Your Brokerage Has the Book. It Doesn’t Have the Machinery.

-IntroductionWhat does a mid-sized brokerage have that it cannot actually use? A specialized book and the data behind it, and none of the underwriting, capital, filing, and admin machinery it would take to turn that book into a program it owns. The ten largest firms solved this by buying MGAs. Cole Riccardi built Authentic to rent that machinery to everyone else, and nine of the top ten retail brokerages now work with him on digital programs anyway. In this conversation he explains why he refuses to call Authentic a software company, what he got wrong in the first two years, and why he went after Main Street before he went after the hard market.Guest BioCole Riccardi founded Authentic in 2022 after five years at Aquiline Capital Partners, where he invested across the insurance value chain and became convinced that nobody was building affinity insurance programs at scale. He built the company with a co-founder and COO who spent fifteen years as an actuary at AmTrust and a CTO who came out of six years at Amazon, and the platform was architected as multi-carrier, multi-tenant, and multi-product from the first day. Authentic runs out of New York and Dayton, Ohio, is backed by FirstMark Capital, and now sits behind six carriers with programs spanning Main Street, energy, and inland marine.Key Topics-Programs should not be limited to the top ten - The largest brokerages own their own MGAs. Riccardi's argument is that everyone else already has the book and the data, and only lacks the machinery, which is a rentable problem.-An MGA that gives its software away - Riccardi is emphatic that Authentic never wanted to sell software and makes its money in the transaction flow. The technology is what makes it a better trading partner, not the product.-Affinity is product creation, not just distribution - For PushPress, Authentic went through the entire book and built four or five custom class codes that mapped to CrossFit gyms and similar facilities, rather than rating them off generic fitness codes.-Main Street first, on purpose - Rather than chase hard-market classes where premium comes fast, Authentic built a sizable Main Street book to prove that the configured programs were what moved business over, not market scarcity.-Same infrastructure, new practices - A Chubb energy underwriter joined with a thesis about independent power producers being underserved on casualty. That program launched in May, and an inland marine practice was announced the day of this recording