What Bevel holds back, and why

The first version of Bevel that issued a certificate did it in about forty lines of code. Read the email, find the policy, fill the form, send. It worked on the first try, and it was useless, because nobody who carries errors-and-omissions insurance should let that anywhere near a holder.

The hard part of this product has never been sending things. It is deciding what not to send. We hold back four kinds of run, and I want to explain each one, because the list is the product.

1. A holder we have never seen

If a certificate is requested for a holder that is not already on the account, and we cannot match the name to one that is, the run waits for a person. New holders are where the mistakes live: the legal name differs from the name in the email, or there are two entities at one address, or the “holder” is really asking to be an additional insured and has not said so.

After a person approves a holder once, it is known. The next request for the same holder goes straight through.

2. Wording the policy does not support

Additional insured, waiver of subrogation, primary and non-contributory. Each of those is a promise about what the policy says. Bevel checks the endorsement schedule on the policy before it puts any of them on a certificate. If the endorsement is not there, the certificate is not issued with that wording, and the CSR sees exactly which form is missing.

This is the rule agencies thank us for most. It is also the one that generates the most held runs, about 4% of all certificate requests, because holders routinely ask for more than the insured has bought.

3. A limit above the policy

If a holder asks for $2,000,000 per occurrence and the policy carries $1,000,000, there is no certificate to issue. There is a conversation to have with the insured about an umbrella. Bevel holds the run, notes the gap, and gets out of the way.

4. A renewal that moves more than 10%

Renewals are re-rated 45 days out. If the new premium is within 10% of the expiring one and the schedule has not changed, the renewal is queued for the carrier. If it moves more than that in either direction, a person looks first, with the old and new schedules side by side.

Ten percent is not a magic number. We picked it by looking at eight months of renewals and asking where account managers started wanting to call the insured before anything else happened. You can lower it per carrier. You cannot raise it.

Held means held

A held run sits in Needs review. It is not sent to the carrier with a flag on it, and it is not sent after a timeout. It stays where it is until a named person approves or rejects it, and either way the decision and the reason go in the audit log.

The same thinking is behind review mode itself. Every operation starts there for every carrier. A CSR approves each run until there have been 25 clean ones in a row, and a single rejection takes the count back to zero. People sometimes ask why 25 and not 10. Ten clean runs can happen by Tuesday afternoon. Twenty-five takes most agencies about two weeks, which is long enough to meet an odd one.

We would rather hold a hundred runs that were fine than send one that was not.

Across 212 agencies, 11,406 certificates have gone out without a person touching them. The number I watch more closely is the one beside it: certificates corrected after the fact. I will write about that one when it stops being zero.