Jones: Acrisure working on establishing ‘underwriting culture’ within MGA business

By James Thaler

June 23 - (The Insurer) - Adrian Jones said Acrisure’s MGA operations are focused on establishing “an underwriting culture” and ramping up “a full overhaul” in its use of technology.

Jones joined Acrisure last year after previous experience at HSCM Ventures, Scor Venture, RenaissanceRe, and Bain & Company, and currently serves as the firm’s head of underwriting and specialty retail. He spoke to The Insurer TV at Insurtech Insights USA 2025.

“There are actually a number of great underwriting businesses that Acrisure has bought over the years. And so, we brought those underwriting businesses together and said, ‘We're going to create an underwriting culture here,’” Jones said.

“We're going to operate them as underwriters, not as distributors, and we're going to build a platform around these underwriting businesses so that we can make them much better," he explained.

“Basically, we want to have all the specialty businesses together. Specialists like dealing with specialists. And we're spending a lot of time on the technology,” said Jones, adding that his experience working in venture capital helps him distinguish between strong tech platforms and “vaporware”.

“We have commenced a full overhaul of our technology on the underwriting side," Jones said, with ongoing efforts around data ingestion and refinement.

“How do we present (data) to underwriters so that they can then make well-informed decisions? How do we get that into our general ledger? How do we get that out to our carrier partners?” he said of his unit’s approach to technology.

“And then, how do we bring in the claims data on the back end as well?” said Jones, adding that the technology acquired from former trucking insurtech Koffie Labs had been “a very good acquisition”.

“And others we're using third parties to help us with. But we're bringing all that together onto a modern MGA platform,” he explained, describing the importance of overcoming initial skepticism among colleagues about introducing new technology.

“But once you see it, then people start getting it. A lot of our technology in this space is original dot com vintage. It looks and feels like Windows did in the year 2000, and it just hasn't been updated. And people get very comfortable with it, and it's like an old shoe,” he said.

CONSOLIDATING

Acrisure has eliminated more than 400 different accounting systems and consolidated over 600 agency management systems in recent years, Jones said, adding: “So, that's all in two different systems right now, and that's allowing us a lot of insight that we would never be able to get before, into what's actually in that retail book”.

Jones said Acrisure was "not trying to compete" with its carrier partners but trying to find "where those big areas of business are that are really inefficiently placed, that are not well served”.

“If we can bring a solution to them, then great, particularly in areas nobody else wants to go to,” he added.

Watch the full interview with Acrisure’s Adrian Jones to hear more on:

• Ambitions the intermediary has to build an underwriting culture within its MGA ops

• Consolidating hundreds of accounting systems and agency management systems

• Why insurtechs need to “think boldly and act incrementally” to scale profitably

• How niche businesses can reach substantial scale and valuations

• And more…