Female-led MGA startup: seeking to ‘be the difference’ in a difficult market

Nivante launched in early September 2021 as an MGA under the NuVenture umbrella, a London-based MGA incubator formed earlier this year by industry veteran Andy Colbran. Backed by A-rated capacity and distributing through brokers only, Nivante offers specialist insurance products for buyers in the UK care sector, which has been hit hard by the pandemic.

Speaking to the Re/insurance Lounge, Intelligent Insurer’s digital hub for interviews, debates and panel discussions, Nivante’s co-founders, Jade Knight and Melissa Kalsi, explained what they are seeking to do in a rather difficult market that has been experiencing capacity constraints.

Knight and Kalsi are experienced underwriters in the UK care sector, having worked at various insurers and brokers including Markel, Beazley, Aon Risk Solutions, AIG, Towergate, Victor Insurance, and Xceedance. Their aim is to bring greater choice to buyers in the sector by developing innovative products and services that cater to their diverse range of needs.

“Choice for clients in the UK market was quite limited and, throughout the pandemic, it has become even more difficult for brokers. The care sector has been under immense pressure to meet all the needs and demands on them, and insurance has been a challenge,” said Kalsi.

The market conditions have been “extremely challenging,” added Knight. “From the brokers that we’ve been speaking to, we know that they’ve had real problems, particularly with capacity providers pulling out of the market, not open for new business and only looking at their existing business.

“Rates have gone up and sadly some care providers couldn’t accommodate those price increases, leaving several struggling to get cover at all.”

Care is a highly regulated sector where the market is quite restricted and limited, noted Kalsi. “We’re at the start of a long journey, but we’re very clear about what we want to achieve in the future.”

The entire Nivante business was created during lockdowns. Everything has been done online—from working alongside brokers to understanding the landscape of the market, developing a policy administration system, setting up an IT platform from scratch and building a rating model and structure to develop that policy—while trying to keep up with the changing market conditions.

Although the journey to launch was far from easy, with added struggles during the pandemic, they believe it has made them far more resilient.

“The timing was interesting, but that wasn’t the plan. We started our discussions with NuVenture about a month after lockdown. It was an absolute coincidence, as we were looking for the right opportunity and the right partner.

“We are now launching into market conditions where this is needed even more than we thought it would be. And that’s positive for brokers and for us,” Knight explained.

Be the difference

Traditionally, the market has been dominated by large insurance companies and corporations, but Knight and Kalsi are hoping to bring about a change with a fresh model and approach.

“We want to be the difference, as much as we want to make a difference. We want to be seen by our brokers and their customers. Our aim is to show the human side of underwriting, which is perhaps slightly invisible in our industry at the moment—certainly to the end customer,” Kalsi said.

“We want to listen and take feedback from brokers and their customers, engage with the regulators and some carriers, and use our policy admin system to capture data and underwriting information that will allow us to be more consistent in the products and pricing that we offer to the market. Eventually, we want our products to make the difference.”

Nivante’s initial product offerings will include public liability, professional indemnity, medical malpractice, employers’ liability, material damage, business interruption and legal expenses, with plans to add some new covers in the future.

Over the next 12 months, the company’s key focus will be on building broker relationships, collaborating with regulators, and simplifying the underwriting process by using technology.

“We’ve kept in touch with a lot of our brokers. Some of them have been very useful in helping us shape this product and offering,” said Knight.

“We would collaborate with our existing customers and the regulators to develop a platform to manage their risk management and how that can feed into their insurance, and we see technology as a big piece of that. We will also be looking at other sectors or subsectors of the care industry, such as urban care, where we could develop products in the future.”

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Changing a bad reputation

New MGAs have been springing up thick and fast. Recent reports indicate that the global MGA market could be growing more rapidly than the mainstream broking sector, but the reason behind this turnaround is the improving quality of the business entering the market, according to Knight.

Sharing her experience working in the insurance industry, Knight said: “MGAs had a pretty bad reputation. They didn’t really care if the book was profitable or not. They were just concerned with doing as much business as they could and earning their commissions.”

Kalsi noted that the perception of MGAs is “rapidly changing”. They both believe that “there’s real quality within MGAs”, as well as a “real desire to run a profitable book of business”.

That isn’t the only change the market is seeing—there’s also a substantial cultural shift at both company and industry level. Kalsi pointed out that certain practices, such as starting early and staying late at the office, have largely faded over time, and the pandemic has played a role in accelerating that.

“It wasn’t necessarily about the quality of work, but simply about being seen. It seemed to be the right thing to do at that time,” she noted.

Talking about the struggles of working in a traditionally male-dominated industry, Kalsi admitted that “there have been examples where women have been overlooked for positions”.

“Things are changing very slowly. Employers need to collaborate more and find out what women really need,” she concluded.

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