about that one doing thirty days, right? Like are they comparing apples to apples here? What I want to say is that should be a little bit of a red flag doesn’t mean they can’t do it but you need to do some deeper investigation, talk to some other folks around your network, talk to references, see if that is truly the case, right? But if we’re evaluating things properly you should be hearing a lot of the same things in the market. Right. And you mentioned that before also in that speed to market conversation, that it’s also about quality and not just getting there. It’s about getting there in the right way so that you have something that’s sustainable to move forward with. Okay, great. We’re going to go to our next poll, our last poll here. We’d love to hear from everybody. Do you find it easy to integrate with ecosystem partners? This is still on our topic of the ecosystem. So, you know, yes, we have many integrations already that are established. We don’t have any issues with this. Kind of, this is that middle option, you know, we have integration set up, but they weren’t so easy and they took longer than we had hoped. And then, of course, you know, now it takes incredibly long to set up any partner integration. So we’d love to hear from all of you in the audience. What are you experiencing at your organizations and your MGAs? What are what’s kind of what’s happening out there with your ecosystem partners? How are you getting in touch with them? And how is the back end working? So I’ll give you, you know, a minute or so, Go vote. Tell us what you think. Okay. All right. Let’s see. About a quarter said yes, but a little more than fifty percent said kind of. So similar to our last poll, and less than a quarter said no. You know, it’s taking too long. You know, Patrick, do you have any thoughts here on this, the ecosystem integrations? Yeah, it’s, you know, challenging, right? And again, I think, you know, we are in a fortunate place that we started Greenfield. And so, you know, obviously, again, I would have answered the top one there. And that’s a function of sort of the environment we have set up. But from past experience, like it can be really challenging, right? And it’s not an easy thing as everybody sort of gets to a common base and common set of technology. You know, I think the industry is going to continue to struggle with this a little bit. You know, so I guess I’m not surprised by the distribution at all. Yeah, same. Is this what you’re saying? Yeah, same. Know, integrations on the vendor side, the ability to integrate is table stakes, right? Just like the ability to do an endorsement, you know, cancel, rewrite, reinstate, right? Those post new business transactions in a policy admin system, you have to have them because they’re just table stakes. Same thing with integrations, right? The thing is they take time, right? And we have accelerators in place, many vendors do where you can speed up the time to implement those integrations. Again, going back to the implementation cycle, right? We speak with folks and if they say, hey look, I need to be quoting new business in sixty to ninety days, you can say, okay, great. We can generate rates in a proposal here in sixty days or ninety days, whatever that may be but you’re going to have to do some, you’re have to put those integrations to the side for day one, right? Because they take time and money and that’s the challenge with integrations and we’re getting faster, we’re getting better but there’s still, I speak to MGAs that are still running off of spreadsheets and work docs. So the fact of having a policy admin system that will communicate with three other platforms outside is mind blowing to some of them. To others it’s that somebody like Pat, it’s just how they do business, right? So I expected this to be kind of over the map. All right. Let’s give some advice. Let’s talk about, you know, can MG do here? What’s going to be their playbook for success? So as we wrap this conversation up, we’ll have a Q and A in a moment. So if you want to put in a question or two, please feel free. We’d love to just, you know, kind of turn the tables back on Tim and Patrick. Yeah. You know, what are some of the things, like a couple, one, two, three, you know, that carriers or carriers building MGA or new MGAs or carriers building MGA like units should prioritize to achieve some of the things we’ve talked about today, like speed and, you know, resilience and strong underwriting? You know, what are some of the things what’s like the either the low hanging fruits, what are some of the first kind of things, or even some of the larger overarching things that you have to do first? Yeah, I think, Mindi, we did another webinar a few weeks ago with an MJ talking about who just went through an implementation and rolled out the Origami platform and he said the one thing that I can really, if I can tell people it’s the plan, right? He did it a year before his contract renewal with his current vendor was up. Said, I’m going to bite the bullet, I’m going pay both for a year and I’m okay with this because we’re going to build this right and we’re going to do it, we’re going to lay the plan out and we’re going to do it right. He really took the time to get his rating documents together, get his forms together, get that roadmap, you know, we present him with a list of things that we’d like to do going into a requirements gathering session. Come to the table so that when we meet during that session it’s not, oh shoot, well we got to call Cathy, know, she’s got to pull that in and that’s going take a couple days, right? So that slows things down. We told him what we wanted upfront, he brought them to the table and then we developed that roadmap and that plan. So planning and timing is always important and the one thing I always tell people and again, the cases vary because sometimes people need to do things fast, but there’s the quick way and there’s the right way to do these things and if we do things the right way, they’ll build you up foundationally for success through the long term and again it varies from situation to situation because there are cases where we do have to go fast and the other thing I think is, people hear that I’m a sales executive and they’re like this guy is just going to sell me some software, right? And that’s just not who I am. I came up as a business analyst. I came up through the business side of the house and it’s really understanding, listening again, understanding the requirements, understanding the problem we’re trying to solve and if we’re not the right solution, that’s okay, right? Like I’m okay walking away from something if it’s not right, There’s nothing I want to do than sell Pat something that we can’t do and then