Leading from the Front: The Biggest Insurance Program Design Challenges MGAs & Program Owners Faced in 2025 and How They Were Solved
- JoAnne Artesani
- Dec 9
- 4 min read
The New Standard for Program Design
In 2025, program owners and MGAs faced a stricter reality:
Carrier scrutiny reached an all-time high
Operating models were inspected in far greater detail
Forecast optimism was challenged directly
Structural gaps became capacity blockers
Greater competition to stand out
Across dozens of evaluations, one question defined success:
How do you translate a strong product based idea into a credible carrier-ready, underwritable insurance program?
Sproutr’s work this year centered on one core mission: turning ambition into structure, intention into readiness, and ideas into credible, insurable programs.
Below are the most common challenges and the methods used that consistently resolved them.
Great idea, wrong structure.
The Challenge
Program owners had conviction around their value propositions, but when presented to carriers as pitches, the context did not translate. The result was either “silence” or a direct request to “show your work”.
How to Resolve
When they came to us with this issue, we rebuilt the program architecture:
Corrected and rationalized unit economics
Added governance and performance controls
Aligned distribution strategy to realistic outcomes for year 1, 3, and 5
Developed a defendable loss-ratio thesis
The Result
Programs went from “This is interesting” to “This feels underwritten, credible, and ready.”
Carriers buy the team that demonstrates realistic outcomes backed by relevant product structures, and an underwriting lane that can scale while delivering underwriting profit.
The submission didn’t tell the right story.
The Challenge
Some founders brought us submissions that were technically correct but strategically ineffective. Carriers were too distracted finding the flow to appreciate the opportunity. The narrative didn’t represent the program favorably by omitting the right points while emphasizing immaterial content.
Risk signals weren’t intentional. They were accidental.
How to Resolve
We restructured the submission, editing distractions out, and building up missing decision-important content:
Reconstructed the narrative arc
Rewrote the thesis for clarity
Backed up assumptions
Eliminated red-flag signals
Added the missing elements underwriters require
The Result
Program leaders who know first impressions are the most important, engage the professionals to scrutinize and refine the deliverable, without judgment, before facing the Carrier.
Carriers acknowledged the expertise: “This is the cleanest submission we’ve seen from an early-stage team this year.”
Misunderstanding how carrier reviews programs for viability
The Challenge
Program owners often underestimate what carrier partners look for to signal alignment and fit. When optimism bias and ungrounded forecasts present early, skepticism becomes the new obstacle.
How to Resolve
We redesigned deliverables to demonstrate:
Rationalized assumptions
Scenario views (best, base, conservative)
Loss-ratio realism
Price to exposure alignment
Operational cost transparency
The Result
Carriers responded with trust because the financial story aligned with the program strategy. When the plan presents realistic prospective outcomes, the carrier leans in instead of pulling back.
Lack of program readiness
The Challenge
When a founder writes their own plan, they found difficulty identifying the gaps because what is in their head often doesn’t effectively translate to the page. These gaps are hard to diagnose without objectivity. The unaddressed items in the gaps are the pieces immediately picked up on by carriers. A myriad of questions follow. When the carrier response is a templated set of questions that were believed to be within the materials, it is a signal the carrier stopped reading at the first gap.
How to Resolve
We run a Readiness Diagnostic to pinpoint:
Structural risks
Operational gaps
Narrative inconsistencies
Distribution strategy misalignment
Missing partner capabilities
Unaddressed exposures
Products right-sized to the underwriting objective
Product ease of maintenance
Logical proforma walks
Then we execute the detailed Program’s Readiness Roadmap focusing on offering design improvements, correcting gaps, providing what’s missing and sequencing go-to-market actions aligned with carrier and capacity timelines.
The Result
Program owners moved from uncertainty to confidence in days, not months. Carriers recognized the clarity which ultimately reduced the number of conversations required to secure capacity.
Moving fast… in the wrong direction
The Challenge
Fast teams lacked discipline resulting in protracted timelines with carriers.
How to Resolve
We refocused the team to follow a fit-for-purpose approach:
Simplified decision paths
Align the development effort around gate achievement
Prioritized what mattered most to carriers
Removed non-essential complexity
Design a lean partner ecosystem
Design to manage the right controls and governance
The Result
Teams became faster and stronger on the deliverables that matter without the chaos. Speed doesn’t impress underwriters. Clarity and discipline do.
All market submissions are not created equally
The Challenge
Founders tended to default to two extremes: Over-reliance on investor pitch-deck style market submissions or use of reinsurance decks to do the work of a carrier submission in the pursuit of securing carrier partnerships.
How to Resolve
We recalibrated the entire program market submission process from the inside out:
Leveraged our experience as former carrier decision-makers to authors of materials that facilitate faster, more confident decisions
De-risked operational vulnerabilities
Balanced product ambition with structural reality
Built and rebuilt submissions to reflect an intentional architecture
Facilitated market introductions between program and carrier, signaling confidence of the program to deliver underwriting profitability
The Result
Creating the right level of materials for the intended audience isn’t a nice-to-have, it is the cost of entry. Programs presented as clear, professional, scalable and carrier-aligned.
Difficulty communicating in a way that builds trust
The Challenge
Non-insurance native founders had great ideas, but struggled to translate and articulate them in a way that resonated with carriers.
How to Resolve
We served as a translator by building their entire program architecture:
The thesis
The opportunity
The risk strategy
The product
The pricing
The economics
The distribution
The clarity
The Result
Underwriters understood the story AND they repeated it back. That’s the moment you know you’ve won.
What These Challenges Tell Us
This year made one truth undeniable: Strong programs are defined by the strength of the design behind it.
The leaders who invested early in program design moved faster, negotiated better, reduced risk, earned trust and launched stronger.
Founders who treated carrier conversations as discovery versus strategy, struggled a lot.
Where Program Builders Go From Here
MGA founders and program owners who succeed will be the ones who lead with structure, communicate with clarity, build with discipline, design intentionally and treat readiness as a competitive advantage. The next era of programs will belong to builders who design programs the way carriers evaluate, and that’s with rigor, transparency and coherence.
We provide a free 2-hour program readiness session once per month to qualified Founders and Insurance Program Owners. If you aren't quite sure if you're program is ready or if you want to know a better structure or the gaps that exist, you can apply here.
