The Case for Insurance Compliance as a Growth Opportunity

This post is part of a series sponsored by AgentSync.

Many insurance organizations see compliance as a challenge to growth, a shackle that keeps them from going too far too fast. But what if, instead, your compliance mechanism was a chamber, giving your rocket-like growth a directionality and creating much-needed thrust to boot?

Although compliance may seem an unlikely organizational superpower, we’ve seen the ways a digital transformation of insurance compliance can support business growth.

Compliance as an innovation

Data-driven transformations of the regulatory environment are inevitable as consumer pressures and needs meet modern technological tools. From the movements around social justice, climate change, and general consumer protections to rising issues regarding digital identity protection, increased compliance with existing insurance regulations is sure to be a part of the answer insurance businesses have for such complex and numerous questions.

One of the many advantages to automating insurance compliance through smart integrations is that it frees up employee time, allowing them to focus on building out technical knowledge in the industry. By lessening their time spent on repetitive administrative tasks, they can commit their skills and knowledge to more tailored client engagements.

This also means that, through modernizing and digitizing these processes, compliance tools can give new employees – people who don’t “speak insurance” – access to a simplified dashboard for viewing data and analytics. Instead of spending weeks training industry newcomers over highly specialized terminology and walking through how to access numerous legacy systems and individual state portals, the right compliance tools can have new employees ramped up and engaged in your core mission from Day One.

Obviously, as we’ve covered extensively elsewhere, an efficient license compliance management system can streamline your agent onboarding process through a number of integrations and digital automations. This not only ends the annoying cycle of endlessly re-keying information for both producers and employees; it also gets agents onboarded and selling faster.

Your company’s reputation for innovation can only be enhanced by compliance automation – being easy to work with makes you a juicy find for good agents, and an excellent referral for prospects. That in turn drives producer loyalty, leading you to a pipeline that is set for growth.

Lower risk across the board

By modernising risk management, you can hit a number of strategic business goals that all align for a promising future of growth:

• Proactively protecting your producers makes you attractive to work with.
• Anticipating regulatory changes keeps you from slowing down your business to react to new legislations or legal interpretations.
• Reputation management is expensive – ensuring compliance lessens your “headline risk,” or the risk that a Google search of your business name turns up unsavory associations.
• An advanced analytics solution to your compliance management and administration means lessening the risk of manual errors from a single employee or small group.
• Robust digital tools also allow you to quickly comply with any regulatory reporting requirements, such as appointment lists or audits without interrupting your flow of business or user experience.

Unfortunately, agencies, carriers, and MGAs often operate without a good understanding of their compliance obligations or their risks. For instance, the MGA Act outlines the duties and responsibilities of Managing General Agencies, and explicitly states that MGAs must appoint agents and take responsibility for ensuring they operate within the scope of their license.

Because many states’ regulators don’t conduct regular audits, many in the industry believe they can fly under the radar or just don’t know their responsibilities and are flying under radar. Yet, once an entity draws the attention of a regulator for even a minor complaint, the floodgates open if they’ve failed to adhere to basic compliance responsibilities.

By maintaining a resilient risk-management framework, you are raising the bar and ethically doing your best for your producers and, in turn, their clients. And, critically, you’re protecting the reputation and bottom line of your business, too.

Grow grow grow

Traditional licensing compliance maintenance practices often feel like deadweight – heightened compliance monitoring in older contexts equates to manpower. It means every level of new producers or agencies requires a corresponding number of compliance personnel. Frankly, in an age where it’s difficult to attract and retain talent in the insurance industry, this pyramid-shaped growth is an impossible shape to maintain.

Streamlining existing compliance processes is a growth proposition partly because it gives your organization scalability without adding to the stress of your systems – and, more importantly, the people in them. As discussions of corporate responsibility and increased industrial scrutiny dominate headlines, having a demonstrable commitment to modern compliance is an extreme value proposition.

Additionally, enforcing compliance doesn’t have to be all stick and no carrot – easy access to understanding where and under what lines of authority your agents are licensed can also give you an easy view to what opportunities you’re missing. Using data-driven compliance measures to recognize areas that are ripe for growth, you can help expand the businesses that feed into your funnel, which grows your piece of the pie with very little effort.

If you’re interested in seeing specifically how AgentSync can help you turn your license management into your secret weapon for growth, check out a demo.