Jetty + AgentSync AutoPilot

Jetty is the financial services platform on a mission to make renting a home more affordable and flexible. To do this, Jetty provides a suite of products designed to improve the financial lives of renters and their property managers. Despite not being a traditional insurance company, Jetty still works within the complex, state-by-state insurance regulatory framework. 

This means keeping up on producer licensing across the 50 U.S. states where Jetty does business. Even though Jetty’s insurance team is small, the amount of work it took to keep on top of licenses was surprisingly large. Or, perhaps not surprising, for those familiar with the intricacies of what it takes to get and keep a producer ready to sell in one state, all the more so in 50. 

After Jetty lost a key licensee, which led to a producer compliance fire drill, Jetty’s VP of Financial Products, Kylie Gauthier jumped into action to find a better way. 

With the help of AgentSync, Jetty has: 

• Saved money by eliminating the need for consultants and contractors to manage producer license maintenance
• Given two full-time employees on the compliance team about 25 percent of their time back to focus on higher-impact compliance needs
• Reduced by 50 percent the time needed to update their Designated Responsible Licensed Producers (DRLP) across all products and states, from a month to just two weeks
• Lowered risk and increased peace of mind for employees and leaders across the company

“Compliance departments can often be a blocker to the business if they can’t operate at the same speed as the rest of the organization. With AgentSync, my team is more efficient and leadership has visibility into what the team is managing without needing a full compliance team dedicated just to licensing.” 

Kylie Gauthier, VP Financial Products, Jetty

A lean team with oversized outsourcing 

Jetty is an insurtech startup managing general agency (MGA) specializing in products that make renting more affordable while protecting property owners from financial risks. Using innovative technology, which it builds in-house, Jetty sells renters insurance along with surety bonds that replace the need for cash security deposits. 

Like most tech startups, Jetty runs a lean business with an emphasis on operational and product engineering roles. But, par for the course in the insurance and financial services industries, Jetty still needs a buttoned-up compliance team to ensure its products and people are working within state and federal regulations. Enter: third-party contractors and consultants. 

With the help of multiple contractors, Jetty managed to keep its handful of producers licensed and up-to-date in all 50 states. But doing so wasn’t quick, easy, cost effective, or foolproof. As Kylie Gauthier, Jetty’s VP of Financial Products who oversees compliance, said, “It was a fully manual process. We had consultants with some expertise we could tap into, but we also had to just trust that they were monitoring things on a regular basis and that they were proactively reaching out to us when we needed to do something like renew or update a license. We spent a lot of time internally reconciling to make sure we were on the same page.”

Despite all that work on both sides, keeping everyone on the same page proved more difficult than Gauthier would’ve liked. Just managing the outside consultants, including responding to their emails and reconciling their records with Jetty’s internal ones, took two members of her compliance team about 25 percent of their time. Even then, Gauthier worried there still might be issues or errors to catch, so she spent her own time staying in the loop to make sure that wasn’t the case.

“As a tech startup, things move really fast. I need my Compliance team to be working with our Product and Engineering teams in lock step as we build new products to make sure that we’re covered from a compliance perspective on all things. But if they’re spending so much time in the weeds doing things like managing producer licenses, that creates other potential areas of risk for Jetty.”

Kylie Gauthier, VP Financial Products, Jetty

The pitfalls of PDFs 

“As an MGA, Jetty’s lifeblood is our ability to sell.” Gauthier said, “So, anything that could potentially inhibit that ability in any state, on any given day, has real impacts.” What that means in concrete terms is that Jetty needed to be a hundred percent certain that there were no gaps in its producer licenses that would require the company to “turn off the application flow,” effectively hitting pause on a fast-moving sales pipeline. 

Unfortunately, without an automated compliance solution, there was more risk in the producer licensing management process than Gauthier wanted. While everyone on Gauthier’s compliance team and the external consultants were doing the best they could, there were always the inevitable hiccups, like a vital piece of information getting lost in a long email chain or an attachment disappearing from an exchange. 

Another big concern with Jetty’s methods before AgentSync was that with everything living in email, there wasn’t a single source of truth for staff to refer back to. If someone left the company, Gauthier and her team were left combing through the former employee’s inbox and piecing together a task’s status and what was still needed. The amount of effort this took, and the level of risk if something were to fall through the cracks, simply wasn’t sustainable.

“We had some outside consultants who could help us with license maintenance but it was an extremely manual process. For something as simple as a change of address, for example, they would send over an e-mail with 50 PDFs that we had to individually execute and sign and send back.”

Kylie Gauthier, VP Financial Products, Jetty

A manual process tipping point

While no one involved in Jetty’s producer license compliance process prior to getting AgentSync would have said it was efficient or easy, it was the type of headache everyone became accustomed to and just assumed was part of “business as usual.” This all changed, however, when a long-time Jetty employee who held a lot of licenses as Jetty’s Designated Responsible Licensed Producer (DRLP), decided to leave the company. 

