MGA Data Quality: The Reinsurance Premium You Pay Without Knowing

If your fronting company sources business through MGAs, poor data quality isn’t a future risk. You’re paying for it today, in missed reinsurance recoverables, in reconciliation labour, and increasingly in what your reinsurers charge.

The MGA market grew 16% in 2024 to $114 billion in US premiums, with fronting companies supporting more than 20% of it. But the data flowing in from each MGA decides how much of that growth reaches your bottom line. That’s the ground fronting teams lose without ever knowing it and we work with you to win back.

What Poor MGA Data Quality Really Costs

The cost hides in three places, most teams never call data problems.

The recoverable you never find. Your reinsurance system matches gross claim data to treaty terms, so one wrong field, a misread date of loss or catastrophe code, can attach a claim to the wrong treaty or none at all. The money’s owed, but the process to find it never runs.

The reconciliation tax. Every MGA sends bordereaux its own way, and your team cleans, reformats, and reconciles each one every quarter, work that buys no strategic value.

The treaty pricing premium. In a discussion with They now penalise poor or untimely data with higher pricing – a global trend that already reaches Lloyd’s coverholders. If your reinsurance costs have climbed while your loss ratios held steady, your data is the likely reason.

The Problem Compounds as You Grow

Every new MGA adds another format, another reconciliation cycle, and another source of error, and one bad field can distort recoveries across the whole portfolio. The market’s consolidating too: , forcing you to manage MGAs at very different stages of data maturity. Your reinsurers won’t wait for it to settle, and neither should you.

Fixing MGA Data Quality at the Source

A stronger reinsurance system alone can’t fix data that arrives broken, so the fix spans two layers. The upstream work, standardizing and validating your MGA data, applying governance and exception handling, and turning the unstructured documents alongside bordereaux into structured inputs, is typically led by a systems integrator, and we partner closely with them so nothing reaches your treaty calculations unchecked.

Downstream, in the system of record, we work directly with you: we validate the fields most often behind shortfalls, control every change with a full audit trail, assign treaties automatically, and identify recoverables across all open treaties continuously, where manual review only works periodically. Together, that’s how data quality becomes built in, not corrected after the fact.

A stronger reinsurance system alone can’t fix data that arrives broken, so we work both ends with you. On the way in, we standardise and validate your MGA data. We apply governance and exception handling before it reaches treaty calculations and turn unstructured documents alongside bordereaux into structured inputs. In the system of record, we validate the fields most often behind shortfalls and control every change with a full audit trail. We assign treaties automatically and identify recoverables across all open treaties continuously, where manual review only works periodically. That’s how data quality becomes built in, not corrected after the fact.

See What Poor Data Is Costing You

Most fronting teams underestimate the gap, and it rarely shows until the system is doing the work. The numbers are rarely small. At three MGA relationships running 70% manual processing, a fronting company with $50 million in MGA-sourced premium can face roughly $2.5 million a year in recoverable leakage and reconciliation cost, and it climbs with every MGA added.

The recoveries are real, documented in our implementations. Automated reviews have found $1.9 million in aggregate claims invisible to manual processes at one insurer, $1.3 million at a personal lines mutual, more than $10 million in unidentified facultative recoveries at a large multi-line insurer, and over $3 million in old losses at a workers’ compensation carrier. The money was owed but never collected, because the process to find it didn’t exist, and nearly every organization that automates recoverable identification finds amounts it had written off.

We won’t hand you a leakage estimate before we start, because that number isn’t real until the system is live. What we can tell you from experience is that once the platform is deployed and recoverable identification runs across your book, we almost always find claims leakage opportunity, amounts that manual processes had quietly written off. Insurers that automate processing and validation have reported up to 30% gains in operational efficiency, and those that act reach payback within the first year, through recovered dollars, lower reconciliation cost, and a stronger renewal position.

Experience That Closes the Gap, Together

This isn’t theoretical. More than 600 insurers across 30 countries run on Sapiens, and our reinsurance clients stay with us, a 10-plus year average tenure and a 95%+ retention rate. We’re recognised in the Datos Insights Reinsurance Administration Solutions Market Navigator and named a Celent “Luminary” in ceded reinsurance systems. With our implementation and data partners, we’ve done this at scale. When your recoveries grow and your renewals get easier, that’s the outcome we’re working toward, side by side with your team.