Lessons learned from 2.5 million policy matches

· Doug Hudgeon

Key Takeaways

  • Two and a half million broker payments matched. The whole lesson is four moves in order: automate the AR, get the closings, split attention by who can fix it, and hand over everything in suspense.
  • Matching is solved. 97.6% of broker payments clear without a human keystroke, so what’s left isn’t data entry — it’s money that hasn’t shown up yet.
  • Of the 12,377 outstanding premiums that cleared last month, the median took 56 days to pay from the policy’s effective date. 37% blew past the 60-day term, and 29% were still outstanding more than two weeks after that.
  • 13,971 outstanding premiums worth about $41.9M are more than 15 days past due right now — roughly one in five of everything outstanding. That’s a chasing workload you fix with a schedule, not with effort.
  • 57% of suspense is brokers paying the wrong amount against a premium already on the books. Every one of those is a discrepancy a closing advice would have caught before a cent moved.
  • The other 43% is a payment for a policy with no premium raised. That’s an underwriting job — the second the premium exists, the payment matches itself.
  • An open suspense item clears in a median of 8 days, and only 10 across the books are older than 30. The digging is the hold-up, not the decision.

We’ve now matched two and a half million broker payments to insurance policies across the books we manage. This is the short version of what we’d tell any underwriting finance team to do with that experience: the prescription first, then the numbers behind it.

Matching is solved. 97.6% of broker payments match to open policies automatically. What doesn’t match falls into two buckets:

  • Just over half the time — 57% — the broker has paid the wrong amount: a missing policy fee, the wrong stamp duty, a short payment with no explanation.
  • The rest — 43% — the policy isn’t yet bound in your underwriting system. No outstanding premium to match against.

The prescription below is how you handle both.

The prescription

Four moves, in order. The order matters — each one shrinks the work the next one has to do.

  • Automate the AR. Match payments on arrival, chase overdue brokers on a schedule. If a person is keying remittances or chasing from memory, the suspense items pile up faster than anyone can clear them.
  • Get the closings. Read every closing advice the day it lands, not the day the money does. It’s the one move that prevents work instead of mopping it up — you catch a wrong amount while the broker still has the file open and no cash has moved.
  • In attention, split the queue by who can fix it. A payment with no premium raised behind it is an underwriting job — have the underwriter raise it and the payment matches itself. A payment that needs the broker to explain something goes to suspense. Two problems, two owners. Don’t let them mix.
  • In suspense, hand over everything. One email per policy, every line laid out, addressed to the right human at the broker or the underwriter, with the full history a click away. The faster the other side sees what you see, the faster it clears.

The evidence

The numbers below are aggregates across the live customer books we manage — demo and mid-onboarding accounts excluded, amounts approximate and mostly AUD, pulled in late May 2026.

The matching is solved. The waiting is the job. 97.6% of broker payments clear without a human keystroke — so what’s left isn’t data entry, it’s money that hasn’t shown up yet. Of the 12,377 outstanding premiums that cleared last month, the median one took 56 days to pay from the policy’s effective date — right up against the 60-day term — 37% blew past it, and 29% were still outstanding more than two weeks after that. Your cash sits on a broker’s ledger for the better part of two months. And the standing backlog doesn’t shrink on its own: 13,971 outstanding premiums worth about $41.9M are more than 15 days past due right now, roughly one in five of everything outstanding. That’s not a problem you fix with effort. It’s a chasing workload you fix with a schedule.

Closings are the cheapest place to catch a problem. Of every payment line stuck in suspense across the books today, 57% are brokers paying the wrong amount against an outstanding premium already on the books. Every one of those is a discrepancy a closing advice would have caught before a cent moved. Read the closing the day it lands and more than half your suspense never happens.

The rest is premiums nobody has raised, and that’s an underwriting job. The other 43% of suspense is a payment for a policy with no premium raised. The underwriter raises it; the second it exists, the payment matches itself. Here’s the part finance teams talk themselves out of: raising those premiums after the fact is no less efficient than doing it up front — the work is identical. The only thing you lose by doing it late is the reporting. Which is exactly why attention should route these to the underwriter the same day.

Hand over the whole picture and suspense moves. Across the books, an open suspense item clears in a median of 8 days — only 10 in total are older than 30 days. The decision is the easy part once you can see everything. The hold-up is the digging: which receipts, which premiums, which closing, short by how much. Put all of it in one email and the broker can answer in a single sitting.

What we’ve been shipping

Around the 2.5-million mark we released broker identification — the piece that works out who to actually email. It reads the correspondence, not just the sender field, to find the person handling the policy. It demotes the impostors — payee addresses, no-reply relays, role inboxes like accounts@ — below every real human. And it shows its work, with a one-click override that teaches it to rank better next time.

It landed alongside a set of connected releases: editable policy numbers, a single reconciliation email per policy (every receipt, outstanding premium, and closing in one message, addressed to the contact identification just found), the policy dossier, a searchable allocation history, and posting events on the timeline.

They shipped together because they’re one idea. You can’t address a broker you can’t identify, can’t use the reply if it isn’t tied to the line, can’t trust the line without a clean policy number, and can’t prove any of it without a history that wrote down what happened.

The newest piece is live now: every unmatched payment explains itself. The same AI that does the matching re-runs on every line the fast path can’t allocate, and writes down what happened, where the gap sits — a commission withheld on the broker’s side, a fee missing on yours, to the cent — who can fix it, and a drafted reconciliation email in your voice. Your team reads the case file and clicks send.

What’s next

The playbook comes next — a chapter on each move: how to run the AR, how to chase brokers, how to use closings to get early warning of problems, how to handle payments with no premium raised in attention, and how to handle inaccurate broker payments in suspense. We’ll sharpen each one alongside our customers.

The goal hasn’t moved since we started: an underwriting finance function that runs end to end — cash in, matched, every suspense item chased to ground, and a suspense number you can actually trust. You can already see the shape of it in the numbers: 97.6% of payments clear themselves, and the suspense that’s left is gone in a median of eight days. Two and a half million matches in, the whole lesson is four moves, done in order.

Book a demo and we’ll show you what it looks like on your data.