9 Reasons Insurance Agencies and Carriers Prefer AgentSync to DIY Compliance Software

We’ve become the vendor of choice for businesses that, candidly, tried it themselves.

Sometimes they had a third party that did compliance for them, and the manual nature of it was disillusioning. Sometimes they had a vendor that provided a software solution and they thought they could do better with a bit of effort. Sometimes it just seemed easier to try an internal compliance tech solution than to spend one more day on a spreadsheet and three state websites.

Regardless of why, we meet with carriers and agencies every month that have spent multiple years and millions of dollars on homegrown tech solutions. But they reached “full implementation” only to find their software didn’t have enough logic built in to be useful to the team, or it didn’t have long-term support, or they simply underestimated the need for internal documentation. 

If this is you—if you’re the Head of Ops or CTO trying to figure out how to explain to your board that, despite the years of effort and money spent to build an internal system that can manage and submit licenses or appointments, you’re not going live this month (or next month… or ever), know that you’re not the first. And you won’t be the last. 

But you can still save yourself time and money. Homegrown tech often appears to have a low total cost of ownership only because so many maintenance costs are hidden by the services and subscriptions of multiple opaque departments. One software maintenance company estimates that an “actively evolving” application could easily cost $50,000 per month in direct maintenance costs. Our own estimates of hidden costs say that, all told, companies may be spending more than a million dollars a year on tech and people resources for their producer compliance and licensing management.

Perhaps you’re proud of your homegrown system, and it’s reliable and all you need is to saturate it with accurate data about producer licensing and appointments. If that’s the case, you should read up on our ProducerSync API. But, if you’re wondering why even insurance agencies and insurance carriers that went the DIY route eventually ended up engaging AgentSync, read on:

1. Transaction success: The standard

AgentSync customers very rarely get a “failed transaction” error. Because our data has so much robust, valuable contextual information around it, we boast a 99.66 percent success rate for our transaction submissions.

Can a producer with a property license in Arizona sell casualty policies in Indiana without taking a state exam? You don’t have to memorize this nuance—AgentSync has built the arcane rules of state lines of authority and lines of business compatibility into the system for you. The system will alert you when you’re trying to submit unallowed transactions, meaning you can save face (and those nonrefundable state fees). 

2. You got 99 problems, but a state process change ain’t one

State licensing requirements, fee changes, fingerprinting processes—does it come before the application, or after?—state rules on licensing and appointments are quite varied, and sometimes conflicting. Businesses that handle insurance appointments or licensing manually find themselves needing to invest heavily in the internal knowledge of their operations and compliance people. We’re all about industry knowledge, but sometimes that means it takes two or three years of hardcore training before your new compliance hire is fully onboarded and useful—and by then, he’s ready to hop to a different team.

By building state process changes and nuances of licensing and appointment rules into the system, AgentSync frees your staff up to do more of the things that require a human touch, like providing white-glove services to producers.

3. Interface with NIPR for state workflow changes

In 2024, 54 state changes required the National Insurance Producer Registry (NIPR) to change the workflows it painstakingly standardizes across the nuances of states and territories. Without a rich understanding of state regulations, NIPR documentation, and the practical implications of how workflow changes affect downstream processes, an internal team at a carrier or agency may find their system behind the curve. At AgentSync, our customers rest assured that we bring all those subject-matter experts together under one roof and leverage our low- and no-code platform options to build and deliver changes to their workflows accurately and on time.

4. Having a team dedicated to your success

Want an answer to your question within 24 hours? At AgentSync, our Customer Success team is on it, whether that means filing tickets on a customer’s behalf or digging in to find out if the customer team needs deeper training. You’re not alone, and you’re not lost in a neverending queue.

5. Coaching for compliance

Businesses get used to doing things the way they’ve always been done. And nowhere is that more apparent than insurance compliance. The first wave of insurtech has mostly just digitized existing processes. However, at AgentSync, our customers report they’re highly satisfied with our Account Executives who have taken the time to understand their business and make recommendations about how their processes could change to better meet their business goals. Instead of a tech implementation, it makes bringing aboard each customer a transformative experience.

6. Automated processes

Reminders you can set and forget? Renewals that submit themselves? Sales territory reports that show up in your inbox on Monday morning without a prompt?

It’s futuristic, but it’s not out of reach when you’re working with a software vendor that partners with you to find low-lift improvements that reduce your employees’ ever-increasing workload. When you’ve been working off of systems that require supporting spreadsheets, secondary software, emailed backchannels, and manual workarounds to accomplish every process, your team may get so used to “the way it is” that you lose sight of what’s possible. But when you implement compliance tech that can be fully automated, your team gets to deliver more impressive results without adding headcount or overtime.

7. Using APIs to push information to other systems

Accounting needs to run license verifications before they pay out commissions. HR wants to know if they’re onboarding employees who already have licenses. Your sales teams want to compete over who has the highest onboard rate for their recruits. This is data that’s easily available thanks to APIs, which can draw the data from AgentSync’s core product, Manage, and saturate the information across the rest of your tech stack. No longer do you need to send “Updated xx.xx.xx” XL files or endure mind-numbing data entry and copy paste work across systems—use your existing data to end silos.

8. Out-of-the-box reporting

AgentSync has the most robust out-of-the-box reporting on the market with 50+ reports standard out of the box, so you don’t have to guess at:

• What percentage of producers are in compliance?
• Which agents have active licenses in a given state?
• Which producers have an appointment with a certain carrier in a designated region?
• Which producers have regulatory actions against them?
• How many licenses are close to expiring?

By being able to run reports on your data, you can increase total organizational visibility of your efforts and prove your successes.

9. White glove? Self service? Why not both? The producer portal

By giving your producers a portal, they can maintain their own information better, which costs your team less effort and makes it easier to provide a better producer experience because everyone on your operations or compliance team can see where a producer is in the onboarding process. Cutting down on the back-and-forth paperchase also gives your producer back some control by giving them equal visibility into the process. They need simply log into their portal to view licenses or submit information like an address change—no drama required.

Distribution channel management that goes beyond compliance

While many insurance carriers and agencies turn to AgentSync because they need a license or appointment compliance solution, they end up staying for the robust distribution channel management. Certainly, AgentSync’s flagship product can transact licenses and appointments; that’s tablestakes. But distribution channel management goes beyond compliance. It makes license and compliance data your superpower with dashboards that allow you to assess your risk through your distribution partners, or that help you visualize the impact of your newest acquisition on your regional sales territory, or make you aware of untapped opportunity in a certain line of authority. 

If you’re excited to move from the hidden costs of do-it-yourself compliance tech into the business opportunities of distribution channel management, watch a demo or schedule a consultation with one of our knowledgeable operations experts today.