For brokers placing SME business in a competitive market, the underwriting conversation often comes down to a single question before price, coverage or relationship: how quickly can you give me a decision?
Turul Brown (pictured), founder of Instant Underwriting, an MGA operating across property owners, commercial combined, retail and food and hospitality, believes the market has not fully reckoned with what that question means. Speed, he argues, has shifted from competitive advantage to baseline expectation. Those who have not recognised that shift are already behind.
"I absolutely believe speed is table stakes," Brown said. "People do not have patience to wait around. They will hunt around the market because they are under time constraints."
Brown's argument about speed begins not with insurance but with behaviour. The same professionals making underwriting decisions, or waiting for them, are ordering taxis from their phones, tracking same-day deliveries and managing investments through apps. That experience, he said, does not stay at the office door.
"We're all consumers at the end of the day and we're all subject to the culture of on demand now," Brown said. "As somebody with that power, when you go wearing your professional outfit for the day, you don't lose that mindset. You go, well, why can't I get insurance immediately? What's the problem?"
The consequence, he believes, is structural and permanent.
"As we move forward, the expectation is only going to grow," Brown said. "Those who lag in legacy processes are unfortunately going to fall to the wayside because there is going to be better players in the market that will fulfil those expectations."
Brown's background in broking shapes how he thinks about turnaround times. From his perspective, brokers begin investing time and money in a case long before a policy is placed.
"From the moment they take information from a prospect, they're spending money," Brown said. "They're spending their time, which is money."
That, he argued, is why speed has become increasingly important. Faster decisions not only reduce friction for brokers but also determine whether an insurer or MGA gets the chance to compete for business in the first place.
"If you can put an option on the table for a client faster than anyone else, you're basically competing already," Brown said. "If you've got nothing showing, you can't compete."
Brown believes the traditional trade-off between speed, price and quality is breaking down.
"Speed is almost now the baseline," Brown said. "It's the table stakes effectively."
He points to the so-called golden triangle, the idea that organisations can realistically optimise only two of speed, price and quality at any one time. In the SME market, however, he argues that clients increasingly expect all three.
"As an MGA in the SME space, you kind of need to be fast, good and competitively priced; you need to be all three," Brown said. "If you're not fast and you're not good and you're not well priced, well, people will place it elsewhere."
Brown's answer to the speed-versus-discipline tension is architectural. Automation, he argues, should handle the predictable by freeing experienced underwriters to focus on cases that genuinely require judgement. The risk, in his view, is not automation itself but ungoverned automation.
"If you've got no governance around the way you run your decision making process, possibly pushing through automation without governing how that all works, there can be massive pitfalls," Brown said. "If you're hell-bent on speed as opposed to combining the quality component, you are going to suffer from deterioration on your profitability."
The model he advocates routes straightforward risks through automated decision-making while preserving direct access to experienced underwriters for edge cases.
"Where it's most powerful is if you can put edge cases to experienced underwriters who want to look at quirky risks," Brown said.
Brown's argument is that speed alone is no longer enough. In a market where fast decisions have become an expectation rather than a differentiator, the challenge is delivering them without sacrificing underwriting quality or profitability.
