How Automating Compliance Management Can Help Insurance Agencies Save Money

Manual producer licensing and compliance management is not only a hassle for your agency’s compliance management team, it’s also cost heavy. Switching to a real-time, integrated, and automated compliance management solution can take the headache out of producer licensing and compliance and tip the scale from “cost-heavy” to “cost-savings.” 

For a long time, the insurance industry chugged along the “business as usual” track without a lot of change, especially when it came to technology. While some early adopters explored automated solutions pre-2020, the pandemic caused a seismic shift in the way insurance agencies leverage technological solutions in their business processes. 

The pressure to adapt to modern challenges, along with the realization that legacy technology may be doing more harm than good, has launched the insurance industry into a technological reckoning as organizations search for modern solutions to address modern challenges. As agencies navigate industry changes and search for new ways to optimize their processes and realize cost-savings, they may want to update their tech stack to include integrated and automated solutions. 

As with any major change, overhauling legacy systems and introducing new technology into traditional business processes can come with a lot of uncertainty. How much time, money, and resources will this take? 

Making such a big change is daunting, and we understand why some agencies choose to put it off for so long. But how much business does your agency lose to inefficient manual workflows in the meantime? Pairing automated compliance management tools with human expertise can reduce pain points for employees and save insurance agencies money.

Manual producer licensing management is no small task

Producer licensing can be a sharp thorn in the side of any agency still managing the process by hand. Manually keeping track of multiple producers is hard enough, but once you add managing producers working across multiple lines of authority (LOA) and in multiple different states, the process becomes even more complex and time-consuming.

Just think of the numerous components a single producer requires tracking for: licenses for each LOA, carrier appointments, continuing education, background information, employment history, address information – just to name a few! Staying on top of it all requires thousands of manual hours. Hours that only multiply when an agency is growing and constantly in the process of onboarding new producers. 

The difficulty of keeping up with producer licensing can lead agencies to avoid the task entirely. That is, until they are slapped in the face with compliance audits. Even the agencies that do manage to stay on top of manual producer licensing face costly delays and missed deadlines as a result of human error. 

How the pain of manual producer licensing and compliance can cost an agency

Not only is manual producer licensing and compliance a hassle for the team tasked with handling it, it can also be a big cost center for an agency as a whole. For starters, just think about the extra labor costs associated with manual producer licensing. No matter which team the task falls on, repeat data entry, paperwork, and keeping up with ever-changing regulatory requirements is not the best use of anyone’s time. And we all know that time = money!

Then there’s the cost of human error. Not only are manual, repetitive tasks a poor use of employee talent and expertise. They’re also rife with human error and mistakes. A typo or missed deadline may not seem like a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but in some cases human error can be a serious time- and money suck for an agency.  

How automating compliance management can create cost savings

An automated compliance management solution can help reduce many of the costs associated with manual producer licensing processes by eliminating compliance-related complexity in your workflows. There are four major buckets these cost-savings can fall into: creating a seamless producer onboarding experience, reducing manual, low-value activities, eliminating unstructured data, and ensuring agents are properly credentialed.

Create a seamless producer onboarding experience

Agencies strive to build a frictionless and modern producer experience by getting agents licensed and ready-to-sell as quickly and efficiently as possible. An automated compliance management solution can streamline the onboarding processes and get your producers ready to sell in minutes rather than days or weeks, helping save money in a major way by:

Reducing recruiting costs – If your producer onboarding process is slow, inefficient, and full of manual data entry, you might have a harder time retaining employees who are looking for a more modern experience than you’re offering. And if you haven’t heard, the insurance industry is in the middle of a talent crisis, so keeping your current producers happy is probably in your best interest. Automating your producer onboarding and license compliance can fast track the entire process leaving your agents satisfied and ready to sell much sooner.

Reduce manual, low-value activities

Stop paying your people for time-consuming tasks like manual data entry. We’re not talking about replacing your people with an automated solution; we’re talking about using technology to enable your team to stop entering and re-entering the same data and start focusing on more high value work. Turn to modern insurance infrastructure to reduce the costs associated with manual work including:

Wasted human effort that is also prone to error – The more human hands you have in your workflows, the more prone to costly human error, oversights, and mistakes your organization is. Taking your talent out of repetitive tasks like data entry with the help of automation not only reduces your risk of human error but also allows employees to get back to more revenue-generating tasks like supporting sales and agent retention.

Eliminate unstructured data 

Emails, spreadsheets, paper files. These types of unstructured data are common in manual processes and have a couple major drawbacks. When insurance agencies modernize their own infrastructure, they reap benefits without any additional cost. Eliminating unstructured data from your agency can help save money by:

Reducing security risk – unstructured data is less efficient and less accessible, often requiring large amounts of tedious digging and cross-referencing to find the data you’re looking for. Plus, inconsistencies between data formats make it easier for hackers to access your data and cause costly security breaches. With an automated compliance management solution, you can wave goodbye to spreadsheets and paper files and the security risks they carry.

Gain full visibility into your organization – With a full 360-degree view of which producers are licensed and ready to sell, you can gain full transparency into the status of each of your producers and instantly expand into new geographies without additional compliance risk or cost.

Ensure agents are properly licensed

Reduce your risk of costly compliance violations. AgentSync’s integrated and automated compliance management solution bakes state-by-state requirements directly into your agency’s workflows, helping you achieve more accurate and timely submissions by doing the following: 

Integrating compliance checks directly into automated workflows – Imagine having effortless compliance verification before, during, and after a producer sells. Built-in compliance checks give you peace of mind that you’re doing everything you can to avoid the financial and legal costs of compliance missteps.  

Automating ongoing compliance checks with an electronic “paper trail” – Your compliance process may be automated, but that doesn’t mean it’s a black hole your team can’t look into. Automating compliance should include automatically creating records you can audit. You’ll minimize human touches while also ensuring accuracy and the ability to verify compliance any time you want to look. 

Compliance management is complex, but it doesn’t have to be costly

Adding automation into your compliance management process can enable your agency to reach new levels of efficiency, productivity, growth, and even profitability. By taking employees out of manual, repetitive processes with an automated compliance management solution, you can eliminate key pain points in the producer onboarding and licensing process and reduce the chances of costly oversights and compliance violations.

When it comes to introducing automated solutions to your agency, compliance management is just the beginning. If you’re ready to tip the scales of your organization’s manual processes from cost-heavy to cost-saving by baking automation into every workflow, see how AgentSync can help!

Key Takeaways

• The pain points of manual compliance management 
• How these pain points ultimately cost agencies time and money
• How switching to a real-time, integrated, and automated compliance management solution (aka AgentSync) can provide agency cost savings