WaterStreet Company

10/15/2026

36 new reciprocal insurance exchanges have formed since 2017, half of them since early 2024.

Now the NAIC is drafting rules that would cap attorney-in-fact fees at the cost of services plus a reasonable profit. Exchanges will need the data to back up every dollar.

Here’s how the model works and what it asks of your systems:

https://hubs.li/Q04BlW5H0

How a reciprocal insurance exchange works: subscriber ownership, attorney-in-fact fees, NAIC scrutiny, and what exchanges need from their data and systems.

09/23/2026

WaterStreet is headed to Denver for the 131st Annual Convention next week!

Stop by Booth 615 to meet our team and talk about what’s ahead for mutual insurance and how the right technology can help carriers move forward.

See you in Denver!

09/23/2026

One farm policy can cover a family home, a grain operation, a cattle herd, and a $741,000 combine.

When the 2020 derecho hit Iowa, it produced nearly 52,000 farm-related claims in a single day. For a county mutual, one storm can reach a big part of the book.

Our new article covers 7 underwriting challenges farm mutual executives face, from reinsurance to legacy forms to agent knowledge that never reaches the file.

Read it here:
https://hubs.li/Q04y9Nsw0

Farm mutual insurance companies underwrite homes, operations, livestock, and equipment on one policy. Learn the 7 core underwriting challenges and solutions.

09/18/2026

Louisiana’s insurance market is changing. But do you know which laws are driving the shift?

Two years of sweeping legislative reform have rewritten the rules for carriers operating in the state, from how they price and manage risk to how they handle claims and litigation.

The changes are significant:
• Repeal of the three-year rule restores underwriting flexibility.
• File-and-use rating allows carriers to respond faster to changing risk.
• Bad-faith reform reshapes claims procedures and litigation exposure.
• New tort reforms change the liability landscape.
• Incentive programs are helping bring private capital back into the market.

For carriers and MGAs, these aren't just legislative headlines. They have real implications for underwriting, pricing, claims, and operational strategy. The rules have changed. Is your operation keeping up?

Our latest blog breaks down the 2024 and 2025 Louisiana insurance legislation and what it means for carriers navigating the evolving market.

Read the full analysis: https://hubs.li/Q04xTcg30

Louisiana insurance legislation is reshaping the market. Explore the 2024 and 2025 reforms changing underwriting, claims, litigation, and carrier opportunities.

09/18/2026

Louisiana’s property insurance market is making a comeback. And the numbers are getting hard to ignore.

After years of carrier insolvencies, soaring premiums, and shrinking capacity, the market is showing signs of a turnaround:

• 17 new insurers have entered since 2024.
• Average homeowners rate increases have dropped from 14% in 2023 to nearly flat in 2026.
• Louisiana Citizens is shrinking as private carriers return.

Sound familiar? Florida followed a similar path, and Louisiana is now seeing some of the same market shifts.

Our latest blog breaks down the reforms driving the recovery, the role of the Insure Louisiana Incentive Program, and what the changing landscape means for carriers and MGAs looking to enter or expand.

The opportunity is opening. Is your operation ready?
Read the full analysis: https://hubs.li/Q04xSPJn0 (https://hubs.li/Q04xSPJn0)

Louisiana property insurance is turning around. Explore how reforms, new insurers, stabilizing rates, and Citizens depopulation are reshaping the market.

09/17/2026

For most of the past decade, "coastal property insurer" came with a warning label. That is changing.
Capital is returning to the Gulf and Southeast coast. Florida led the turn, Louisiana and Texas are following, and residual markets are shrinking as private carriers take business back. But recovery is uneven, and the catastrophe risk has not moved.

Our latest piece maps what a successful coastal insurer looks like: why the market turned state by state, how wind pools and state-backed programs change the math, where coverage fragments across wind, surge, and flood, and what carriers need to know about reinsurance.

If you are underwriting the coast, or thinking about it, this is the profile and the map.
Read it here: https://hubs.li/Q04xPBXh0

Coastal insurer strategy for the Gulf and Southeast: what carriers weighing coastal expansion must know about risk, data, reinsurance, and market recovery.

08/07/2026

$108.7 billion. That's what U.S. MGAs wrote in premium in 2025, up 17.8% in a year (AM Best).
The MGA boom isn't a pricing cycle. It's structural. But most analysis misses the real story: every force driving growth also raises the operational bar.

→ Non-exclusive carrier deals are now 57% of P&C direct premium. Carriers can shop for better-run partners, so your switching cost lives in operations, not your pitch deck.
→ The fastest-growing lines (cyber, flood, crop) are the hardest to administer.
→ Embedded distribution means more policies, smaller units, no room for manual back-office work.

The MGAs that scale won't win on alone. They'll win because they built policy administration and back-office capacity early, not once the strain hit the loss ratio.

Read our latest blog to learn more:

MGA premiums hit $108.7B in 2025. But the boom is structural, and whether your program survives it comes down to operations, not just underwriting.

07/31/2026

Facultative reinsurance is having a moment.

Every underwriting shop eventually meets a risk that doesn't fit. Too big for the net line. Outside the treaty. A class no standing agreement ever imagined.
Facultative is how you write it anyway: place exactly that risk, on your terms, without betting the balance sheet on one account.

And demand is climbing. Mordor Intelligence projects facultative placements to outpace the broader reinsurance market through 2031, driven by the large, strange, and specialty risks treaties leave out.

But here's what doesn't make the headlines: facultative is as much a systems challenge as an underwriting one. Every placement documented individually. Every fac cert tied to the right policy. Every bordereau reconciled. Get it wrong and the leakage shows up in your loss ratio.

Our latest breaks down what facultative reinsurance is, how it differs from treaty, and what it asks of the platform underneath it.

https://hubs.li/Q04rs_Rm0

Facultative reinsurance lets carriers and MGAs cede individual high-value or unusual risks on custom terms. Learn how it works and why demand is rising.

07/09/2026

$40B to $130B in a decade.

That's the U.S. & lines story, and it's now roughly 35 cents of every commercial P&C premium dollar.

We dug into a decade of AM Best, S&P GMI, and ALIRT data to answer three questions a headline can't:
Why did so much risk move to E&S? Property catastrophe losses and admitted-carrier retreat did the visible work. Social inflation and nuclear verdicts did the quieter, stickier work in casualty.

Who actually drove the growth? A cohort of 65 newer specialty carriers, many of them fronting operations tied to MGAs, now writes about a quarter of the market. Most of their surplus still comes from parent capital.

And what happens now that growth is cooling? Premium growth slowed to 9.7% through Q3 2025. AM Best moved its outlook from positive to stable. The next phase rewards discipline over expansion, and the winners will be the ones who can answer a capacity provider's questions with clean data and tight reporting.

The full breakdown is in the article: https://hubs.li/Q04p63fX0

U.S. excess & surplus lines grew 223% in a decade to $130B. What drove the shift, why it's structural, and what a maturing E&S market means for carriers.

06/30/2026

Florida and California are the two big catastrophe markets everyone points to. They look like the same story. They aren't.

Florida's crisis was about legislation. Litigation reform reset the market, and carriers are coming back.

California's is about rate adequacy. Until Prop 103 loosens, the math doesn't work, no matter how much capacity you'd like to deploy.

Same headline, opposite playbooks. And for any carrier weighing where to expand next, that difference decides whether you're walking into a recovery or a market that hasn't found its floor yet.

Read the full breakdown here: https://hubs.li/Q04n7Hgl0

How two catastrophe markets, California and Florida, are diverging on regulation and recovery, and what P&C executives should read into it.