APIs and Business Data: Defining Change for Your Insurance Distribution Management

Often, as carriers and agencies embark on significant changes to their infrastructure, it’s out of a sense of dissatisfaction with their current processes. But, when you’re stuck in a rut with your insurance distribution data, your producer compliance, or your partner onboarding, it can be difficult to envision a realistic (better) future state.

Sure, we’d all love to have a process where the DRLP of your preferred downstream partner high fives you, and like magic their information’s in your system, their agents are appointed, the contracts are signed, and you have complete visibility into their downstream partnerships. MAGIC.

That version of a future-state doesn’t actually exist. It’s not possible (yet). But part of change management is about setting expectations that are realistic. If your current processes are unsustainable, you need to decide what changes are necessary, and where your “dealbreakers” are. 

Change management and your criteria for “better”

Are you willing to change your process? I.e. change starts from within

One massive question to ask yourself before you embark on an overhaul of your distribution management is whether you can accept your role and any limitations in your organization’s ability to change.

Some carriers struggle when they’re vetting potential partners to help them make their ideal changes because they’ve become entrenched in how they do things now. They want to take the same process they’ve built over decades and make it faster, or digitize it, but essentially they want the process, their onboarding forms, appointment process, data collection, etc. to remain unchanged.

So, as you define change for your organization, what are you willing to relinquish to achieve your better vision? What are you willing to change?

If your business architecture is so rigid that organizational change is nearly impossible, that’s going to be a serious factor in pursuing a better way of doing business.

How APIs could improve your distribution management

Regardless of your future state vision, accessing accurate data when and where you need it is crucial to achieving that vision. That’s where integrating APIs through your tech stack becomes essential.

Let’s explore how APIs can affect some of the most prominent factors of a “better” state for your distribution management:

• Data quality
• Frequency of data updates
• Where data is available
• Maintenance
• Contextualization

Data quality and your change management

What’s the current state of your data? Do you have a high degree of confidence in it at any given moment?

Part of envisioning a better future is to evaluate your current infrastructure. What’s the current quality of your data? How often does bad data quality – license information, addresses, matching names, accurate lines of authority, etc. – upset your teams’ workflows? It can be hard to put firm numbers on this, but don’t rely on a gut estimation. Consider an audit. Ask your team to track how often a task is slowed, derailed, or incomplete because of dirty data or having to verify the information in an account.

APIs can elevate your data quality by synchronizing your existing tech, where your data lives, with industry sources of truth. Instead of relying on manual data verification, APIs automatically synchronize your data, ensuring it’s perpetually accurate and useful.

Frequency of data updates in producer management

Carriers and agencies have different cadences for updating their data, often dependent on whether they rely on manual processes or whether they have a vendor that handles distribution management data for them. Some businesses handling this manually have a process to update data on a quarterly basis – hardly ideal. However, the options for manual distribution management are dwindling as old standards such as the National Insurance Producer Registry’s (NIPR) Company Specific Report (CRD) is reaching retirement. 

Even those already using vendors in this space often report pulling data on a monthly or weekly basis. This still leaves weeks of potential gaps in accurate data, allowing for inaccurate onboarding, commission clawbacks, and opaque producer license and appointment data to complicate a host of distribution processes.

By leveraging APIs, you can insist on data synchronization that happens daily, for near-real-time accuracy surfaced in your system. At this point, daily data accuracy is the gold standard. So, evaluate how frequently your data is updated and consider how often you would like it to be so.

Your architecture + your data

In deciding where you’d like your data to live, your organization’s change management comes into play in a serious way. This is where you may be most tempted to simply put API-driven, up-to-date data wherever you’ve always put it. Perhaps that means dumping it into your existing client relationship management (CRM) platform. If you’ve been swimming against the stream of dirty data, even a basic API synch that puts accurate data in your CRM is better than what you’ve had.

Yet, if your business architecture’s flexible enough to sustain more significant changes, imagine where you could put your producer and distribution data. 

What if you could surface licensing data in your commission payment system? Or attach line of authority data to the information in your policy admin system? What if you could view what other appointments your producers had, outside of your own distribution relationships? 

Accessing clean, accurate data where and when you need it can net results as simple as ensuring policies are sold in perfect compliance, or as complex as yielding business data that directs you to unplumbed lines of business and new territories to conquer.

Yet, even with APIs, it takes work to support these integrations. So instead of being the kid in a candy store whose eyes are bigger than their stomach, make deliberate time to decide, where it’s essential to have distribution data, and where it’s a nice to have. No one wants to overextend themselves and their tech abilities, but neither do you want to neglect the basics that could transform your business into a lean, mean, policy sales machine.

The demands of maintenance

One factor for how you intend to solve your distribution management dilemma is going to be how much time and effort you put into maintaining the data or infrastructure you use. If you work purely off a system of alerts from the national Producer Database (PDB) and manually input the data, that’s still a lot of manual work to maintain data.

Any solution you use for compliance, onboarding, or other distribution management will require some degree of maintenance. That’s reality. But, particularly if you’re working with bespoke systems that you want to feed your data into, you need to ask yourself how much time you want to spend on maintaining the data vs. maintaining your infrastructure. 

By leveraging APIs that derive data from sources of truth, you can virtually eliminate the need for ongoing data maintenance. Instead, you can work on making the most of the tech infrastructure that drives your company’s core business processes.

Contextualizing data

Part of maintenance is ensuring the data you source is usable. Having virtual reams of numbers and feeds of names and addresses isn’t beneficial if your team doesn’t know what to do with them once they’ve got them.

Data context works on a sliding scale with your team’s internal knowledge and training. If your staff has  robust internal training for imparting and retaining industry knowledge, and you’ve dedicated many human resources to staying current with state laws and regulatory trends, then you need less contextualization for your data. But if your team has higher turnover or simply fewer resources to devote to learning about how each state handles licensing, appointments, affiliations, hierarchies, commissions and fees, etc., then having a data feed that gives you more context will be a significant part of your search. 

So, as part of your initiative to move to “better,” and when evaluating what specific APIs to use to feed data into your system, part of your consideration will need to be where your Goldilocks spot is for the intersection of internal knowledge and contextualized data.

Find your better state with AgentSync APIs

If you’ve done the work with your stakeholders to determine what “better” looks like and to what extent the change management processes at your company can handle the transition, it’s time to find your path forward. 

At AgentSync, we’ve built our cloud-native distribution management software with an API core, and now offer our ProducerSync API as a standalone product for businesses looking to stream accurate, up-to-date data from the industry source of truth through their existing systems for purpose-built use cases.Simplify your business with better data. Find your better state with AgentSync. Learn more about how the ProducerSync API is transforming distribution management today.