Insurance brokerage: a profitable sector undergoing transformation
The insurance brokerage sector continues to grow at a comfortable pace. Stable premiums and commissions have long been sufficient to preserve margins, even with sub-optimal tools, time-consuming manual processes, and an artisanal approach to managing financial flows.
But things are starting to shift. The sector is now facing converging pressures: shifting demographics, intensified competition, stricter regulatory requirements, and evolving customer expectations in the face of insurtech companies that are setting a new standard for customer experience and agility.
Financial flows, which have been long neglected, are now emerging as a strategic lever as they directly impact margins, the customer experience, and the trust insurers place in brokers.
For brokers, this means rethinking the way financial flows are captured, monitored, distributed and secured –not by adding yet another technical layer, but by aligning their financial infrastructure with the characteristics of their business and economic model.
In the sections below, we outline how reinventing flow management can help the insurance brokerage sector meet the new challenges of performance and customer experience it now faces.
Modernising subscription to improve conversion rates
Subscription is a decisive moment in the insured’s journey: it marks the start of a commitment and the first payment. Yet this critical stage often remains under-optimised.
On the one hand, the payment methods offered are scattered (credit card, bank transfer, cheque, cash) with no omnichannel logic or proactive management of failed payments, resulting in frequent drop-offs, unrecovered payments, and ultimately in an invisible but immediate loss in revenue.
On the other hand, insurtech companies have redefined subscription standards with more integrated and seamless processes. Aligning with these new standards is a key challenge for the sector, as a poorly designed subscription process – where payment and confirmation aren’t a seamless experience – weakens the broker’s brand compared to these new competitors.
1POINT6 addresses these challenges with a revenue capture module designed to increase customer satisfaction and conversion. The Pay-In Hub centralizes all payment methods into a unified experience while the Smart Retry engine automatically retries failed payment attempts under the best conditions – whether it’s postponing payment, trying a new method or contacting the insured again. The subscription and payment stage is integrated seamlessly within the overall customer journey directly into the business tool, and can be enhanced via ready-to-use APIs to adapt to the specific needs of the broker and the contract. The whole process works seamlessly for the user, reducing drop-offs, cutting down manual follow-ups, and improving performance at subscription and throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
Structuring commissions and retrocessions to secure the value chain
The management of commissions and retrocessions is at the heart of the brokerage business model, often involving several stakeholders and risk bearers.It plays a central role in partner relationships but remains largely manual and difficult to industrialise.
This lack of structure leads to payment delays, errors and disputes, which strain partner relationships and burden back-office teams with repetitive,error-prone manual tasks.
1POINT6 secures and automates this critical process with its Pay-Out module. Designed for precise, transparent and scalable commission management with fully configurable retrocession automation, it also provides centralized real-time monitoring of flows and payments.
Reducing hidden costs to protect margins
Although the insurance sector is still profitable, we are seeing an erosion of margins that could be slowed down through better management of financial flows.
Payment processing generates many hidden costs, both operational (team time and effort) and transactional (payment method fees), which eat into profitability. Without consolidated tools, brokers lack visibility into their financial flows and struggle to identify levers for optimisation. On top of these come manual and time-consuming accounting reconciliations, as well as opaque pricing models, with unclear coststhat obscure the true cost of each payment method.
1POINT6 enables brokers to regain control over these invisible costs and better protect their margins. Thanks to smart routing, each transaction is directed to the most cost-efficient payment method. Automated reconciliation of flows eliminates manual intervention, reduces the risk of error and frees up time for teams. Finally, real-time KPIs enable accurate tracking of success rates and average costs for each payment method to drive overall performance.
Beyond payment: managing broker revenue
For the insurance brokerage industry, managing financial flows is not just a matter of efficiency, it is a key lever for competitiveness and performance.
1POINT6 helps brokers immediately increase their margins by optimising each payment, save time through automation of repetitive tasks, and offer a seamless, reassuring customer experience designed to increase conversion rates.
But beyond immediate gains – increased conversion and success rates, FTE savings, reduced errors – 1POINT6 fully integrates with the brokerage business model by offering the best of both worlds: the technological robustness of a cutting-edge payment infrastructure backed by BNP Paribas, combined with a deep understanding of brokerage-specific business challenges. Not to collect payments faster, but to give brokers full, lasting control over their revenue.
