The success of MGAs needs little introduction. For the past several years, the MGA story has been one of growth, and that trend appears to be continuing with Conning’s 2026 report showing a 12% year-over-year premium growth from 2024 to 2025.
While continued expansion is cause for celebration, it also introduces concern in the form of a single question: Can this growth survive?
Viewing success through the lens of single-digit years can limit proper analysis and reflection; a strong market can mask underlying flaws in the business model. As market conditions evolve, MGA metrics may shift from growth volume to performance consistency. With softer pricing and long-tailed casualty (longer gaps between claims and payouts) MGAs should feel their underwriting discipline, incentive alignment, and operational execution tested in the coming years.
Where surging growth once dominated the analysis of MGA strength, the focus now is on whether the specialization, partnerships, and adaptability can endure in a more adversarial market.
Can MGAs perform in a softer market?
Whereas a hard insurance market can empower specialty insurance organizations to grow due to stricter underwriting guidelines in the admitted market, a soft market may temper that growth.
As carrier capacity rises and pricing pressure increases, holes can emerge in weak programs, unstable relationships, or incentives that prioritize volume versus sustained performance. The addition of long-tailed casualties, sometimes called long-term liabilities, introduces an additional challenge, as underwriting decisions made today take years to realize. For MGA leaders, these concerns make underwriting discipline an increasingly important source of differentiation.
Identifying and acting on new opportunities remains a cornerstone of successful MGA operations, but the scope of these opportunities is expanding which is testing risk selection, price discipline, underwriting consistency, and program oversight as conditions shift. It isn’t enough for MGAs to be first to market or more efficient than their competitors; a comprehensive approach is necessary to survive. This distinction matters because growth yields expectations. As MGAs take on a larger role in the insurance chain, carrier partners have more reason to look beyond sheer premium volume and toward the quality and reliability of performance.
Carriers seek MGAs for their niche expertise, but they choose their MGA partner based on a myriad of factors, including profitable track records. The specialization of MGAs opens the door, but consistent performance enables you to walk through.
How MGA partners help sustain growth
The success MGAs have enjoyed, and the potential for their continued growth lies not in isolation but in extensive collaboration.
Carriers, fronters, reinsurers, brokers, and other insurance partners make or break an MGA’s ability to expand not just in their existing lines of business but new ones as well. The report identified more than 900 recurring insurer-MGA relationships in 2025, a statistic that defines an important caveat for growth. As the MGA segment becomes more interconnected, and the operational hand of MGAs extends down the policy lifecycle, trust has to travel across organizations:
- Capacity partners need confidence in responsible underwriting
- Reinsurers need clear visibility into program performance
- Carriers need to understand how delegated authority is being exercised
The task for MGA leaders is to foster an environment with enough transparency, accountability, and alignment to keep the entire ecosystem of industry partners functioning. The MGAs positioned for long-term growth will be those that can give partners a clear window into their performance, risk assessment, and decision-making processes. Instilling confidence alongside demonstrated premium growth will ultimately distinguish an MGA as a viable partner for the future, as opposed to one who simply delivers on premium alone.
Scaling specialist expertise requires operational excellence
A clear strength of the MGA model is specialization that allows MGAs to move quickly in areas where unique judgment matters. As MGAs grow, maintaining that particular advantage can be a challenge as the supporting systems multiply in number and complexity.
More premium can mean more submissions, programs, carrier relationships, data, reporting obligations, and underwriting decisions moving through the business every day. Processes that worked well at an earlier stage may struggle at a larger scale, jeopardizing valuable opportunities at critical junctions. When that happens, operational consistency is less of an efficiency issue and more of a strategic one. However, the goal isn’t to remove the qualities that make MGAs special, but rather find the proper solutions that empower widespread, repeatable performance.
- Clear workflows to help ensure consistent underwriting standards
- Reliable metrics and data analysis to improve program evaluation
- Define decision rights to reduce ambiguity and clarify responsibility
- Connected knowledge sharing to reduce dependency on SMEs
Vertafore’s own MGA workforce report highlighted a similar shift; policy administration, document management, and workflow solutions are already embedded into the daily workflows of many MGAs. The next evolution for internal systems is taking these capabilities and scaling them as the organization grows without introducing friction or increased overhead. It’s here where operational maturity and a strong technology partner can help secure the value MGAs have enjoyed in recent years, turning the surge of recent growth into long-term performance at scale.
Staying power will define the next chapter of MGAs
The surge of MGAs over the past several years, continuing in 2025, demonstrates broad appeal of specialized underwriting and flexible approach to insurance distribution. However, Conning’s report also raises important questions about the viability of such growth and whether the market will settle toward MGAs, carriers, or a coexistence between the two. That makes the latter half of this decade less about proving the growth potential of the MGA model and more about demonstrating its lasting value.
The MGAs that achieve this will pair specialization with underwriting discipline, transparent communication with strong partnerships, and robust technological solutions with operational consistency. Their end goal will be an environment that capitalizes on favorable conditions and weathers unfavorable conditions, giving them staying power across all types of markets.
The right partner will make all the difference to leading MGAs. For over four decades, Vertafore has been a leader in MGA solutions and is paving the way for AI integration into core systems with specialized agents that empower MGAs to work faster, smarter, and safer.