The UK insurance broking market is under pressure from every direction. Rates are hardening in some lines, softening in others, and the FCA's Consumer Duty regime is demanding a level of documented oversight that many mid-sized (20-150 staff) brokers are simply not set up to deliver. Meanwhile, the operational backbone of most brokerages — the inboxes, the spreadsheets, the manual data entry — hasn't changed much in a decade.
Skilled brokers and account handlers are spending a significant portion of their day on work that shouldn't require their expertise at all.
Where the time actually goes
Most brokers we speak to are surprised when they quantify it. New business submissions arriving by email, read manually, extracted by hand, re-keyed into Acturis or another platform. Rekeying the same risk data into three different insurer extranets. Endorsements and mid-term adjustments processed one by one. Management information that takes hours to compile rather than seconds to access.
At 60 cases a day, 15 minutes of unnecessary administration per case adds up to 900 minutes — the equivalent of nearly two full working days — lost every single day. That is not a marginal inefficiency. It is a structural drag on the business.
What we are building at North Stack
North Stack builds AI automation specifically for insurance brokers. Our insurance practice is led by Myles Langstone, formerly a senior advisor at the ABI. We don't replace your existing systems, we build agents that sit on top of them. Our automation can read inbound emails and attachments, extract the relevant data points, apply business rules, clarify the output and push back to a human to check before syncing with your systems. No re-keying. No manual triage. No bottlenecks. Keeping humans in the loop. We read the messy stuff and your team approves.
The results are immediate and measurable. One of our clients is saving 900 minutes of operational time every day and £120,000 per year as a direct result. We're now rebuilding their wider operation from the ground up, AI-first.
Governance and regulation are not an afterthought
We build with Consumer Duty in mind from day one. Every automation we deploy includes a human review layer — account handlers retain oversight and sign-off before anything reaches a client or a system of record. Audit trails are built in as standard, giving compliance teams the documentation they need without creating additional work for the broking team. AI should make it easier to demonstrate fair outcomes, not harder.
The window is now
The brokers moving on operational efficiency today will have a structural cost and capacity advantage within 6 months. The ones waiting for the perfect moment will be competing against leaner, faster businesses that moved while they were still deliberating.
If you want us to run the 15-minute case audit across your own inbox, email [email protected] with your firm name.