Almost anyone working in delegated authority claims knows the friction has many sources. Coverage interpretation, reserving, fraud investigations, delegated authority disputes, documentation gaps and wider operational bottlenecks all play a part. Less visible, but worth examining alongside them, is the operational data that flows through the premium payment lifecycle into the claim.
Premium reconciliation, payment allocation and bordereaux data shape the record a claims team works from when a loss event lands. When that record is incomplete, the resulting ambiguity can compound other pressures on the claim by the time it reaches the team. The contribution is rarely the largest factor, but it is one of the more addressable ones. For MGAs working between cover holders and carriers, inconsistencies introduced at early handoff points can be the hardest to trace later in the claim.
AutoRek’s 2026 Insurance Operations Report puts numbers to an issue most MGAs experience without needing data to confirm it. The average B2B premium settlement period runs 56 days, rising to 59 days for firms processing more than 10 million transactions annually. Nearly half of insurers face cycles exceeding 60 days. That is money in transit, against which the insurer remains on risk for policies they have yet to be funded for.
Claims fail because the operational data feeding them was already compromised upstream. Below are four points in the premium lifecycle where that damage tends to originate:
1. Data fragmentation. The average insurer manages 17 separate data sources feeding the premium payment process. When those sources sit unreconciled, the financial record a claims team works from is incomplete, with missing payment history, misallocated premiums and unreconciled bordereaux entries creating ambiguity at moments where clarity matters.
2. Manual processing at modern volume. Fifty-two percent of insurance firms still use Excel as their primary tool for premium processing and allocation, while the average insurer handles 16.77 million transactions a year, a figure projected to grow 28.7% over the next two years. Spreadsheets were never designed for that load, and the errors that result accumulate in the background rather than failing dramatically, surfacing at settlement where they cost more to resolve than they would have cost to prevent.
3. Exception management. High volumes of data (60%), varying payment terms (51%) and different formats and structures (48%) are the three largest premium payment challenges firms identified. Each is a category of exception that requires resolution before clean settlement data exists, and without automated tooling to identify, categorize and route those exceptions in real time, they queue behind manual workloads and push claims timelines out alongside everything else downstream.
4. Key person dependency. Legacy reconciliation processes tend to live in the heads of a small number of experienced staff and are rarely documented in a way that allows another team member to step in. When institutional knowledge replaces automated controls, operational risk persists, and the week a senior reconciler is out tends to be the week a complicated claim arrives.
What practical fixes look like
The practical steps are well understood and increasingly demonstrated across the market. Centralizing data management across the premium payment lifecycle produces a single reconciled view before claims processing begins. Automating reconciliation reduces error rates and provides the audit trail carriers and regulators expect to see. Real-time exception management stops backlogs from compounding. No-code configuration lets finance teams adapt workflows as payment types and counterparty formats change, without queuing IT projects.
“Claims management is where the various pressures on a claim become visible, but it is rarely where most of them originated,” says Tony Shek, Insurance Sector Lead at AutoRek. “The premium data piece is one of the more addressable ones because it lives entirely inside the operational infrastructure the MGA controls.”
The volume growth ahead will test the systems carrying premium data through the lifecycle. MGAs investing in them now will extend their competitive advantage as that pressure compounds.