Between the retail agent and the market

A submission arrives in whatever shape the retail agent's office produced it. It then has to go out to several markets, each with its own idea of what a complete submission looks like.

Which markets, how to structure it and what to lead with are your judgement and your relationships. The work in between is reading, rekeying and chasing, and it scales with the number of submissions rather than with anything you are paid for.

What arrives, and what you have to build from it

Retail agents do not converge on a format. One sends an ACORD and a clean schedule, one sends a spreadsheet built for a purpose that was not insurance, one sends the terms in the body of an email and the rest as photographs of paperwork. None of them is being difficult. It is just what their office produces.

SnapLine reads the bundle as it arrives — the email body, the PDF, the Excel across its tabs and its versions, the scan, the photograph — and returns one structured record. Open any field and you see the region of the document it was read from.

What you assemble the market submission from is then the same shape every time, whoever sent it in.

Where it comes from
Retail flowRetail agents
Wholesale flowWholesale brokers
Program businessIn the format the program administrator settled on years ago
An acquired bookNever fully migrated, still arriving its own way
One intake

Triaged in the underwriter’s own Outlook inbox: the email body, the PDF, the Excel schedule across its tabs and versions, the scan, the photograph.

Out of it, one structured record, with the source document kept for each value read.

Binding deskNeeds the record complete enough to decide inside the authority, and fast enough to stay competitive on response time.
Brokerage deskNeeds the exceptions surfaced, because on this desk the exceptions are the whole file.
Both desks

Missing information routes to the outreach view, so a chase back to the broker is a workflow step. A field that is absent stays marked absent.

Four routes, one intake, two desks. The formats do not converge on their own; the record is where they converge.

The gaps, while you can still do something about them

An incomplete pack comes back from the carrier, and the time lost is not theirs. It is yours, and it is lost after you have already done the work of putting the submission together.

Absence is treated as information rather than filled in from something nearby that looked plausible. A missing year built stays missing and says so. What is open routes into an outreach view, so going back to the retail agent is a workflow step rather than a note to yourself: everything outstanding goes in one message instead of three, and the reply and its attachments are matched back to the submission without anyone filing them.

A drafted email to the broker listing the three outstanding items, with the submission's open items on the left and a note that the reply and its attachments will be matched back to the submission automatically.
One email, every open item, and the reply lands back on the submission. Illustrative data throughout: the insured, broker and carrier are invented.

Read once, not once per market

The same risk goes to several markets, and the reading does not need to happen several times. The record is built once from the documents that arrived, and it is the same record whichever market the submission goes to next.

That is a statement about the reading, not about the placing. SnapLine does not decide where a risk should go, does not produce a market-specific submission for you, and has no view on appetite. It takes the part that is repetition off the front of the job.

If you also carry a binding authority

Many wholesale operations run a binding desk alongside the brokerage one, and the two want different things from the same documents. A brokerage desk needs the exceptions surfaced, because the exceptions are the whole file. A binding desk needs the record complete enough to make a decision inside the authority, and fast enough to stay competitive on response time.

Both run on the same intake. The binding side is covered properly on the US specialty MGAs page, and delegated authority reporting on the bordereaux page.

Where this is running

SnapLine is in production at a US wholesale operation, on live submissions, under a commercial contract. That business runs both a brokerage desk and a binding desk, which is why it appears on this page and on the MGA page — it is one customer, not two. We are not going to name them, and we are not going to offer you a reference call we have not been given permission to offer.

SnapLine was built inside Probitas, a Lloyd’s syndicate, against the submissions that syndicate receives. Neither Probitas nor Lloyd’s endorses SnapLine.

Bring three submissions from three different agents

Not three from your tidiest one. The point of the exercise is whether it survives the range of formats you actually receive, and that only shows up across agents.

Five sample submissions come pre-loaded in the demo and up to three of your own can go in alongside them. After that, a fixed-scope Proof of Value runs across twenty of your live submissions and ends in a written report.

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