Most MGA distribution operations run on some version of the same four things.
Individual Outlook mailboxes, one per underwriter. A shared mailbox for submissions, submissions@ or newbusiness@, that four or five people can open. A distribution list per program, which is how brokers hear the appetite has changed. And Teams, for the internal half of every conversation.
That's the stack. One of those distribution lists is still named after a program that closed in 2023 and nobody has taken it down, because taking things down is how you find out who was relying on them.
Why it ended up this way
Nobody chose Microsoft 365 as a distribution platform. It came with the business, usually before there was a distribution function to have an opinion, and the broker at the other end already had it too.
That second part decides everything else. A broker placing a risk into eleven markets isn't going to log into your portal to tell you the client agreed terms, they'll reply to the thread. So this is the right setup for this market rather than a compromise. Two firms who don't share a system, using the one thing they both have.
What the setup does well
It's universal. Every broker who deals with you can already use it and needs no account, and there's nothing for anyone at your end to adopt, which is a low bar most software in this market fails to clear.
It survives people leaving, which very little else does. An underwriter goes to a competitor in March, the mailbox is still there with every thread in it, and the successor inherits years of the relationship in writing. A CRM record only survives if somebody typed it in on a Friday afternoon.
It also works on a phone in a parking lot at four in the afternoon, which is where a fair amount of this business gets done.
What is invisible in it, and why
None of this is about anyone being careless. These are properties of the medium, and no amount of care changes them.
A thread lives in whichever mailbox it landed in. There is nowhere else it also lives. If a broker replies to the person they emailed last time, that copy is the only one anyone will ever open. Cc doesn't fix it. A Cc is a copy, and nobody reads their Cc.
Which is what produces fragmentation. Take a broker firm of forty-odd people where three of them deal with you. Property risks go to whoever writes property, casualty to whoever writes casualty, and a new inquiry from someone junior to submissions@ because that's the address on your website.
Over a month that firm sent you nine threads, two of them carrying real commercial intent. Ask the property underwriter how that firm is doing and you'll hear quiet, which is true, because they saw three. Casualty says the same, for the same reason. Nobody saw nine, so nobody has an opinion about nine, and three accurate answers add up to a wrong one. We followed one firm across three inboxes in more detail a while back.
The brokers are routing correctly, which is the part people miss. And it bites hardest at the top of the book, because a large producer is spread across more inboxes than a small one, which makes the firm with the most going on the hardest to see whole.
A shared mailbox shows what arrived and not what was answered. Somebody picks a submission up, replies from their own address because that's what Outlook does, and the reply sits in their sent items. What brokers asked for is all in one place. What they were told back is in five different ones.
And nothing in a mailbox has a state. A message is read or unread, which is a fact about you rather than about the thread. It can be flagged, which is a fact about one person's Tuesday. Nothing in Exchange means "a broker asked us something and nobody answered", so as far as the software is concerned there is no such thing as an unanswered thread. Every list of them that has ever existed at an MGA was made by a person, from memory.
What the tenant already holds
More than people assume. Every message carries who sent it, who it went to and who was copied, the timestamp to the second, whether there was an attachment, and a conversation ID that holds a thread together after the subject line has been through four rounds of RE: and an autocorrect. Sent items are the interesting half and the one nobody opens.
You can get at all of that without reading a word of anyone's mail. Subject lines come along with it, and Microsoft treats a subject as metadata rather than message content, which is a distinction some people are comfortable with and some are not. Worth deciding which you are before anybody starts.
The three mailbox counts on the first row are the whole point of it, because no single underwriter there saw six threads. What it can't tell you is what was in any of them, or whether the quiet firm at the bottom is cooling off or short-staffed until September.
What none of it will tell you
Metadata gives you the shape of a conversation and not its contents. Eleven messages and two attachments over four days might be a placement going well or a long argument about a bordereau.
A drop in volume is not always a cooling relationship. Roughly eight weeks is what separates a firm genuinely accelerating from one coming back to its usual volume after a quiet spell, and four weeks describes both identically. That's where we set the long baseline, and we'd move it if the first pilots said otherwise.
Late August is the worst month of the year to judge any of it, which is awkward, because it's also when renewal season starts loading up. A firm that reads as gone cold is often a firm whose two best brokers are back on the 1st, and anyone drawing conclusions from the last two weeks is reading a vacation schedule.
And no arrangement of Microsoft 365, however carefully configured, closes the loop on who picked a conversation up. Categories, rules, a shared mailbox with five people in it: none of them know what "against it" means. That part is somebody remembering.
Something to check this week
Pick one producing firm, a good one rather than a problem one, because the problem ones you already think about.
Open sent items in the two or three mailboxes that deal with them, search on the broker's domain rather than anybody's name, and set it to the last sixty days. Twenty minutes, less if you know their domain already.
Then compare that against whatever you'd have said about the firm before you started. Where it doesn't match, the gap is often a thread somebody answered on a colleague's behalf and never mentioned. Take the answer into whatever your Monday meeting is called.
What it won't settle is whether the thread nobody answered would have gone anywhere, and nobody can tell you that. It takes twenty minutes because you're doing by hand, one firm at a time, what the tenant could do for you.
Fixing it properly would mean something reading across all of those mailboxes at once, grouping the traffic by the broker's domain rather than by whose inbox it landed in, measuring each firm against its own history and putting that in front of one person before Monday, which is the email we send at BindSignal.