For brokers, urgency used to mean the occasional last-minute vehicle pickup or same-day home closing. Now, many say it defines the entire workday.
“Right now means right now,” said Pak Selvarajah, registered insurance broker at My Insurance Broker, describing the growing number of same-day requests brokers are navigating daily.
Brokers say the workflow itself has changed. Once a more linear process — handling renewals, quoting new business, and servicing clients in sequence — the workflow is now a constant state of triage. Urgent requests, remarkets, underwriting timelines, and client demands are all competing for immediate attention.
As workloads increase, brokers are rethinking how they organize and prioritize their workdays.
Selvarajah says he now relies on multiple systems to manage volume, including calendars, CRM software, and manual task lists to keep urgent files from slipping through the cracks.
“Two years ago, maybe I had five things to do today,” Selvarajah said. “Now I have 15 things on my list.”
That pressure is changing how brokers approach client service.
“Speed is a factor,” Selvarajah said. “But now I’m trying to look at what’s actually going on and how we can help the client.”
Heavy workloads also strain operational processes, thereby changing the relationship between brokers, underwriters, and technology providers — particularly in cyber insurance, where response expectations and threat environments continue to accelerate.
Also in the news: How Intact expects auto reforms in Alberta and Ontario to change its bottom line
“People have an expectation now to get responses quicker on a variety of levels,” said Erik Tifft, global head of underwriting at Boxx Insurance, a cyber specialist.
That expectation forces insurers and MGAs to rethink underwriting workflows.
“It’s less about prioritizing the urgent from the non-urgent,” Tifft said. “It’s about treating everything as urgent and using technology to make us faster and more efficient.”
Increasingly, that means relying on AI models, automated underwriting logic, and threat intelligence systems to rapidly process straightforward submissions while escalating more complex risks for human review.
“It’s not sequential anymore,” said Neal Jardine, Boxx’s chief claims and cyber intelligence officer. “It’s stacking.”
Rather than moving submissions step-by-step through underwriting, pricing, and intelligence reviews, multiple assessments now happen simultaneously to accelerate turnaround times without weakening risk analysis.
The goal, Jardine says, is not necessarily to reduce pressure, but to change where human expertise is applied.
“AI is not going to reduce the pressure,” he said. “It’s going to change the pressure and allow you to focus on the areas that you truly add value.”
But Boxx executives say the next competitive advantage will not simply be speed.
“The next phase of the market isn’t necessarily about who’s going to do it the fastest, but who’s going to do it the smartest,” Jardine said.