This set into motion what Gauthier described as a “producer licensing fire drill” as the internal team frantically worked with their outsourced consultants to get a new DRLP in place for every line of business in every state before their old one departed. It was all hands on deck and took an entire month of hard work to accomplish. This transition shined a spotlight on exactly how difficult, time-consuming, and risky Jetty’s license maintenance practices could be if anyone made a mistake or oversight. 

“The producer piece is both the most important and the most high-risk side of the equation for us,” Gauthier said. “Any way that we can derisk that is super valuable to the company.” With leadership now having a firsthand view of the potential risks of manual producer license management, the time was right for Gauthier to propose a new solution.

“We were functioning in a way that I felt was reactive instead of proactive. We would get alerted by states or carrier partners that something was missing, and we’d fix it. As a leader, I really wanted my team to be fully in control of monitoring and auditing license compliance so we had full visibility and we were the ones driving it, not just reacting.” 

Kylie Gauthier, VP Financial Products, Jetty

Investing in an expert (and automated) partner

By this point, Jetty’s challenges were clear: managing producer licenses across all 50 states was taking up too much time, costing too much money, and leaving Jetty open to too many potential areas of risk. That’s when partnering with AgentSync became an obvious solution. And, Gauthier says, it wasn’t difficult to make the business case. 

On top of implementing AgentSync Manage to streamline and automate producer license management, Jetty also decided to take advantage of AgentSync’s Autopilot service for an even greater level of support and expertise. With the Autopilot team, Jetty’s internal compliance staff were relieved of the tedious and time-consuming tasks they’d previously had to do to stay on top of producer licenses, even with a team of outside consultants.

“AgentSync empowers us with additional expertise that we can tap into. It’s a team you can lean on and leverage for areas where you might not be an expert, and that enables our team to take on more. It makes tedious business-as-usual tasks a smaller part of their day, while at the same time reducing risk to the company overall.”

Kylie Gauthier, VP Financial Products, Jetty

The partnership faced its first real test when, once again, Jetty’s primary DRLP left the company. Unlike the compliance fire drill they’d previously experienced, the process of transferring DRLP status to a new producer took only two weeks and virtually no effort on Gauthier and her team’s part. 

Benefits at every level 

Unlike hiring multiple third-party consultants to help with Jetty’s producer license management and compliance duties, partnering with AgentSync actually reduced Jetty’s hard costs, lowered compliance risks, and gave Gauthier peace of mind that everything’s under control (without needing to read every email!). It also benefited everyone from senior leadership to the staff, who previously spent excessive amounts of time managing producer licenses. 

“Going with AgentSync and Autopilot has been huge for my compliance analyst,” Gauthier said. “Because we have the Autopilot team’s expertise to draw on, she doesn’t have to be an expert in all things across all states. Not having to worry about the minute details of producer licenses means she’s been able to take on more responsibilities and manage even more compliance duties across the company.” 

On top of that, AgentSync provides Jetty’s agents across the organization with a more seamless experience since Jetty can now point them to a customized portal where they can view and fill in their own information and get real-time visibility into their own license statuses. No more emails, no more paper chases; just a one-stop shop for producers to view and edit everything related to their numerous state licenses. 

At the executive level, Gauthier has a producer license management system she can be proud of – and Jetty’s CEO truly sees the value. “Our CEO went through the licensing process when he founded the company and knows firsthand the challenges of getting and staying licensed,” Gauthier said. “ With AgentSync, he sees that I have this on lock, and that gives him a peace of mind we simply couldn’t offer before.” 
As for Gauthier herself, one of the biggest benefits is not having to be copied on every email between her compliance team and outside contractors. Instead, she’s got all the information she needs, available when she needs it, with the assurance that it’s entirely accurate and up-to-date each time she looks.

“Having AgentSync helps me so much as the leader of the compliance organization by giving me a level of visibility into the status of anything I want to see, without needing to be looped in on every email my compliance lead sends. I can validate the current status at the end of the day, or whenever I want, just by looking at AgentSync.”

Kylie Gauthier, VP Financial Products, Jetty

How AgentSync helps Jetty

• Saves money by replacing various outside consultants and contractors with an automated, centralized system and an expert team that takes the lead on maintaining producer licenses in all 50 states
• Provides 100 percent peace of mind to Jetty’s CEO, compliance analyst, and everyone in between
• De-risks the producer license management process, so Jetty never has to wonder if a license hiccup will get in the way of a sale
• Allows Jetty’s compliance team to move as quickly as the rest of the business, meaning compliance never competes with growth and other business goals