Blog: You Can’t Buy Time… You Can Only Save It

For many brokers, spare time in any working week is a rare thing. The same is also true for insurers. 

Faced with relentless time pressures, reducing wasted effort is critical to saving time, but where do we begin when identifying the sources of waste? 

Broker Insights has recently added a broker-orientated ‘Time Saving Calculator’ to our website, which helps to shine a light on the scale of wasted effort and the benefit of using the platform to bridge the knowledge gap in the market.  

The calculator focusses on the friction and lost time incurred by brokers and insurers generated by the speculative proposal process. 

The calculation starts by identifying the number of renewals a broker markets each month, the presentations issued for each renewal, and the time taken to follow up on each presentation. 

Here is an example of the of the calculation in practice: 

The typical ‘churn’ rate for a broker’s held book is around 20% each year. Analysis of our platform data shows that the average number of policies for a broker with circa £5m GWP book is around 2,700, meaning that around 45 are marketed each month. 

When it comes to market presentations, the FCA indicates that a Fair Analysis of the market must be based on a sufficiently large number of contracts of insurance. Let’s assume that for each risk, a broker will issue six presentations with the aim of obtaining four quotes from the market.  

Once issued, the broker will probably have to follow up on each presentation. If we assume that each follow up will take around thirty minutes in total per presentation, we can calculate the amount of time spent per month marketing renewal risks: 

45 renewals marketed per month 

x six proposals issued for each renewal 

x 30 minutes per proposal 

= Approximately 135 hours per month spent on issuing and chasing up presentations. 

To obtain figures for your brokerage, click here to visit the calculator and input the relevant information. 

Once you have a figure for how much time could you save, how much could it be worth?

Broker Insights ‘in-appetite’ matchmaking allows brokers to match upcoming renewals directly against the underwriting appetites of our partner insurers. As a result, instead of speculatively issuing large numbers of presentations and investing time to follow them all up in the hope of obtaining the required quotes, a broker can focus their follow-up activity on the insurers with an appetite to write the business.  

Greater relevance leads to greater response rates and stronger relationships, and better still, our insurer partners can reach out to brokers via Notes of Interest to enquire about upcoming renewals, reversing the process to the benefit of the broker. 

Commenting on the efficiency gains, CCO for Broker Insights, Alan Sanderson, said: “We estimate that our platform’s ability to support brokers placement management can unlock in the region of a 30% time saving.  

“This targeting process drive efficiency for insurers, too. By identifying underwriting appetite, the quality of inbound quote flow and broker follow-ups increases, which reduces the time it takes to process out of appetite presentations.  

“Our aim at Broker Insights is not to compete with traditional professional practices, but to complement them and to enhance them. As an industry, we are at a tipping point where waste and friction are no longer accepted as the norm. We have the means to bypass these market inefficiencies and gain the strategic advantages of doing so.” 

You can’t buy time; you can only save it.  What is the value of the time you could save?