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In this episode, Adam Masojada, Chief Ecosystem Officer at Accelerant, explores what a truly connected insurance ecosystem looks like and why it matters now more than ever. Drawing on his experience building the Accelerant Marketplace, Adam explains how smarter partnerships, cleaner data, and shared incentives can help MGAs compete with global carriers. From the realities of trust and transparency to the practical challenges of AI adoption and capital deployment, this conversation unpacks what it really takes to scale sustainably in specialty insurance.
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Do you really need the scale of a global carrier to build a connected insurance ecosystem? Or can MGAs compete through smarter partnerships and technology? Today, are separating fact from fiction and exploring what it really takes to drive growth, innovation and resilience. Today's guest is Adam Masayada. He's Chief Ecosystem Officer at Accelerant, the data driven risk exchange where he leads marketplace development and partnership strategy.
Georgie:The creator of Accelerant Marketplace, which connects over 100 vendors with over two eighty specialty insurance MGAs. He has over fifteen years experience building products at the intersection of insurance and technology. He's former head of insurance at Deloitte Ventures, an ex consultant and an ex startup founder. He's passionate about proving that smarter partnerships and technology can help MGAs compete with and outperform global carriers. Welcome, Adam.
Adam:Thanks, Georgie. Great to be here.
Georgie:So today we're diving into what is a modern ecosystem. And when we talk about connected ecosystems in insurance, what's your perspective and what does getting it right or what does good look like?
Adam:Thanks. I know it's a question I'm asked quite frequently, as you can imagine, what is an ecosystem? What does that mean? What are you talking about? And I love analogies.
Adam:And the best analogy I have when it comes to insurance is imagine an orchestra. So at the moment in today's situation, you see that the insurance operations are sort of separated into different silos. You've got the underwriters who are the violins. They're fantastic doing what they do, but they're following one set of music. And you've got claims who are playing the drums, just going and doing whatever they want.
Adam:You've got the rest of the organization playing different things, all playing out of tune. So everyone individually is playing fantastic music, but you step back and it just sounds like an absolutely horrible noise. And building a connected ecosystem is the opposite. It is where there is some orchestration, there is some conducting taking part, and where everyone's playing from the same sheets of music playing in time, and it sounds fantastic. It is about tying together siloed systems, fragmented data, and trying to make it all work together.
Adam:And you mentioned good or great. I think there's a there's a couple of examples I'd like to do with one non insurance, a company everyone would have heard of, which is Amazon. It is a fantastic example of a connected ecosystem. Everyone knows Amazon. You know, it started off selling books.
Adam:But when you look at it today, the real innovation and shift in Amazon's go to market strategy came when they opened up Amazon to third party sellers, enabled them to transact and go across and use the Amazon systems to reach a much wider market than you can. Now you've got Amazon sellers who are doing millions, hundreds of millions, billions of revenue via Amazon, via the connected ecosystem that Amazon has built. When you think of insurance, slightly different, but someone who has done it is Ping An in China, connecting together lots of different things in their life insurance business, you know, different health care data providers, their own offerings of health insurance, they're able to cross sell and move data between their different divisions very, very seamlessly to actually make sure that the insureds have a fantastic proposition.
Georgie:So you and Jeff Bezos are conductors?
Adam:I would be delighted to be compared to Jeff Bezos.
Georgie:Before this, I had a look at and typed into LinkedIn chief ecosystem officer. It's still quite a unique title. What problem are you trying to solve in your role? And do you think that the chief ecosystem role is one that's growing?
Adam:Yes. I do. I mean, when I was coming up and choosing a title, I was like, okay. What do I do? Started looking it out, go googling it, and then popped up with the chief ecosystem officer position.
Adam:Was like, oh, hang on. You look at the job spec when you Google it, that's exactly what I do. Mhmm. It is about not just looking internally and thinking how can we solve this problem. It's about thinking, okay, who's solving it?
Adam:How are they doing it? Can we connect them in? So it's not thinking about how do we build everything ourselves. It's about how do we nurture a network of partners, vendors, suppliers, and communities that creates value for everybody involved. The problem in insurance that we see is insurance has historically been terrible working together.
Adam:Everyone has their own patch. Partnerships can be quite transactional. A carrier gives capacity, and an MGA spends a lot of the time protecting their own position because they're terrified that the carrier is going to see how profitable they are and stand up their own line of business. What we've learned is that a connected ecosystem approach well, the current situation leaves a lot of value on the table, but a connected ecosystem approach makes it and makes everyone have value and generate more value for themselves. Why is the title becoming more relevant now?
