Being a CFO at an MGA in 2025 means managing more complexity with fewer resources.
You're driving growth, maintaining compliance, and delivering board-ready numbers… all while working with fragmented systems that weren’t designed for today’s partnerships or data demands.
What most CFOs haven’t been told is this: financial infrastructure is no longer just a cost center. It’s a growth lever. The right foundation gives you leverage in negotiations, operations, and how fast you can scale.
McKinsey’s Global Insurance Report shows that billing delays and fragmented ops damage partner satisfaction and revenue predictability, especially for MGAs managing over $50M in premium.
After working with top finance teams across the MGA landscape, I’ve seen how infrastructure either compounds your advantage, or holds you back.
Here's what every insurance CFO should be addressing this year:
1. Billing delays are damaging trust
2. Payment data is partner data, don't lose it
3. Your infrastructure should work for Ops, not slow them down
4. You can't scale if your systems don't talk
5. Audit-readiness starts with automation
6. Manual reconciliation is killing your margins
We hear it all the time. “Where’s my commission?” “Did the payment go out?” “Why doesn’t this match what we have?”
If these sound familiar, your billing system is already costing you trust.
Most MGAs are working with carriers, brokers, wholesalers, and premium finance providers who expect clarity in real time. Instead, they get follow-up emails, PDF attachments, and manual workarounds that don’t scale.
And that’s the real problem. Every delay creates noise and doubt. Partners start wondering if you're organized, reliable, and… worth sending business to?
Fast, accurate billing is the easiest path to clean up your workflows. It’s how modern MGAs earn confidence and keep their partners happy. And it shows that you’re running a business that’s easy to work with.
If you want to grow, that kind of reputation is non-negotiable.
MGAs that reduce time-to-payment under 5 days typically see faster partner response times and fewer billing inquiries, according to industry benchmarks.
Here's what most CFOs miss: every transaction tells a story.
Who paid. When. How fast. How often. What needed adjustment. Where delays originated.
If you're not capturing this info in one place, you're sacrificing efficiency and losing strategic advantage.
Payment data shows you:
Over time, these patterns can help you renegotiate terms, flag risk early, and direct capital where it matters most.
But you can't analyze what you can't access. If payment data is scattered across PDFs, inboxes, and third-party tools, you're flying blind.
MGAs that centralize payment data consistently report improvements in partner retention, faster commission resolution, and clearer forecasting.
Centralizing commission flows, refunds, premium finance, and fees lets you turn operations into intelligence. You move from reacting to issues to anticipating them.
I’ll make this one short and sweet.
If your policy admin and accounting tools don’t sync, every edge case turns into manual work. That slows down finance, blocks ops, and frustrates partners.
At scale, these gaps lead to bigger issues like missed revenue, broken workflows, and extra headcount just to keep up.
When systems work together, the numbers line up, the noise disappears, and leadership gets what they need to support growth: a single-source of financial truth.
CFOs focused on speed know that small problems in ops don’t stay small for long.
Ops teams handle policy changes, onboard partners, field broker questions, and manage commissions. When systems are clunky or disconnected, it creates major plumbing issues.
That’s how minor delays turn into late nights. A policy change that doesn’t sync. A broker waiting on an answer. A missing payment that triggers five follow-ups. These moments stack up.
And it’s not for lack of effort. Most teams are blocked by systems that weren’t built for the way insurance works.
When infrastructure gives ops real-time data, clean workflows, and tools they actually trust, it gets quiet. Partners get answers faster. Teams stop playing catch-up. And new business moves forward without friction.
Every finance team expects audits, but that doesn’t mean they’re ready for them.
We all know that manual work leads to major gaps in compliance. When reconciliations live in spreadsheets and approvals happen in email, there’s no audit trail. That makes audits slower, harder, and more expensive.
MGAs with automated workflows avoid the back-and-forth that drags audits out and drives up costs.
McKinsey’s 2024 insurance leadership report found that operational efficiency and full-stack automation are now board-level priorities, with CFOs driving infrastructure upgrades to streamline billing, reconciliation, and audit readiness.
Auditors want evidence: when payments were processed, who approved them, what policy they tied to, and how exceptions were handled. If your team has to dig for that, the system isn’t working.
Automated workflows should log every step. The right person approves the right thing, and it’s all time-stamped and tied to the right data. When policies, payments, and partners flow through one system, the numbers explain themselves.
Audit-readiness isn’t a fire drill. It’s what happens naturally when you get the process right every day.
Gartner’s 2024 Risk & Finance Priorities Report found that CFOs with automated audit workflows spend 46% less time on year-end preparation.
A single policy at a traditional insurance company can touch dozens, sometimes hundreds, of systems.
That complexity doesn’t show up for the customer, but it hits your finance team hard. Especially during reconciliation.
According to PwC’s Finance Benchmark insights, finance teams still spend close to 60% of their time on transactional work, with just 31% of processes automated.
For high-volume MGAs, that translates into thousands of hours in hidden cost. Duplicate payments, missed credits, and policy mismatches quietly chip away at your margins.
You can’t fix what you can’t see. And you can’t grow with processes that need human input at every turn.
Reconciliation should run on auto-pilot. Every transaction should be tied to a policy, a party, and a date, with exceptions flagged, not buried.
For CFOs, automating reconciliation is no longer optional. It cuts close time in half and gives your team room to drive business growth.
Insurance CFOs know their financial infrastructure is holding them back. What they need is a clear path forward that doesn't require rebuilding from scratch.
Start with high-impact areas:
Start where the pain is greatest. Small wins compound fast, and they signal maturity to your board, your auditors, and your partners.
Final thought on digital transformation in insurance.
The MGAs that scale fastest in 2025 won't be those with the most capital or the best products. They'll be the ones with infrastructure that turns operational efficiency into competitive advantage.
You don't have to do everything at once. But you do need to start. The longer you wait, the more room your competitors have to move faster, operate cleaner, and win better deals.
Book time with us and see how Functional Finance can help.
Ready to replace tedious tasks with fast, accurate workflows? Book a free live demo of the #1 insurance financial operations platform today.
Functional FInance is a financial technology company, not a bank or FDIC-insured depository institution. Banking services are provided by Grasshopper Bank, N.A.; Member FDIC. The FDIC's deposit insurance coverage only protects against the failure of an FDIC-insured bank.