For many insurance brokers, one of the most time-consuming parts of the finance function remains surprisingly manual: matching premium receipts in the client or IBA bank account against individual policies and transactions.
A payment arrives for £3,742.18. Who paid it? Which client does it relate to? Is it one policy, several policies or a combination of premium and adjustment?
Traditionally, somebody has to work that out.
Modern reconciliation technology can take transaction data from the bank and compare it with the outstanding transactions held within the broker's insurance system.
Rather than relying solely on exact reference matching, AI-assisted software can look for combinations of information such as:
payment amount
client and payer names
policy numbers and payment references
expected premium amounts
payment dates
previous payment behaviour
combinations of outstanding items which together equal the amount received.
The system can then automatically match high-confidence transactions and present the remaining exceptions for a human to review.
Instead of somebody manually reconciling hundreds of receipts, the job increasingly becomes reviewing the relatively small number the technology couldn't confidently match.
Acturis already contains extensive accounting functionality, including the ability to maintain client and office bank accounts, debts and payments. It also has significant automation and API capabilities.
There are already third-party reconciliation products capable of integrating with Acturis and using AI to improve insurance accounting and settlement processes.
For brokers using Acturis, that creates an interesting opportunity: how much of the traditional IBA reconciliation process actually needs to remain manual?
For an insurance broker, speed isn't the only consideration. Client money needs to be properly controlled and reconciled.
The objective therefore shouldn't be to remove people from the process altogether.
A better model is:
Technology does the matching. People investigate the exceptions.
Done properly, this can reduce repetitive finance administration, improve the speed of reconciliations and allow the people responsible for the accounts to spend more time investigating genuine differences rather than matching transactions that were correct in the first place.
At SWLA Accounting, we understand the specialist accounting requirements of insurance brokers and the systems they use. We believe the combination of insurance-sector knowledge, good accounting controls and intelligent automation can dramatically reduce the administrative burden of running a brokerage.
If your team is spending hours every week manually reconciling premiums and your IBA account, it may be time to ask a simple question:
How much of this could technology be doing for us?