Adam:Because the technology landscape has changed significantly. You look at what we've seen over the last decade and with AI emerging as well. There are thousands of insurance technology vendors out there, hundreds, thousands of other vendors that MGAs or other insurance businesses can transact with. There's countless point solutions, and companies can spend more and more time managing their own partnerships and their tech stack than actually doing what's good and what they're good at, which is underwriting. Someone needs to be able to curate and connect all of these different vendors together, and that is for the chief ecosystem officer role.
Georgie:Building a connected ecosystem sounds very compelling from a strategic lens, but what are the kind of the harshest and hardest realities organizations face when looking to connect partners, platforms, and data?
Adam:You're right. Building a connected ecosystem sounds great in a strategy deck, really, really compelling. The reality is messier, and it is really, really hard. If it wasn't, everybody would do it, and this wouldn't be a problem that we're facing. There are three things that you really need to look for that and that I look for when trying to build out an ecosystem.
Adam:Number one, data quality. Secondly, it's trust. And third, alignment. First, data quality. And I'm gonna use some buzzwords in here, but AI has the capabilities to completely reshape insurance as we know it, to reshape the world as we know it.
Adam:But this falls down if you don't have good quality data. You don't understand your data. You don't understand your operational processes. Before AI and a connected ecosystem can have an impact, you need to fully understand your data, what good looks like, and understand your operational processes. At Accelerant, we process 1,200,000 probably over 1,200,000 data points every month.
Adam:The first step that we've had to take is cleaning that up and making sure we know and can process that quickly and efficiently. Most organizations underestimate how difficult this is probably by a factor of about 10. It is hard. It is a lollipopraft to get there, but it's the most important thing to do. Secondly, trust.
Adam:Insurance is operated in an information asymmetry way. I mean, we've done this for centuries. That's literally how everything how underwriting worked. I know this, so I can price it much better than you. You don't know it, and that's how people want.
Adam:But with the explosion of data and what everything's evolved, this information asymmetry is coming down. So it's less about what do I know that you don't know. But asking and trying to drive this information asymmetry down, asking carriers, MGAs, and vendors to share data openly requires a level of trust that I think we haven't had in the industry before. It's not just a cultural shift. It is a technical one as well.
Adam:Thirdly, alignment. Everyone has to win. If your ecosystem only benefits one party, then no one's actually gonna want to use it Mhmm. Or transact across it. But at Accelerant, we structure everything around shared incentives.
Adam:So our members' success is our success. They write more and better business. It benefits Accelerant, and it benefits our third party risk exchange partners, and it benefits the vendors. It sounds obvious, but you're surprised about how many partnerships are not fair. They're not equal, and one person's taking a lot of money out of it.
Adam:The hardest part about a connected ecosystem, it's not the technology. It's convincing people that transparency creates more value than secrecy. Once you crack that, everything else is easy.
Georgie:On that point about transparency, and you mentioned about the trust with the shared data points, is that your responsibility to sit in the middle and allow those conversations to happen? Or do they happen between each other? So say the MGAs, the vendors who are kind of providing the connection layer, and then over to, I guess, the carriers, whose responsibility is it in that sense to align on the transparency of data?
Adam:Great question. The answer is yes. It is everyone. You have to persuade everyone that this is something to go for and to achieve, but everyone will end up being responsible. So I know that's a bit of a cop out there, Georgie.
Adam:I mean, sometimes sometimes I, you know, I I will start start the conversation and seed it, but actually everyone has to be aligned to want this to happen, to make Fair it
Georgie:enough. And we had an analogy on a previous podcast about MGAs are speedboats, carriers are oil tankers, and it's often seen that MGAs are a lot more agile than the carriers. Where does agility help in this context, and where can it potentially create more complexities?
Adam:I love that analogy. I listened to that podcast, Georgie, so I was I was sort of going, yes. Yes. Love it when when your your guest was saying that. I mean, accelerant you know, MGAs are our business.
Adam:Yeah. And I genuinely believe that MGAs have structural advantages. They're closer to the risk. They can move faster. They are the speedboats, and they attract entrepreneurial underwriters who are able to think more slightly outside the box and wanna build something.
