AI for MGAs and wholesale insurance brokers, tested first on submissions your desk already cleared.

A submission that reached your desk ended one of four ways: cleared to an underwriter, blocked because the same risk was already in, sent back for missing pieces, or declined. Your management system kept that outcome next to the email and its attachments. Those records are the answer key. Your reviewer, the person who clears the most submissions, sets each AI draft beside what your desk actually did with the same email.

The job exists because of how the market is built. A retail agent with no surplus lines license has no binding authority with a nonadmitted insurer, so the wholesaler it uses becomes the agent of record on the placement. That puts hard-to-place risks through your inbox, often from more than one retailer for the same insured. An MGA adds one question to each file: whether the risk falls inside the authority the carrier granted. Lloyd's, which also calls its coverholders MGAs, sets that scope in a binding authority agreement with a Lloyd's managing agent.

The rules after binding make the second job worth testing. Under the Nonadmitted and Reinsurance Reform Act, part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, only the insured's home state may require surplus lines premium tax, and the placement follows that state's rules. Fifteen states run a stamping or service office that reviews filings, among them the Surplus Lines Stamping Office of Texas, the Surplus Line Association of California, the Excess Line Association of New York and the Florida Surplus Lines Service Office. Each wants different documents, so binders and filing data come second, or first if compliance is your heavier load.

The trade has its own systems. Vertafore built AIM for MGAs, MGUs and wholesale brokers, with submission clearance as a core screen, and many of those firms file documents in ImageRight. Others run Applied Epic, or Insurity for programs written under delegated authority. The proof of concept needs none of them, and we never log in.

These pages are for the firms WSIA represents. The Wholesale & Specialty Insurance Association formed in 2017, when NAPSLO, founded in 1975 for surplus lines brokers, merged with AAMGA, founded in 1926 for managing general agents. One limit holds on every page here: commercial lines only, so personal lines E&S such as coastal homeowners stays out. None of this is legal or regulatory advice.