I Was an MGA Underwriter...

It was painful.

Now I’m building the system that I wish I’d had.

When people talk about underwriting, they usually talk about pricing, risk appetite, or capacity. That’s not where the real pain sits. The real pain is operational. It’s in the everyday work that fills the diary but adds very little value.

A typical day always started with enquiries. They came in via email and phone, and each was for a different product with its own set of data to be logged.

For a large portion of my day, that’s what I did again and again.

From there, the focus shifted to maintenance. Manning the inbox, updating our records, and ensuring our data reflected what was happening in reality. Data integrity wasn’t enforced by logic or automation. It relied on people remembering to keep things in sync.

Quoting was also a core part of the day and one of the most time-consuming tasks. Working from .Docx templates, editing them and converting them to a PDF, again and again. Then came the formatting, as each brokerage had its own preferences for the quote template. Some wanted spreadsheets and others PDFs, so every quote was carefully crafted to meet that need.

Once the quote was produced, there was a predictable chain of admin. Updating our records, saving all the documents, and ensuring the right versions were saved. Miss one step, and you create problems for yourself or someone else.

After lunch, data requests would usually land. These always came via email and were nearly always urgent. Excel became the tool of choice. Data was pulled from systems, cleaned to remove spaces and typos, then reshaped using formulas to produce something decision-makers could actually use. The work was painstaking. It took hours. And because it was manual, it was fragile. A small error could undermine confidence in the output.

Once that was done, it was back to submissions again. Uploading new enquiries. Checking for duplicates. Coordinating with colleagues to avoid doing the same work twice. There was no system logic preventing duplication, so it came down to communication and trust. Tools that could have automated data ingestion existed, but they cost money. Hiring more colleagues felt like the better solution, even if it embedded inefficiency deeper into the process.

Late afternoon was reserved for reporting. This usually meant zooming in to 150% in Excel and checking every line and cell. Looking for spaces, typos, or formatting issues introduced through manual handling.

Once finished, you checked it again.

And again.

It was early evening by the time you were ready to send it, hoping nothing had been missed.

Running alongside all of this was the challenging task of knowledge transfer. Taking everything you’d learned through experience and trying to explain it to a new colleague. Walking them through every nuance, workaround, and exception. Explaining not just what to do, but why it had to be done that way. Constantly adapting explanations as systems changed and requirements shifted.

All the while, there was a quiet question in the background: Surely there is a better way to do this.

This is the operational reality of underwriting in many MGAs. Not because people are careless or resistant to change, but because the systems were never designed around how underwriting actually works day to day. They were bolted together over time, leaving underwriters to manually bridge the gaps.

I lived this reality. That experience is exactly why I’m building what I wish I’d had back then. Not something flashy. Not something theoretical. Something that removes the friction that drains time and energy from underwriting teams and distracts them from the work that actually matters.

So here’s the question worth reflecting on: If you stripped away the spreadsheets, the manual checks, and the workarounds, how much of your underwriting day would still need to exist in its current form?

Shane Bhangoo is a Product Analyst at Azur Technology and a former MGA underwriter. After years underwriting complex specialty risks and implementing policy management systems, he now focuses on fixing the operational friction that slows underwriting teams down.