Submission Intake Automation Mgas

What Submission Intake Automation Costs an MGA

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Brian Lawing is EVP of Sales at Upstage, where he works with carriers, TPAs, and MGAs on claims and submission intake. The short version: Upstage's Ten Hour Program puts a submission intake agent, built in Upstage Studio , in front of your underwriters. For MGAs under $50M GWP it's $50,000 a year, build included, covering up to 500,000 pages a year. It goes live in under 30 days on 10 hours or less of your team's time. It reads the whole broker package (ACORD applications, loss runs, statements of value, declaration pages, certificates and the broker email), connects it into one submission per insured, flags what's missing, and maps it into the policy or agency management system you already use. Every MGA I talk to has the same binding season. Submissions come in faster than the team can work them. Somebody's keying loss runs at nine at night. And the packages nobody got to have already bound somewhere else. The shops that come out of binding season in better shape aren't the ones with more underwriters. They're the ones who took the sorting and the keying out of the front of the process, because that's where an MGA's capacity gets won or lost . Your underwriter opens clean data instead of a fifty-page PDF and spends the morning on the risk, not retyping it. Most MGA leaders I've sat with have already thought about taking that work off the front of the process. They looked once, two or three years ago, and decided intake automation wasn't built for a shop their size. Back then, they were right. Here's what it costs now, how long it takes, what it handles, and who on your team has to be involved. What does submission intake automation cost for an MGA? For MGAs under $50M GWP and under 100 employees, the Ten Hour Program is $50,000 a year, build included, covering up to 500,000 pages of submissions annually. No setup fees. No per-page overages inside that volume. Mapping the data into your existing system is part of the build, whether that's a policy administration system, an underwriting workbench, or a database. A 40-person shop can check that number against its budget before anybody sits through a discovery call. That matters. Intake automation stalled outside the top 20 carriers because the projects got expensive, not because the technology did. Vendors pitched MGAs as if they were selling to a company with 4,000 employees, a procurement team, data scientists on staff, and six months set aside for integration. A six-figure build with a nine-month timeline that pulls two of your people off their day jobs just isn't something a shop that size can absorb. Everybody in the room knew it. The other side of the math is what it costs to build it yourself, and that comes in two pieces. First, getting to production takes longer than people expect. Accuracy climbs fast at the start, then stalls for months well short of where it needs to be. Second, whatever you do ship needs retraining every time a carrier changes its format, somebody watching to catch when that happens, and somebody who owns both of those jobs forever. On the return side, Tricura Insurance Group, an MGU writing senior living liability, put Upstage into its underwriting intake . The team saved roughly 30 minutes on every single-facility application, plus another 20 minutes for each additional facility on the same submission. But the minutes aren't the whole story. What matters more is that they handled a growing pile of submissions without adding headcount, which is exactly the problem binding season creates. And because brokers send the same risk to several markets, a clean submission on day one is also how your quote gets out first. How long does it take to automate submission intake? Under 30 days to production, and 10 hours or less of your team's time. Those are two different numbers, and they both matter. Thirty days is the calendar, well inside the six to twelve weeks most intake automation vendors quote. Ten hours is what we actually ask of your people across the whole build. That's the number to compare. And those 10 hours aren't a guess. Here's where every one of them goes. Ten Hour Program timeline, week by week

When Your hours What happens Your side

Week 1 2 hours Kickoff and sample pull. One call. You hand us a folder of real submissions: ACORDs, loss runs, SOVs, a few messy broker threads. No forms to fill in. 1 underwriter, 1 ops lead

Weeks 1 to 2 0 hours We build. Your intake workflow is set up in Studio and tuned to your forms and your appetite, mapped to the fields your system already uses. Nobody

Week 3 5 hours Review and correct. Your underwriter reviews the agent’s output on live submissions and flags what’s wrong. That feedback is the tuning. 1 underwriter, about 1 hour a day

Week 4 3 hours Go live and hand off. The agent turns on inside the workflow your team already opens every morning, with a short training session for the intake team. Whole intake team, 1 session

At the end of it, you're live in production on real submissions. Not running a pilot. Not holding a proof of concept that ends in a slide deck. There's no discovery phase that turns into a consulting engagement, no integration that eats a quarter, and no data science hire. We build it. Your team runs it. What does an intake agent do with an insurance submission? The agent works on the whole broker package, including ACORD applications , loss runs from every prior carrier, statements of value, declaration pages, certificates of insurance, and the broker email the whole thing came attached to. A submission shows up as one big file or as an email with six things hanging off it. Different types, different formats, some scanned and some not. So the first thing the agent does is sort the package, because each document needs its own handling before the submission can be put together. What the agent reads in each submission

Document What it is What the agent captures

ACORD applications (125, 126, 130, 140) The standard commercial forms brokers send, filled out to varying degrees of care Applicant name and address, SIC and NAICS codes, policy period, coverage...