What is the biggest operational challenge facing the industry today?

Earlier this year Insurance Business was here at the BIVA Conference 2026 to ask the industry's biggest questions to insurers, brokers, MGAs, associations and more. In this edition we ask what is the biggest operational challenge facing insurance today? I think the problem we really have now is that people want more for less. I think the cost of everything is gone up. I think we can't really transfer that cost on to our customers so we have to be clever and innovative about how we deliver our service because that service still has to be great. But we have to deal with the challenges that come with the cost of living crisis and I think for me as well you have more than one person in the supply chain and a bad person in the supply chain can bring everything down. So it's really important that we make sure everybody in the supply chain is contributing, doing a really good job and not kind of breaking it down and making everybody look really bad. So I think we've all got to work together to deliver that service jointly. You can talk to any broker, MGA or carrier right now and they will tell you one of the biggest operational drags for them is Bordereau. Bordereau is still holding a slack and huge efficiency wins. If we can nail Bordereau, we can look at our growth story a little bit closer. I think it remains data, both timeliness and accuracy of data. We've seen that we continue to get quicker with our IT systems but data lags that and I think the challenge is getting that data right first time and transmitted to insurers and claims handlers so we can deal with it quicker, more efficiently to move forward. The biggest operational challenge as I see it right now is for a lot of products in the insurance industry, it's going back into that cycle of a soft market and you've got a changing distribution chain with the rise of MGAs coming through and also greater cost on compliance. All of that is squeezing the value chain. MGAs are taking their own part out of it, the increased costs and I think operationally for insurers, particularly on the underwriting side, it's about how you manage to get that underwriting profit and in insurance you can do 10 years and 10 years is a decent amount of experience but you wouldn't have been through the cycle and it's only once you've been through the cycle then you can start to understand how you manage your way through. Coverdrawing guys, they've been doing this, their routes go back to 2007 so they've seen how the whole market evolves. You see that in other areas of insurance but unfortunately sometimes you see people that don't have the background or the experience and then unfortunately get themselves into issues. I think it's finding staff who are trained and competent and keeping them trained and competent. I think there's a lot of advances in AI which are for the benefit of the industry but have also caused a few problems in terms of making sure staff are able to do their jobs properly. So I think it's the volume of ways that we are interacting with other systems and businesses and now we can consolidate that into a meaningful, speedy, efficient way of trading. Everyone is finding different data points, different companies that do different things, you've got your own staff, customers want something different and we're trying to be efficient and those things are not efficient so we need to work better to bring those together.