Fourteen years of working inside carrier, MGA, and brokerage operations gives you a particular view of how these businesses actually run.
It is rarely the same view leadership has.
The gap between those two pictures tends to come down to the same thing: accumulated workflow debt. Processes that made sense when the business w
as smaller were left in place as the operation grew around them, quietly becoming more expensive with every year that passed without a redesign.
OIP Insurtech sees this pattern across every engagement, regardless of the client’s size, market, or technology stack. It shows up consistently enough that it stopped feeling like a coincidence a long time ago.
OIP’s teams work embedded inside client operations. Shadowing live workflows, sitting alongside
underwriting support staff, and mapping how submissions actually move from inbox to AMS.
What comes up consistently is this: processes designed for a $50M book are still running at $200M. Headcount is added at each growth stage to compensate, but the workflow itself is never redesigned.
Every manual step that could have been standardized but wasn’t carries a cost. Every work
around that becomes standard procedure carries a cost. Every human bridge between two systems that don’t communicate carries a cost.
None of those costs show up on a single line of the P&L. But they compound quietly over time and become more expensive every year the operation grows without addressing them.
Standard lines have had decades of standardization working in their favor. Consistent submissi
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on structures, established processing workflows, and predictable document types.
Specialty and E&S lines never had that foundation. Non-standard submissions, manuscript policies, varied document formats, and high-touch broker relatio
nships all require more human involvement at every stage of the workflow.
Across specialty clients, OIP sees the same pattern: more manual steps per dollar of premium, more individual judgment applied to tasks that don’t actually re
quire it, more capacity consumed before underwriting even begins.
The result is that specialty operations carry disproportionately higher workflow debt than their
standard market counterparts. And most of them have no baseline to measure it against, so they have no way of knowing how much it is actually costing them.
