Delegated Authority: You Gave Away the Pen and the Data Went With It

Delegated authority is a genuinely useful model. An MGA or coverholder writes business on your paper, in a niche where they have distribution and expertise you don't. You get access to a market without building it. What you also get, and rarely plan for, is a portfolio where the underwriting decisions, the policy data, and often the claims handling all happen inside someone else's systems — and what reaches you is whatever they choose to send, in whatever shape they send it. You carry the risk. They hold the detail.

Why the oversight gap opens

The contract usually specifies underwriting limits and reporting obligations, and both get monitored. But the data itself — the granular record of what was written, at what price, against what risk characteristics — arrives as a periodic bordereau built for compliance rather than analysis. It's summarised, formatted to the coverholder's convenience, and late. So the insurer supervising the portfolio can confirm the limits were respected while having very little ability to actually analyse the book it's carrying.

Where it breaks down

  • Summarised submissions. Bordereaux report aggregates when you need risk-level detail to understand performance.
  • Every coverholder is different. Formats, field names and definitions vary by partner, so consolidating the delegated book is constant manual work.
  • Latency. Data arrives well after the business was written, so problems are found long after they could have been corrected.
  • No independent view. Because you can't analyse the underlying risks yourself, oversight reduces to trusting the partner's own reporting.

Why it's a data-foundation problem

Supervising delegated business properly means being able to see it at the same granularity as business you wrote yourself. That's an ingestion and standardisation problem: define the data you require at risk level, normalise every coverholder's feed into one model, land it promptly, and govern it with lineage. Once that exists, oversight becomes analysis rather than trust — you can compare partners, spot drift in what's being written, and price renewals on evidence. It's the bordereaux foundation applied to the part of the book where you have the least visibility and the most delegated risk.

What good looks like

  1. Risk-level data required by contract, not just aggregate bordereaux.
  2. One common model that normalises every coverholder's format into a comparable structure.
  3. Timely ingestion so drift is caught while it can still be corrected.
  4. Independent analysis of the delegated book, so oversight rests on your data, not their summary.

Delegating the pen is a legitimate strategy; delegating your visibility into the risk isn't the same decision, though it's often made by accident. Building the ingestion and governance that keeps delegated business analysable is exactly the kind of work we do with insurers at IntelliBooks.

Someone else is writing business in your name. It's worth being able to see exactly what they wrote.

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