The US managing general agent (MGA) market kept climbing in 2025, with premium flowing through MGAs reaching roughly $128 billion, according to a Conning study. For Anthony Slimowicz (pictured), executive vice president and chief operating officer of MGA and Specialty Risk at Amynta Group, the more consequential number is not the size of that market but how selectively technology gets applied within it.
When asked about the biggest hurdle in modernizing technology across so many lines at once, Slimowicz drew a sharp line between what should be centralized and what should not.
“The biggest challenge is understanding what can be modernized – or moved to a common platform – versus the things that make the business unique and different,” Slimowicz said. “Setting up a platform for workers' comp versus surety versus trade credit: all have very different needs, very different outcomes. It's not always the right answer trying to move something to a similar or one common platform.”
Rather than treating deeper specialization as a growing burden, Slimowicz frames it as a matter of recognition. “You just have to be able to recognize the uniqueness’s of each business and not let the quest for commonality overwhelm the need for uniqueness in the product and the underwriting,” he said.
The MGA’s approach echoes a broader shift already underway, where a recent report on how MGAs are reshaping insurance models found that most are building proprietary products around specialty and liability lines. But Slimowicz emphasized the MGAs' advantage over more traditional insurance models.
“MGAs are more nimble,” he said. “Most traditional insurance organizations are still operating on legacy green-screen back-end systems and have simply built more user-friendly outgoing platforms that sit in front of or around them.
He pointed instead to data granularity as the real differentiator. “The biggest advantage MGAs have is the ability to pull data at a more granular level that is specific to the types of risks being written,” Slimowicz said. “At larger more traditional organizations that level of detail tends to get lost as background noise.”
Amynta Group has expanded considerably through acquisition, raising the question of how new technology gets folded in without eroding the specialized underwriting culture a deal was meant to preserve. Slimowicz said the priority is to support existing expertise that makes the MGA great and not override it.
“We look for technology to support the expertise that's already there and help fill a lot of those back-office functions that don't actually move the needle,” he said. “But the worst thing you can do is come in, put your letterhead on the front door, and say, ‘Okay, now you're on our system’ – and lose the entire culture and expertise you purchased in the first place.”
Asked what single obstacle he would remove to accelerate innovation across specialty insurance, Slimowicz returned to data – not how much is collected, but how much of it gets used
“It's probably the challenge everybody shares today: utilizing and drawing more from the data we've all assimilated within our respective organizations,” he said. “How do we maximize that to improve underwriting, as well as our customer interaction and market-facing capabilities?”
Slimowicz, who spent much of his career on the carrier side before moving into the MGA space, said the shift has been instructive. “There's no better place to be in the insurance industry right now than in the MGA space,” he said.
