How an MGA runs a specialty E&S program on one system

This is an illustrative example, not a report from a named customer. It describes how a team of this shape runs its program on Riska, using the product as it ships today.

Picture an MGA with binding authority from one fronting carrier for a specialty E&S casualty program. Two underwriters quote. An operations lead owns the payment plans and the endorsements. A finance lead closes the month and sends the carrier its bordereau by the tenth.

Before Riska, each of those people kept their own copy of the program. The rating spreadsheet lived on a shared drive, the guidelines in a PDF, the payment plan in a billing tool and the carrier report in a workbook rebuilt from three exports every month.

Each copy was right on the day it was made.

The program record names the carrier bearing the risk and the remittance terms: the basis, how often it is due and how many days the MGA has to pay. The products the MGA sells sit inside the program.

Rates go into a rate book, a timeline of effective-dated versions. A version takes force on its date and the next version’s date closes it, so nobody sets an expiry. The workbook that prices a submission reads a base rate, a territory factor and a deductible factor from those tables by name.

Before anything goes live, an underwriter points the workbook at a real record and re-runs it with the formulas still unsaved. Nothing is written. When it prices the way they meant, the change is cut into a release and deployed, first to a test environment and then to production.

The bordereau run produces the written premium bordereau: one line per posted premium line in a closed period. A period that is still open is refused, because its lines can still change.

The template is a saved view over posted premium lines, and its column labels become the CSV headers. Matching the carrier’s layout is a matter of naming the columns the way their spreadsheet does.

A paid bordereau, built from cash matched to individual lines, is not in the product yet. Carrier remittance is held as an amount owed onward and stays open until a disbursement settles it, in full or in part.

The four copies drifted because nothing connected them. On Riska the rate book, the appetite rules, the payment plan and the report template are configuration on the same program, versioned and released together.

So the term an underwriter binds is the term billing invoices and the term the bordereau counts. A referral recorded by appetite sits on that same record, next to the decision that cleared it.

Month end stops being a reconciliation. It becomes a run.