Show Notes
There's a reliable way to spot a boom in insurance: count the conferences. Cyber got its own, then AI, and now MGA events have taken over the calendar. Tom Spier joins Cordy on The Reinsurance Podcast to work out whether the MGA surge is a real shift in how risk reaches capacity, or just a lot of good underwriters building their own wealth instead of somebody else's.
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: Why MGA fortunes track the insurance cycle, and where margin hides when it softens Why underwriting discipline alone won't win capacity in a soft market, and what actually does How insurers are getting their arms around a third of the book they didn't underwrite, from the Fidelis split to Axis's $10bn delegated authority ambition What reinsurers should be asking about an MGA's distribution health instead of reading last year's bordereau Where AI genuinely speeds up MGA quoting, and where it just makes the inbox louder
EPISODE LINKS: Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomspier/ BindSignal: https://bindsignal.com/
CONNECT WITH US: Say Hello: [email protected] Website: https://www.supercede.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/supercedehq X: https://twitter.com/SupercedeHQ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SupercedeHQ RSS Feed: https://anchor.fm/s/7e741c8c/podcast/rss
OUTLINE & TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Intro 01:32 MGAs in a Softening Market 02:43 How the MGA Model Works 03:59 What Makes an MGA Stand Out? 05:14 Growth, Distribution & Underwriting Discipline 07:22 How Insurers Manage MGA Portfolios 09:45 How MGA Business Flows Into Reinsurance 10:58 Data, Bordereaux & Assessing Performance 12:44 Why Distribution Health Matters 14:12 AI, Submission Ingestion & the Human Bottleneck 16:14 Will the MGA Boom Keep Going?
More from The Reinsurance Podcast
Dame Susan Langley, the first Lady Mayor of the City of London in 800 years and only the third woman to hold the office, has spent a year flying round the world telling people what London’s insurance and reinsurance market actually does. Recorded at Mansion House, this is her case for why the quietest industry in finance needs to find its voice.
Sub-$50bn of first-half cat losses, no hurricanes last year, none so far this year, and rates heading south. Verisk's Rob Newbold boards the TRP yacht at Monte Carlo RVS to explain why reinsurance should still be braced for $171bn of insured catastrophe loss in an average year. Then he gets into what AI is actually doing to cat modelling, from globally correlated models to agents that talk to each other so humans can get on with deciding.
New capital is still queuing up for Lloyd's, but Argenta's Kate Tongue and Robert Flach reckon the smart money is taking its time. On board the Supercede yacht at Monte Carlo RVS, they explain three things: why investors tend to show up a year too late, why a diversified Lloyd's portfolio can rival ILS returns with less risk, and why capital cares less about a syndicate's AI than about who's parameterising it.
Property is softening at a sprint. Casualty is walking, and keeping one eye on US social inflation. On the TRP yacht at Monte Carlo RVS 2026, Lockton Re's Carla Moffett and Sam Sweeney explain why casualty reinsurance won't follow the rest of the market down, and why the brokers worth hiring now do much more than place the treaty.
Rachel Turk, Chief of Performance and Strategy at Lloyd's, explains why the flood of third-party capital is good news only while there's fresh risk for it to chase, and why institutional money might one day walk for reasons that have nothing to do with the insurance cycle. Plus: data centres that want $20bn of cover but not the bill, and why agentic AI underwriting only works if it explains itself in plain English.