Adam:The typical MGA joining the accelerant platform has between 10 and 40,000,000 in premium, 15 to 30 people working for them, and an average of fifteen years of underwriting experience. That's deep expertise that is concentrated and it is focused. Where agility really helps is in speed to market. They're able to react to the market much quicker than a large legacy carrier is able to. There, they're right at the coalface.
Adam:They can make the changes quickly. I mean, take cyber, for example. MGAs were writing this risk while the carriers were still forming committees trying to work out what to do. That speed to market is fantastic. It's what is going to keep the MGA market growing and be the exciting place that it is today.
Adam:It does and it can create the stability can create new complexity. I mean, we talk about vendors and different solutions. An NGA can make a technology decision very quickly. But it doesn't take long before you're managing fifteen, twenty different vendors and you've got an extremely complicated and legacy tech stack. It requires real thought in terms of infrastructure as to actually work through and understand and how to keep that under control.
Georgie:So building a meaningful partnership, you need to have a broad overview of what the MGAs are experiencing. From your role and from Accelerant's experience, what are the challenges that you're hearing from MGAs today?
Adam:Oh, love this one. It's literally my role. I spend every day chatting with MGAs. And Accelerant, work with over two sixty across North America, Europe. So the challenges you hear are very, very diverse, very different.
Adam:It's I have great fun chatting to the leaders of our MJs about what they're facing and how we as Exerium can help. Really, I feel and I I I tend to put them down to a couple of buckets. The three big ones that are always of concern for MGAs. Number one, capacity. Number two, talent.
Adam:And number three, technology. So number one, capacity. This has to be the big worry for MGAs. The biggest risk is your carrier relationship. You know, something can change at the carrier, then suddenly, at very short notice, you're left without any paper, the ability to to to write anything.
Adam:This is the big problem that Acceleron was set up to overcome. We provide five year capacity commitment, which means that MGAs can actually focus on writing business. Mhmm. They can focus on growing their business. They don't have to worry about where next year's capacity is coming from.
Adam:Number two, talent. The reality is the best underwriters are in demand. Mhmm. And you've got a lot of people going after them. You know, the the big carriers with their deep pockets are able to afford it.
Adam:How can MGAs compete with this? It is the entrepreneurial nature of it. It's enabling underwriters to to focus on what matters, which is underwriting, not to focus on rekeying or redoing data. And being part of an an ecosystem like Accelera enables our MJ partners to actually focus on underwriting because we provide a lot of the stuff in the middle that can help them achieve that focus. So I think talent is an issue that's not gonna go away.
Adam:Mean, you see the headlines, you see the aging industry that we seem to have and people leaving, I think that's always gonna be a problem. I'm not sure how we're gonna overcome it. Like everyone is thinking, oh, AI is the silver bullet to do it. But I disagree. Insurance is a people business, and I think it will be and should be going forward.
Adam:And thirdly, technology. And this is very much from an overload perspective. I mean, spoke about it's very easy to sort of build 15 to 20 vendors and suddenly have a massive problem managing your your tech stack. And there are thousands and thousands of vendors out there that you can choose, all doing different things, different ones, some of which are better than others, some of which are better salespeople than others and don't really have anything under the hood. This is tricky, and it is something to focus on.
Adam:Every MGA I talk to is drowning in technology options, but it's starving for technology that actually works together. They don't need more vendors. They need an ecosystem that can talk to each other.
Georgie:Mhmm. Would you say Accelerant provides the safety for MGAs? So instead of them having to waste time and kind of fail fast in exploring this new technology, you provide this kind of this yeah, this ability of of a trusted network of people to go to.
Adam:Exactly. I mean, solving that technology problem, that's why I built the built the Accelerant Marketplace. Yeah. It is a one stop shop for everything an MJ needs to run and scale its business. We launched it back in November with over 80 partners on the platform.
Adam:I mean, everything from lawyers, accountants, core systems. Anything an MGA could need, we try to have it on the marketplace. It is the first place that our MGAs go to when they check for new vendors, when they need to work out, okay, this one's not working. What can I do? We go there.
Adam:And for vendors, it's a great way to get distribution, 260 plus MGAs that Accelerant works with.
Georgie:The Amazon for insurance people. You are the new Jeff Bezos. So looking beyond kind of the challenges that you think that MGAs are facing today, what do you think are the evolving challenges that you might see surface in the next years as the market continues to digitalize?
