How NBS Underwriting Transformed MI with IDS Analytics

Saving 10+ days a month, cutting errors by 95%, and empowering insight-led broker and insurer conversations

NBS Underwriting is a fast-growing, award-winning MGA (est. 2011) with £117m+ GWP and ~100 staff across five locations in the UK and Ireland, delivering tailored solutions across 40+ specialist lines.

Guided by “making brokers’ lives easy,” NBS offers fast, accurate quotes, direct access to highly skilled underwriters, and BDM support—backed by A‑rated capacity from Hadron UK, Accelerant, Hiscox, Tokio Marine HCC, Allied World, and ARAG. NBS combines capacity strength with specialist underwriting expertise to provide brokers and their clients with market-leading solutions.

NBS Underwriting Power BI dashboard - Renewal Retention

The Challenge

NBS faced growing volumes of data across products, brokers, and schemes, sourced from SchemeServe and manual spreadsheet-based MI. This created several operational hurdles:

• Time-consuming reporting and monthly pack builds diverted skilled staff from higher-value tasks.
• Limited agility to slice, drill, and spot trends early, with restricted data enrichment and integration (e.g. budgets).
• Inconsistent entity mapping across spreadsheets led to unreliable KPIs and data quality concerns.
• Manual spreadsheet sharing introduced version control issues, weak audit trails, and poor access control for sensitive data.
• Limited visibility into key metrics such as retention, conversion, rate changes, loss ratios, and exposure.

The Solution

 To strengthen its broker-first commitment, NBS partnered with IDS to implement a scalable, secure, and self-service analytics solution.

IDS delivered a SaaS platform with:

• Secure, role-based access for unlimited users.
• Automated data updates (daily and near real-time).
• A governed insurance data warehouse—a single source of truth—built on IDS’s specialist insurance model.
• Tailored Power BI dashboards aligned to NBS’s specifications, empowering underwriters, operations, and other stakeholders with trusted insights and self-service reporting.

Each release was supported by a “confidence pack” including UAT results, reconciliation summaries, and KPI definitions. Parallel-run reconciliations against SchemeServe and legacy MI validated data integrity, while automated alerts on load failures ensured ongoing reliability.

Delivered in Just 3 Months

Thanks to close collaboration between NBS and IDS, the scalable analytics solution was designed, built, and deployed in just three months—

A Governed Insurance Data warehouse 

At the heart of the solution is a governed insurance data warehouse—designed as a single source of truth. Built on IDS’s specialist insurance model, it enables:

• Consistent, mapping across products, brokers, and schemes.
• Reliable data enrichment  budgets and targets.
• Governing KPIs and data quality rules.

Power BI Dashboards  Phase 1 

IDS experienced BI Team co‑designed with NBS operations, underwriting, and leadership input to ensure KPI and insights matched real decision points:

• Broker Analysis
• Renewal Retention
• New Business
• Claims & Triangulations
• Daily Volumes operational dashboard.

Quality Assurance, Automation & Monitoring

Structured UAT cycles were complemented by defect triage and formal sign-off processes, supported by parallel data reconciliations against Scheme Serve and legacy MI systems to ensure data integrity.

Automated alerts for load failures were implemented to maintain system reliability and enable prompt issue resolution.

Training, Access Control & Support 

To support the onboarding process, IDS met weekly with NBS during the development phase. IDS also provided training for NBS on effectively using their Analytics framework and dashboards.

The training also covered key areas, including user management, role-based access control (RBAC), and the IDS Support Desk SLA Portal.

Phase 2 in Progress

With a robust MI foundation now in place, NBS is moving forward—at pace—into real-time underwriting intelligence and automated regulatory reporting.

Next Steps

• Underwriting what‑if analysis (rate/exposure/capacity) → price discipline before action.
• Rating strength and rate change analysis → visibility of rate adequacy to protect profitability and competitiveness.
• Near Real Time “day sheet” refreshing throughout the day.
• Consumer Duty Dashboard → FCA regulatory MI and outcome monitoring.
• Insurer Pack - giving capacity providers a transparent, data-backed view of performance across premiums, claims, brokers, schemes, governance, and forecasts.

NBS Underwriting Opportunities Ahead

With this secure foundation, NBS is equipped to:

• Build additional Power BI dashboards and reports in-house with confidence and efficiency.
• Continue leveraging IDS’s expert support for more complex analytics and dashboard development.
• Expand insight delivery across the business, enhancing decision-making and operational agility. 

Why Insurance Data Solutions

IDS helps insurers, MGAs and brokers turn operational data into governed, decision-ready dashboards and MI. With deep experience in the insurance industry, our team of data engineers and BI developers understand insurance and delegated authority processes, business rules, as well as the challenges and nuances of different policy administration systems. We speak the language of insurance — giving you instant confidence in the insight we deliver.

IDS Analytics SAAS Solution (at a glance)

IDS Analytics offers a secure, cost-effective framework for self-service analytics and decision-making insights.  Offering a single source of truth that integrates multiple data sources into an insurance-ready data warehouse model.

Security and governance are embedded through two-factor authentication (2FA), role-based access controls (RBAC), and comprehensive audit controls, ensuring the right people see the correct data for operations, sales, and underwriting with complete accountability.

From this foundation, self-service Power BI dashboards refresh automatically, offering interactive visuals, filters, and drill-through detail to access the underlying data. Monitor KPIs in real time with alerts, enrich performance with targets, budgets, and external data, and save time by replacing manual reporting with governed automation — ensuring accuracy, compliance, and consistency across your MI landscape