This post is part of a series sponsored by AgentSync.
Historically, carriers have tended to treat compliance as a series of necessary checklist items to complete. But by changing your mindset to see compliance as a function of superior business data with automations integrated throughout your operations system, you can realize numerous benefits.
Here we have listed some common use cases for how providers can leverage compliance data for leaner, more agile, less risky and more profitable businesses. There may only be seven here, but there’s no end to the ways you can leverage this data once you decide to change your mindset from seeing compliance as a list of steps in a process to instead seeing it as an opportunity to mine your data for use in business decisions.
No.1 Stop compliance violations before they happen
Perhaps most obviously, baking NIPR-sourced data into your team’s decision-making point can reduce risk to your business and end the time-sucking accident of green-lighting impossible situations. Commission payments can greatly benefit from this automated data. Another great use case: Carrier call centers that use licensing and contract data to automatically route calls based on location to only a manufacturer that is properly licensed and designated to discuss products with a potential customer.
No. 2 Compliance data as cost-saving tools
If you’re tired of proactively appointing every manufacturer that raises their hand, you can use compliance data to achieve numerous cost savings for your business, but one easy application is appointment cost savings.
Operationalize Just-in-Time agreements
If you want to leverage compliance data for cost savings, a clear choice is to operationalize your organization’s ability to use Just-in-Time agreements. These statutory provisions allow carriers to delay reporting agreements—and paying for them—in most states until the producer has written business.
Since the majority of treaty states require appointments at the individual level, waiting to process treaties on both a producer-by-producer and state-by-state basis can save hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the size of your distribution channels .
Elimination of contract renewal fees for producers who do not produce
State contract renewals can be annual, biennial, or on some other basis, depending on which states you operate in. But getting a list of which manufacturers you should terminate in which states by the deadline can be a race with manual hours of reporting. If you have accurate data woven up and down your systems, generating a report on who is writing business and where should be a breeze and could save you thousands of dollars in renewal fees.
No. 3 Calculate a real ROI for your producers
When you work across states, you have the dilemma of not only whether to designate a manufacturer, but also whether to designate them in each state in which you offer products. By integrating data about your policy management system with license and contract data, you can see real costs of what you’re paying for not only your agency partners, but also for individual-level producers and what they’re delivering in return per state.
For example, someone who is a big player in Kansas may be a waste of a deal fee in Nebraska. Or you might have recruited 60 producers from an agency, only to find that more than half of them don’t write your company. This individual-level data is critical to understanding whether you have a valuable agency partner or just one or two very valuable producers. It can also make negotiating contracts at renewal time much easier when you can arm your recruiting teams with concrete data about what each producer and agency contributes to your business.
No. 4 Utilization of compliance data as competition data
If you pull data from the industry’s source of truth, then you can set your system to only look at the strictest compliance-only slices of data. Or you can expand your data collection to include the kinds of information that provide you with key information. For example:
- Individual-level licensing data can tell you where your manufacturers have licenses that they don’t sell for you
- Manufacturer authorities can give you insight into what other products your manufacturers sell
- Broader deal data tells you which other providers your manufacturers work with for important competitive data
This kind of data can help you make important business decisions about mergers, acquisitions, product extensions, competitive moves and regional sales without second-guessing your capacity or relying on gut feelings.
No. 5 Removes the risk to your sales force
It’s no secret that the industry is facing a shift as the current crop of producers get ever-expanding books as their slightly older compatriots retire and age out of the business. But even today’s super producers are retiring.
Now, we’re longtime advocates of the idea that cutting paperwork and manual processes is key to recruiting younger manufacturers, and industry research shows that younger manufacturers are very comfortable with self-service options and generally hate repetitive copy-paste work. Nor can you abandon your current super-producers, whose definition of white-glove service is likely to include high-touch human interaction.
But often insurance companies don’t even understand the true makeup of their sales force. Taking an atomic look at producer data and seeing who your super sellers are and estimating the percentage within striking distance of retirement can help you figure out how to prioritize your producer recruitment and retention strategies.
No. 6 Accumulation of institutional knowledge
Internally, you may face similar risks to the threat of a retiring manufacturing workforce. If you’re like many airlines, you have one or maybe two compliance or operations managers who know what they’re doing, and they’re constantly training and retraining a green crew. You may risk losing all that knowledge when they retire or leave.
If you can support more institutional knowledge as data points inside your business systems and tools, then you can shorten the training period it takes to onboard new employees.
No. 7 Rapid turnarounds in changing economic or regulatory conditions
Unprecedented regional fires. Regulators with something to prove. Market declines. These are all situations that require turnarounds and product innovations at the organizational level and make every ounce of dead weight on your familiar ship a threat to your solvency and profitability. If every change requires a manual review, you’re in trouble.
Having easy access to data about product lines, agreements, individual licenses and competitive information can help you be more resilient to market and regulatory changes.
AgentSync transforms compliance through better data
Geico is publicly trying to shrink its more than 600 technology systems to something closer to 20 by leveraging integrations across systems for better data. And they are far from the only ones.
Because AgentSync is built on a cloud-native infrastructure and uses APIs to transfer data across systems, we’re able to connect to other core business systems and get the data you need to make decisions. But don’t take our word for it – read from our customers for themselves how they use AgentSync’s solutions to grow their businesses more effectively. And if you’re ready to start thinking about how we can help, start with a demo today.
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