Adam:This is a fun fun one. I think I've already I've already used the the most hyped, most used phrase in insurance at the moment. AI. Yeah. I mean, I think the the the stats are ridiculous.
Adam:I think it's I think it's three quarters of insurance companies have implemented some form of AI. Whether or not this is actually in production and gaining traction, not clear. But the gap between pilots and production is gonna be the big one. If we can't overcome that gap, then AI is not gonna have the impact that we hope it's going to. Everybody has got an AI proof of concept, and I'd say almost nobody is delivering AI meaningful AI at scale.
Adam:And, you know, it's a space that I'm watching, a space that we at Accelerant are are working on. I think it's gonna be a fascinating one to see what happens over the next year and couple of years. With regards to AI, I think another interesting point is gonna be where the regulation goes. I mean, I'm not a regulatory expert, but I mean, you can see the EU and UK starting to diverge on their regulation of AI. You know, the EU coming out with the EU AI Act and UK is saying, no, we're gonna use existing frameworks to regulate it.
Adam:So again, I'm not sure where it's gonna go, but a good spot to watch. It will give MGAs and any companies that are doing business in both Europe and UK something to watch and something to be concerned of. I don't know where it's gonna go though.
Georgie:Yeah. Well, hopefully, it doesn't slow people down too much because I feel like it's a race now between everybody to to get something out there. Because if you're not doing something with AI or you're still kind of in that behind phase, your competitors are just gonna accelerate ahead of you. Hopefully, there's still flexibility, but there is safety in what's going to happen.
Adam:I completely agree with that. It's really exciting, and the speed at which AI and the models develop is crazy. I mean, I've been working with AI, or at least trying to build products using AI for quite some time, even since my Deloitte days, we were doing and using some of the early stuff to try and do it. It's come along a hell of a lot since then. A lot.
Adam:It's just insane. I mean, I was practicing and and trying to do something with my daughter with Lovable. We, you know, took me one pro one line prompt to build a computer game for her to then just play. Like, that's insane. How can I'm not a game developer.
Adam:I've never done that before, but took a one line prompt and it built an actual functional computer game. It's so exciting.
Georgie:What happened to, like, good old toys that kids used to play with? Now it's all computers.
Adam:Oh, no. No. No. I mean, she did lose interest after about ten minutes, but it's fine. That's that's still that one It's not a cool one.
Adam:Yeah. So
Georgie:I think this is a nice segue into, yeah, more of a topic about AI. There is definitely perception that AI is magic. When I'm having conversations with people, they literally just think AI will do everything for them. And I don't think there is the true understanding of where AI sits nicely and where it can complement you rather than kind of replace everything. From your perspective, what is a realistic kind of expectation of what AI can deliver for MGAs today?
Adam:You're right. There is so much hype out there around around AI. It is incredible. A lot of snake oil salesman promising the world, you know, this is the latest gold rush. It is not magic.
Adam:I mean, I don't think it's gonna replace underwriters. I really hope that it's not gonna replace people. And I think where you see it gaining traction, it is where it is enhancing what people can do. It is getting rid of the busy work, the boring stuff. I think what's realistic today, one of the the big areas that we're seeing traction is in document processing.
Adam:Yeah. Extraction of data. It's turning that 600 page submission into structured data in in minutes. And that's something that we've actually done at Accelerant for some of our members. It is turning submissions into turning the processing from, what, six days down into two minutes.
Georgie:Yeah. It's ridiculous. It's
Adam:like, that's crazy. That's having an impact now. I mean, we're already seeing upticks in our members, know, 30 to 40% increase in operational efficiencies for those who are using AI in the right ways. Mhmm. And it is starting to translate into more GWP written because they're able to focus on underwriting.
Georgie:I think that's a really good use case for where it's kind of beyond the hype of AI and where it's delivering. I think still some people are confused about what is AI. You know, I think we're now at that point where AI is being used as a blanket term to kind of bucket everything and people are still, you know, are we talking about large language models? We're now moving on to agents. But I think definitely document processing is a place where it has been it's there's a problem and AI is solving it right now.
Georgie:It's ridiculous that it would take six
Adam:days And and your point about it being a catchall is it is correct. I mean, you look at some of the the vendors under the hood, it's like, oh, what are you doing? No. No. It's AI.
Adam:Guys, that's just RPA. That's been around for decades. Like, come on.
Georgie:Where should someone start if they wanted to build a connected ecosystem?
