How to Overcome Bordereaux Reporting Challenges

Since the 1880’s when Lloyds of London wrote its first reinsurance policy, the use of bordereaux reports has been to report policy, cash and eventually claim transactions from the agents/brokers conducting business “on behalf of” the underwriters/reinsurers who are ultimately responsible for the risk.
Despite replacing the original manual report generation by applying modern technologies to generate and deliver bordereaux reports, efficient and accurate bordereaux file processing has remained elusive in the insurance industry.
A significant challenge has been how data is both cumulated and absorbed in the value chain.  MGA/MGUs struggle to get data from existing solutions into formats suitable for their multiple carriers, and carriers have difficulty efficiently and accurately absorbing the report data to transform it into “actionable data”.  Whether it’s determining how much premium is due, or what claims are being paid, the actual creation, distribution and absorption of data via bordereaux files still remains a manually intensive process.
While the insurance industry has made great strides in defining standardized data sets to be used by trading partners, the adoption of these data sets has been slow.  Even when standardized formats for reporting are used, the issue of data disparity still exists.  Most of the stakeholders in this data-sharing scenario, have not fully implemented standardized data standards in their internal systems. The reasons are varied, with often cited factors being the high cost and effort required to updating existing and functioning systems.
Whether it’s a Microsoft Excel file, a CSV file or a database, the ideal systems are capable of quickly and easily mapping and converting the data to a normalized data standard and format.  Companies might consider defining and managing new solutions to support this need.
For example, pre-defined business rules can assist in converting the data without the high costs of IT and data migration specialists, resulting in a much quicker turn-around time from the point a new bordereaux file format is created until the data is usable by the receiver.

Conclusion

While bordereaux reporting has long been a challenge for insurers, today’s modern technologies offer new tools and methods to streamline and finally tackle the bordereaux reporting conundrum.