Paragon Insurance Group isn’t a typical MGA. Paragon operates as an aggregation of approximately 25 specialized programs spanning multiple industries and lines of business - from E&S casualty and workers' compensation to commercial auto and public entity.
That breadth is a core part of Paragon's value, but it comes with a distinct operational challenge: scale. Some of Paragon's highest-volume programs receive upward of 50,000 submissions per year, a number that continues to climb.
🎥 Hear from John Scully, Duffy Koller, and the Paragon underwriting team about how Kalepa changed the way they work.
Before Kalepa, Paragon's underwriters worked through their inbox the way the industry always has: manually, submission by submission, relying on experience and instinct to figure out what deserved attention first.
With programs generating tens of thousands of submissions annually, it wasn't sustainable.
The team was only able to review approximately 30% of incoming submissions. The rest went untouched. There simply weren't enough hours to triage, evaluate, and prioritize what was coming in. As a result, the team lacked a reliable way to know what business they were missing.
"Kalepa came to my attention via one of our programs. They were a high-volume program - around 50,000 submissions a year and continuing to grow - and they were only looking at about 30% of their submissions every day. They didn't have time to look at all of them. They didn't have time to triage all of them."
— John Scully, Chief Technology Officer at Paragon
Paragon implemented Kalepa's AI underwriting platform across its programs, starting with its highest-volume teams. The goal was straightforward: give underwriters the tools to work through their full inbox, focus on the right submissions, and move faster without sacrificing quality.
Kalepa replaced the manual triage process with automated submission ingestion, clearance, and prioritization, processing every incoming submission and surfacing the ones most likely to bind profitably. Within 90 days, Paragon's entire submission inbox was running through Kalepa.
"As soon as our underwriters started using the Kalepa dashboard, there were immediate enhancements to their workflow," Scully notes.
The value of Kalepa's triage capabilities goes beyond getting to more submissions faster. It's about getting to the right submissions and having the clarity to act decisively on the ones that don't fit.
"What I really like about Kalepa is its ability to triage our submissions - getting us to a point where we're finding the business we want, and also showing us the business we don't need. That gives us the ability to go back and educate our clients and brokers on what fits our appetite."
— Duffy Koller, President of Excess & Surplus Lines at Paragon
For underwriters on the front lines, the day-to-day impact is equally tangible. When every underwriter has instant clarity on which risks deserve their attention - and everything they need to evaluate those risks in one place - the whole operation moves differently.
Rubin Ortiz, a Senior Underwriter at Paragon, puts it simply:
"Kalepa gives you a snapshot of each individual risk and a quicker way to assess risk as you're starting the day. Because of the sheer volume we get, it really makes things more efficient."
That depth matters. Kalepa's risk analysis pulls in news articles, legal filings, third-party data, and public records alongside submission documents, surfacing insights that a clean loss run would never reveal. For Paragon's underwriters, Kalepa changed what thorough risk evaluation looks like.
Kalepa didn't just move Paragon's inbox - it transformed how submissions were processed entirely. Every incoming submission was automatically ingested, cleared, and triaged within minutes, with data extracted and structured to a level of accuracy that surpassed what the team had achieved manually.
"Within 90 days, we had moved our full submission inbox through Kalepa,” Scully notes. “We're somewhere around 98 to 99% accurate now - even more accurate than when we had an operations team doing this manually."
With submissions ranked by fit and likelihood to bind, underwriters spend their time on the right risks from the start - and arrive at each assessment with the full context needed to make decisions with confidence.
As a result, Paragon's quote-to-bind ratio doubled within the first year. Koller attributes the improvement directly to the discipline and speed that Kalepa enables.
"We're seeing a better quote-to-bind ratio. In the past year it has doubled from what it was before. Kalepa is showing such due diligence in our underwriting that it's also giving peace of mind to our reinsurance clients that we're doing the right thing."
"We expected some improvement in triage and the ability for underwriters to look at what was coming in, make a decision quickly on which accounts to look at, and spend more time looking at the relevant accounts. And we got all that, but we also got so much more. The speed with which we're able to respond to agents, the accuracy of the information, more profitability. Huge ROI. I just can't imagine not having Kalepa anymore."
Ready to see what Kalepa can do for your team? Schedule a demo.
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