A renewal at 90 days out looks straightforward on paper. The risk is known, the incumbent carrier has the history, and the broker has done this placement before. What actually happens between day 90 and day 1 is where the friction lives, and it rarely shows up as a single dramatic delay. It shows up as a string of small waits, each one reasonable on its own, that together push a routine renewal uncomfortably close to expiry.
Underwriter Response Time Is the Bottleneck Brokers Feel First
The most direct evidence of this comes from the London Market’s own placing data. The average response time for a firm order across the market was 2.3 days in 2025, up from 2.0 days the year before, according to the first market-wide benchmark published by Placing Platform Limited. Carriers in the top quartile responded in an average of 1.2 days, which means the gap between a well-run desk and an average one is not marginal. It is roughly a full working day per order, repeated across every risk in a broker’s book.
The same data showed that endorsement response times ran nearly twice as long as firm order response times, and that follow markets were roughly 70 percent slower than lead markets on the same risk. A renewal rarely touches only one market. It touches a lead, then a series of followers, each adding its own delay on top of the one before it. [PULL QUOTE] The bottleneck is not any single underwriter being slow. It is the arithmetic of asking several slow steps to happen in sequence.
Rekeying the Same Data Before It Even Reaches an Underwriter
Response time measures what happens once a submission lands on an underwriter’s desk. It says nothing about how long it takes a broker to get a clean submission there in the first place, and that stage carries its own, separate friction. At BIBA 2026, the industry’s own trade conference, one finding surfaced repeatedly across broker conversations, according to a review of the event. Stripped of the AI headlines, the most common technology complaint brokers raised was an older and more mundane problem, that their systems simply do not talk to each other. Brokers described re-keying the same client data across quoting tools, policy administration platforms, and finance systems, losing hours to it every week.
This is not a training problem or a discipline problem. It is what happens when a broker’s own internal systems are as disconnected from each other as the broker is from the carrier they are placing business with.
This bottleneck sits upstream of the one before it. A submission assembled from re-keyed, manually reconciled data is more likely to trigger the back-and-forth queries that stretch an underwriter’s response time further still, which means the two bottlenecks are not competing explanations. They are the same underlying failure showing up on both sides of the placement.
The Technology Barrier Behind Both Problems
The common thread connecting slow underwriter response and broker-side re-keying is not a coincidence of timing. It is a shared root cause. [KEY STAT] When London Market brokers were asked to name the single biggest impediment to modernisation, reliance on outdated technology ranked highest, at 24 percent, ahead of every other barrier offered. [KEY STAT] Separately, 78 percent of brokers said insurer technology plays a decisive or highly significant role in where they place risk, which means this is not a background irritation. It is actively shaping placement decisions.
An underwriter working from a fragmented core system is not choosing to be slow, and a broker manually re-keying data into three different platforms is not choosing to be inefficient. Both are downstream symptoms of the same disconnected infrastructure, one experienced from the carrier’s side of the desk and one from the broker’s.
Agiliux was built to close that specific gap, with integration designed into the platform’s architecture from the outset rather than added as a layer on top of an existing core, which is the difference between a system that removes re-keying and delay at the source and one that simply adds another interface for brokers and underwriters to manage on top of the ones they already have.
Key Takeaways
| Five things to retain from this article |
|---|
| 01 The average London Market firm order response time was 2.3 days in 2025, up from 2.0 days in 2024 (PPL Service Benchmarks, 2026) |
| 02 Top quartile carriers responded in 1.2 days on average, a gap of roughly a full working day per order versus the market average (PPL, 2026) |
| 03 Endorsement response times ran nearly twice as long as firm order times, with follow markets around 70 percent slower than lead markets (PPL, 2026) |
| 04 UK brokers at BIBA 2026 repeatedly cited manual re-keying of client data across disconnected quoting, policy admin, and finance systems as their most common technology complaint, ahead of AI-related concerns |
| 05 Outdated technology was named the single biggest impediment to modernisation by London Market brokers, ranking above every other barrier offered (Guidewire, 2026) |
Frequently asked questions
Renewal delays typically accumulate from a series of individually reasonable waits rather than one large issue, most commonly underwriter response time on the lead market, additional waits on each follow market, and time lost re-keying data into a clean submission before it even reaches an underwriter.
Data from the London Market shows follow markets responding roughly 70 percent slower than lead markets on the same risk, meaning a placement with multiple markets accumulates delay at each step rather than moving at the lead market’s pace throughout.
Yes, according to brokers themselves. At BIBA 2026, disconnected internal systems and the resulting need to re-key client data manually was reported as the most commonly raised technology complaint among attending brokers, ahead of concerns about AI.
It is frequently both, but technology plays a larger role than is often assumed. Underwriters working across fragmented, poorly integrated systems often cannot respond faster even with adequate staffing, because the delay sits in reconciling data between systems rather than in decision-making capacity.
Glossary
| Key terms used in this article |
|---|
| Firm Order A binding instruction from a broker to a carrier to accept a risk on agreed terms |
| Endorsement A mid-term change to an existing policy, requiring the carrier to review and confirm the amendment |
| Lead Market The first carrier on a slip to set terms, which other markets then follow |
| Follow Market A carrier that accepts the terms already agreed by the lead market on a shared risk |
| Legacy Broking System A broking platform built before AI-native architecture was technically or commercially viable, typically designed around batch processing, modular data silos, and human-mediated handoffs between system functions. Legacy broking systems can be improved through orchestration and bolt-on AI, but their fundamental architecture cannot support a closed AI agent reasoning and action loop. |
| Bordereau A periodic report detailing policies written or claims incurred, typically compiled by hand from multiple source systems |
Conclusion
None of these three bottlenecks will be solved by a broker pushing harder on a single file. A 2.3-day average response time, compounding across a lead and several follow markets, sits downstream of the same fragmentation that has brokers re-keying the same client data three times before a submission is even complete. Treated separately, each looks like a service issue to escalate. Traced to their shared root, they are a single structural problem wearing three different faces.
As more of the market publishes data like this, response time and submission friction stop being anecdotal and start being something brokers can actually select for, the same way they already select on price and coverage. The carriers and platforms that treat this as an architecture problem, rather than three unrelated service complaints, are the ones likely to define what a fast renewal looks like over the next few cycles.
Is your placement strategy accounting for which carriers are structurally faster, not just cheaper?
Agiliux was built by people who worked inside broking and reinsurance, which is why closing the integration gap behind both slow response times and manual re-keying was a design priority from day one, not a feature added later.
Want to see what a platform built to close that gap looks like for your book of business?
Sources cited
- Statistic: Placing Platform Limited (PPL), “PPL launches first market-wide benchmark for underwriter response times” (aggregated analysis of c.200,000 risks placed annually across 400 London Market firms during 2025), 29 July 2026. https://placingplatformlimited.com/news/ppl-launches-first-market-wide-benchmark-for-underwriter-response-times/
- Statistic: Guidewire Software, “London Market Tech Barometer 2026” (survey of 251 insurance brokers conducted by Censuswide, 19-27 November 2025), published via Business Wire, 19 February 2026. https://www.barchart.com/story/news/297172/london-market-brokers-favouring-digitally-advanced-insurers-in-a-softening-market
- Qualitative finding (not a statistic): Genasys, “BIBA 2026: 10 Valuable Insights from the Conference,” reporting broker conversations at the British Insurance Brokers’ Association conference, Manchester, 13-14 May 2026. https://www.genasystech.com/biba-2026-review/