Adam:You should start with your data and your operational processes. That is step one, is understanding exactly what happens with your data and your operations. Where does it go? What happens? Who uses it and how?
Adam:That is the number one step to make. You have to understand something before you can think about getting involved in a wider diverse ecosystem. If you don't understand it, you're just setting yourself up for failure. Once you understand it, fix your data. And this is hard.
Adam:This is really, really hard. It is fix your data because otherwise and if you are moving on to an sort of AI enabled world, you're just gonna be putting rubbish in Yeah. You're gonna be getting rubbish out. Step three, it is choose your partners carefully. Not every vendor or partner belongs in an ecosystem.
Adam:Right. So you need to make sure that aligns to fixing and helping you with your operational support and systems, and that they are also aligned in the success that you're driving towards.
Georgie:Just to dig into the point about fixing data, what does that look like? How does one actually fix data?
Adam:See, this is when you hire someone much smarter than me to actually go through and do it. We have a a whole team at Accelerant. That is their role. And they've been very, very busy for a long time fixing it and making sure that the 1,200,000 data points that we collect every month, that it is true, accurate and verifiable data. It's tough.
Adam:It is really, really hard. I don't think it ever will be. I don't think AI is gonna be that silver bullet that helps solve the data problem. That's still gonna require people. AI should enable us to do it quicker, though.
Georgie:Yeah. So today, we're dump debunking the myth that you need to be a large carrier to be successful to build a connected ecosystem. What is Accelerant doing today to help the MGAs?
Adam:So there's a couple of things we provide. Number one, it is the five year capacity commitment. Yeah. That was the big, big points and why Accelerant was established. That enables the MGAs to focus on writing more and better business, to focus on growing their business.
Adam:Yeah. And that's why on average, an Accelerant MGA grows over 30%. That's two to three times the market depending on which geography you're playing in. Second, it's a modern data and analytics platform. That is what a core our technology team at Accelerant has built.
Adam:Our data and analytics platform provides real time insights into what the MJs are writing so they can understand their business much quicker than they've been able to do historically.
Georgie:Right.
Adam:You know, sometimes going back into the the old days, they wouldn't really understand how their book is performing until the end of the year when it comes to renewal, renewal of their of their binder. Now with Accelerant, we can provide that, and we're trying to work in towards to get it to as near as real time as possible. That's extremely valuable. And the third, it's what I and my team do, is access to third to shared services. It's access to a curated ecosystem of technology providers that can help them better run and scale their business.
Adam:I mean, the results speak for themselves. And I said our our MGAs grow at over 30%. That is incredible. It is by enabling them to focus on writing business and not on next year's capacity, and not on spending time finding new technology vendors, and by providing them with real time insights, we are able to enable that growth. A great example is is one of our members in The US, a company called AIU.
Adam:They grew their GWP by 700 in the three years after joining Accelerant. Wow. You don't need to be a global carrier to build a connected ecosystem. You need the right infrastructure, the right partners, and a commitment to make it work. That's what we try to drive at Accelerant, and that's what our members' growth rate of over 30% shows.
Georgie:What's your kind of call to action for people listening?
Adam:Call to action. If you're an MGA Yeah. And you're looking for a partner, you want capacity, and you're looking for a partner to help you grow your business, come speak to Accelerant. And if you're a technology vendor and you have a solution that solves problems for MGAs, come chat to me, please.
Georgie:Perfect. So future outlook, this is your artificial insight. What do the winners look like in five years' time?
Adam:Oh. Five years from now, I think the winners will be those who've made AI work for them. Yeah. They're the people that have managed to put the infrastructure in place to enable it to work. They have gone from using it in pilots to production.
Adam:They have harnessed AI to help their team, their underwriters, their operations people work better and more efficiently. So able to handle much more volume Mhmm. Without outgrowing their headcount. I think five years from now, the winners won't be the biggest. They'll be the most connected, real time data, able to react quickly, partnerships that multiply their capability.
Adam:The question really is simple, and what what people need to ask now is, are you building those connections capabilities now, or are you gonna wait and see what happens?
Georgie:Yeah. Act fast.
Adam:Exactly.
Georgie:Adam, thank you so much. This is your first podcast, wasn't it?
Adam:First one.
Georgie:First one.
Adam:Thank you. Thank you. I hope so. Yes.
Georgie:I'm glad you chose mine as the first. So thank you very much, and thank you everybody for listening.