Markerstudy’s group underwriting director Gary Humphreys has spoken out about the future of MGAs and how technology will help them stay ahead of the game.

Markerstudy, which underwrites more than five per cent of the UK’s motor market, became one of the UK’s biggest retail MGAs when it was acquired by Qatar Re earlier this year.

Writing in Insurance Age, Mr Humphreys said: “Technology is helping to change the shape of the MGA space and the best MGAs are clever about how they use it. Embarking on a road of innovation and transformation will shape an MGA’s direction.

“Those that will triumph will inevitably be the businesses looking ahead at where technology can provide added value, whether that be through legacy modernisation, machine learning, robotic process automation or blockchain.

“There is clearly money to be made from adoption of insurtech that dramatically improves access to and analysis of data, a smooth customer journey or information to influence underwriting.

“Technology can be a game changer but should include a word of warning – after all of the smoke and mirrors the figures need to stack up. There are amazing advancements out there, some of which we have adopted ourselves, but more substance is usually required to bring the complete MGA proposition together successfully.” *

At the launch of TRiCE insurance last year, Mr Humphreys told the audience: “At Markerstudy we’ve embraced super technology; technology that’s so much more advanced than everyone else’s, working in conjunction with RDT.

“Data is key. We use more than 60 agencies to gather data and we quote 40 million times a day, every day. We realised that we had so much data that we could return a quote after customers filled in only a few fields. But rather than using an existing sales channel we wanted to run it into a real time environment, from an app. This is a next generation of aggregator.”

* Comments on behalf of Markerstudy Group Underwriting Director, Gary Humphreys, and taken from Insurance Age.