Tony Dixon: Lack of stable capacity ‘major challenge’ for MGAs

How is Integra continuing to develop service levels to match and exceed broker expectations?

In April of this year, we moved our claims service in-house, enabling us to provide a full service claims facility and achieve greater control over our customers’ claims journey.

Through our newly built online self-serve platform, we have created an easy-to-use and efficient online claims portal, allowing brokers or customers to register claims and exchange evidence online 24/7, which allows us to make informed decisions much quicker.

The claims platform is also integrated through API’s to our policy administration system, which has allowed us to automate the validation of policy coverage. And through dynamic questions sets that are bespoke to each type of incident, we have also been able to automate the claim triage and routing (supply chain or desktop handling) decision making process and the next steps guidance communication provided to our customers.

What is Integra doing to take existing broker partnerships to that next level?

We maintain relationships with our key accounts through regular catch-ups, exchanging KPI’s and gaining feedback on our partnerships.

We also continually get out of the office and on the road to meet with our broker partners and work with broker networks such as KeyChoice, Bravo and Movo to give their members access to our products.

What can brokers expect in the next 12 months from Integra? 

We are continuing to grow as an MGA and the next few months will see us bring new partners on-board from across the home insurance space.

In terms of our products, we will also see continued improvement of our quotability as our pricing and analytics team continue to gather more market data. There will also be continued risk selection improvement as we roll out initiatives, such as our partnership with Address Cloud.

Finally, we are also looking at a full point-of-address review over the next year – looking at homes in areas that we’ve traditionally not quoted in to see if we can open up new markets for ourselves and our brokers.

What are the major challenges facing the MGA market in the year ahead?

The lack of stable capacity within the MGA market may continue to be a major challenge for MGAs. In the home insurance sector, if insurance prices begin to increase, we may see new capacity providers looking to move back into the market as it becomes more attractive, which again leads to the issue of inconsistent capacity.

For us, the biggest challenge will be the volatile nature of the home insurance market – with winter storms and other weather events having a huge impact on claims and premiums.

What technological developments have been implemented at Integra?

We use machine learning in our pricing algorithms to ensure that we’re assessing risk as accurately as possible and offering the best net rates that we can.

We analyse our IHP quote conversion data in depth to identify areas where we could expand our underwriting footprint or reduce rating to increase our competitiveness.

Later this year, we’ll introduce elements of machine learning into our claims service too, to enhance the efficiency of our claims processing and free up our contact team to spend more time with our customers, particularly those that need our support with more complex claims.

What is Integra doing to attract, develop and retain talent? What do you think needs to be done to attract the next generation of talent?

Over the next few months, we will be relocating our head office to a modern and sustainable office space in the centre of Leeds.

We believe that having a modern premises that is in the heart of a financial services and transport hub like Leeds – and that also pays respect to the environment by being an A rated building in terms of sustainability – can help attract a younger generation of talent that are more socially conscious and want to work at a company that takes environmental matters seriously.