NBS Halves Underwriting Time and Reviews 25-40% More Submissions a Day with Heron

LONDON, July 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- NBS, a UK MGA that has grown to a ~£120M book across 40+ products since 2011, ran a portal-only model that required brokers — or its own underwriters — to manually enter every risk. By using Heron to automate submission intake across that broker portal, NBS cut underwriting time roughly in half, freed underwriters to review 25–40% more submissions a day, and lifted quote volume even in a soft market — all without adding headcount, and with a projected £8–10M in additional premium as every line moves onto Heron.

For most of the book, roughly 95% of submissions came in the same way: a broker manually entered the risk into the portal. On the professional indemnity scheme, where NBS took proposal forms directly, underwriters did the keying themselves — and cross-referenced up to ten documents per submission to make sure the numbers tied out. The more complex the line, the worse it got. A commercial combined risk with two premises could run up to 120 questions.

NBS is 100% portal-based, so Heron sits between the incoming submission and that portal. A broker or an underwriter forwards the submission by email, in whatever form it arrives — a proposal form, a presentation, a stack of attachments — and Heron reads it, returns clean structured data into NBS's portal, and flags anything that needs a human's eye. A commercial combined case that once ran up to 120 questions across multiple premises now returns in about two minutes. NBS discovered Heron through the Accelerant Marketplace — Accelerant's curated network of best-in-class partners, each thoroughly vetted for quality, performance and integration before an MGA ever sees them.

"We wanted to remove the repetitive, manual tasks from our underwriting process so our underwriters could spend more time doing what they do best – underwriting risks rather than entering data."

— Rachel Oldroyd, Operations Director, NBS

The payoff is throughput: underwriters now clear 25–40% more cases a day, and, freed from the repetitive data entry, they like the work more for it. Because NBS can now accept manual submissions, more business finds its way to NBS. For one line of business, in the first three to four months, quote volume rose about 10% — and that number understates the impact, because a soft UK market had comparable lines running roughly 16% down over the same period. Turnaround tightened too: professional indemnity moved from about four days to two, and commercial combined from a day to half a day. None of it required adding headcount — the same team simply handles more.

"We've seen underwriters doing between 25 and 40% more cases a day, because they've cut their underwriting time by about 50% on each case."

— Rachel Oldroyd, Operations Director, NBS

NBS projects that once every line runs through Heron, quote volume could climb 25% — an estimated £8–10 million of additional premium in the first twelve months. Heron is now central to how NBS plans to grow. It intends to roll Heron across all 40 of its products — no new product will go live without Heron built in — and it's developing a broker-facing chatbot widget that drops a submission straight to Heron and returns it ready to complete.

About NBS

NBS is a UK managing general agent founded in 2011. The team originally focused on writing leisure and hospitality risks — pubs, restaurants, shops, hotels — and has since broadened into 40+ products, including commercial combined, contractors, professional indemnity and non-standard household. They'll log around £120 million in gross written premium this year. nbsunderwriting.co.uk

About Heron

Heron automates submission intake and underwriting data for insurers, MGAs, brokers and lenders — reading documents in any format, screening them against appetite, and delivering clean, structured data into existing systems. herondata.io

Media contact: Swati Gupta - [email protected] - Heron

SOURCE Heron Data