Pat and I are at a conference and we’re sitting at the bar having a drink at night and he’s shooting daggers across the bar at me. That’s not how you build success in this industry, right? It’s about communication, understanding and then laying out a plan to make both sides successful. Alright, foundation. One point for a foundation. Patrick, any tips and tricks, or are you going to is it foundational as well? No. I mean, so especially from an MGA context, I think there’s three critical things. And I’ve sort of touched on them a little bit. But just to summarize, the first and foremost, most important thing, let’s let’s not forget what we’re all trying to do here. Right? We’re trying to underwrite risk. And in order to underwrite risk, you need strong underwriting talent. And that is that’s the number one priority. We’re not technology companies. There’s opportunities to work with technology companies. If you want to build a strong MGA or MGU, go out and get talent and hire the right people, the right underwriters that understand how to write business. That is the most critical thing. Then how do you build around them? You build around them by putting together the right strategy and the right business architecture to support the product development roadmap that you have in place. And then from there, then we start talking about, okay, what technology and what data do I need to have in place to support those things? And that’s how we sort of architected our entity, and that’s how we’ve thought about it. But back to sort of the point of speed to market and getting to market quickly, once you have the right folks that understand their business and understand their products, they’re very, very good at explaining how they’re going to rate it and what forms they want to use and how they want to think about underwriting. Right? And you’re able to take that information. And if you have the right chassis in place, you can continue to leverage that to get to the market faster with not only that product, but new products as well. Okay. We seem to have lost your face, Patrick, but we can hear you just fine. Okay. Okay. I think everybody else had that. Tim, can you see Patrick? No, same here. You know, one thing, you know, to Patrick’s point too, and there’s an excellent comment from Karen Siebert over here in the Q and A and she’s spot on is, I don’t want to be seen as a vendor. I want to be seen as a partner, right? And again, I talk about wanting to be able to see Pat at a trade show and buy him dinner and Pat tell his friends that we’ve done good for him, right? Like I want to be a partner, that’s the way I approach sales and I think vendors should be approaching it that way is this is a partnership, right? This is not a, hey, you’re just customer and you’re an MGA customer and that’s that, right? Like, no, like, you get to know people and you build relationships, you know, you care about the success of everybody. Right. Well, we definitely have one question, and surprise, surprise, it’s about AI. So we’d love to hear from both of you if you can share your thoughts as it relates to this topic, you know, the impact of AI. The example that they’re offering here is Florida based Neptune Insurance has no underwriters, only uses AI. Is this a growing trend? Is this something we’re going to see moving forward? How will AI be leveraged in tech when it comes to MGAs? Yeah, I can certainly start. Hopefully, are you guys able to see me now? Yep. Yeah, yeah. All right, good. Good, good, Yeah, I saw this question earlier in the chat, I wanted to figure a way to work it in because I think it’s super important. So thank you for the question. Really, really, really good question. You know, for me, again, I’m gonna go back to my my my number one principle from before, right, is is underwriting matters, and underwriters are what drive this business. And although AI is the new buzz and and it it is certainly changing the way we do business and the way the industry does business, I think, you know, the technology is really incredible, but we’ve got to find the proper use case to apply it And there’s a lot of use cases that are out there, but to get to a point where, you know, there’s going be no people underwriting risk, you know, I think that’s a long, long, long way off. You know, there are certain opportunities to do that in certain types of business. You know, you think about some of the smaller premium, very high transaction volume stuff, like that is the kind of stuff that you should be using more automation and AI on. But if you think about big commercial risks, we’re not at a place where the data is structured enough in terms of what you get back from brokers, third party data sources, etcetera, external sources, whatever you want to call it, that we’re in a position where we can start doing that. And so, you know, I think my answer to your question is certainly that there are opportunities out there, but I think we’ve got to be very, very careful to make sure we’re thinking about underwriting as our number one priority. Yeah, and from a vendor side, AI is becoming, it’s almost, I’m going to say that every vendor has an AI strategy at this point whether they’re developing their own or they’re working with partners or third parties, right? And in some respects that will become table stakes over time from what I’ve seen as well but Pat nailed it. The analogy that I like to give as I’m speaking with folks who want to automate and streamline things especially complex things is if I’m a business owner, I’m not using TurboTax to file my taxes. Taxes are complex, they’re hard, right? You can, but personally, if I’m that business owner, I’m gonna use a professional, right? And I’m gonna use somebody like Pat who’s been in the business for twenty years, who knows the ins and outs of how to file something properly, right? And when that audit comes from the government, right? I’m going to be in good hands because we did it the right way, not the automated cheap way or however, right? Specialization in my opinion still does matter I don’t think that’s going away between now and the time I retire, you know, in this business. I love it. All right. Well, thank you to everybody. Thanks for your expertise. You know, everybody was you know, both Patrick and Tim and the questions that came from the audience, thank you so much. And thank you for joining us today for Business Insurance and Origami webinar. Everyone who signed up for this webinar, whether you were here or not, will get full access to the presentation via email in the coming week. And we hope everybody has enjoyed this experience. Thank you again so much, everybody, for joining us, and you all have about ten minutes back on your calendars. Thank you.