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Bordereaux reporting is the unglamorous but essential obligation that comes with delegated authority in insurance. Every month, quarter, or reporting period, MGAs, coverholders, and brokers with binding authority must compile detailed schedules of risks bound, premiums collected, and claims incurred, then submit them to capacity providers in prescribed formats.
For many organisations, this remains a manual, spreadsheet-driven process that consumes days of skilled staff time and carries significant error risk. Automation changes bordereaux from a dreaded reporting burden into a reliable, largely hands-off operation.
What Is Bordereaux Reporting?
The Reporting Obligation
A bordereaux is a detailed listing of insurance transactions submitted by a delegated authority holder to the insurer or reinsurer providing capacity. The term covers several distinct report types:
Premium bordereaux: lists every risk bound during the reporting period, including policy details, insured information, cover details, premium amounts, and commission calculations.
Claims bordereaux: records every claim notified, reserved, paid, or closed during the period, with loss details, reserve movements, and payment breakdowns.
Risk bordereaux: provides detailed information about the portfolio composition, enabling capacity providers to monitor the business being written against agreed parameters.
Each capacity provider may require different formats, field mappings, and submission schedules. An MGA with multiple capacity providers may need to produce dozens of distinct bordereaux reports each month.
Why It Matters
Bordereaux reporting serves critical functions in the delegated authority chain:
Portfolio monitoring: capacity providers use bordereaux data to monitor the business being written against agreed underwriting guidelines and appetite.
Premium reconciliation: bordereaux enable reconciliation of premiums due, collected, and remitted between parties.
Claims oversight: claims bordereaux give capacity providers visibility into loss development and reserve adequacy.
Regulatory compliance: Lloyd's and other market participants require bordereaux submissions as part of their oversight framework. Late or inaccurate submissions attract regulatory attention.
Relationship management: consistent, accurate reporting builds trust with capacity providers. Poor reporting quality damages relationships and can lead to capacity withdrawal.
Current Pain Points
Manual Compilation
The typical bordereaux process involves extracting data from multiple systems, combining it in spreadsheets, applying formatting rules, and performing reconciliation checks. This process suffers from predictable problems:
Data extraction: pulling data from policy administration, claims management, and accounting systems requires manual queries or exports. Different systems use different identifiers, formats, and structures.
Spreadsheet manipulation: raw data must be transformed into the format required by each capacity provider. Column mappings, value lookups, currency conversions, and calculated fields must be applied correctly.
Reconciliation: totals must balance against accounting records. Premium bordereaux must reconcile to collected premiums. Claims bordereaux must reconcile to paid amounts and reserve positions.
Quality checking: every row requires validation. Policy references must exist. Dates must be logical. Premiums must match rate calculations. Commission must reflect agreed terms.
Error Risk
Manual bordereaux preparation introduces errors at every stage:
Mapping mistakes: data mapped to wrong columns or fields. A single column shift can invalidate an entire submission.
Calculation errors: commission percentages applied incorrectly. Pro-rata calculations for mid-term adjustments computed wrong. Currency conversions using incorrect rates.
Omissions: transactions missed during extraction. Endorsements not captured. Late-reported claims excluded from the period.
Duplication: the same transaction reported in consecutive periods. Adjustments double-counted.
These errors do not merely cause inconvenience. They can trigger incorrect premium settlements, distort loss ratios, and undermine capacity provider confidence.
Time and Resource Cost
A mid-sized MGA might spend three to five working days each month on bordereaux preparation across its capacity provider relationships. This work requires staff who understand both the business and the reporting requirements, typically senior operations or finance team members whose time would be better spent on higher-value activities.
During reporting periods, these staff members are unavailable for other work. Holidays, sickness, or staff turnover create immediate reporting risk because knowledge of specific provider requirements often resides with individuals rather than systems.
The Automation Approach
Data Integration
Automated bordereaux reporting begins with direct integration between the systems that hold transaction data and the reporting engine:
Policy data: every risk bound, endorsed, renewed, or cancelled feeds into the reporting system in real time. No end-of-period extraction is required because the data is already captured.
Claims data: notifications, reserve movements, payments, and closures update continuously. The reporting system always holds the current position.
Financial data: premium collections, refunds, and settlements link to the corresponding policy and claims records.
With SwiftCase's analytics platform, these data flows are configured once and operate continuously. The reporting system always holds complete, current data.
Template Configuration
Each capacity provider's reporting requirements are configured as a template:
Field mapping: which data fields populate which report columns. Mappings handle differences in naming conventions, field structures, and data types.
Business rules: how values are calculated, transformed, or derived. Commission calculations, pro-rata adjustments, and currency conversions apply automatically.
Filtering: which transactions fall within each capacity provider's scope. Binder references, product codes, or other identifiers determine inclusion.
Formatting: output format, column ordering, date formats, number formatting, and any provider-specific requirements.
Templates are configured once and reused every reporting period. When a capacity provider changes their requirements, the template is updated and all future reports reflect the change.
Automated Generation
At the configured reporting frequency, the system generates bordereaux automatically:
Period selection: the reporting period is defined and transactions falling within it are identified.
Data assembly: transaction data is assembled according to the template configuration, with all calculations, transformations, and formatting applied.
Validation: automated checks verify data completeness, internal consistency, and reconciliation against control totals.
Exception reporting: any transactions that fail validation are flagged for review rather than silently included or excluded.
Output generation: the completed bordereaux is produced in the required format, whether Excel, CSV, or XML, ready for submission.
Reconciliation
Automated reconciliation runs alongside report generation:
Premium reconciliation: total premiums in the bordereaux reconcile against collected premiums in the accounting system.
Claims reconciliation: paid amounts and reserve positions reconcile against the claims management system.
Period reconciliation: the opening position from the previous period, plus movements during the current period, equals the closing position.
Discrepancies are identified and reported automatically, with drill-down capability to identify specific transactions causing imbalances.
Benefits of Automation
Time Recovery
Automated bordereaux preparation reduces a multi-day manual process to a review-and-submit workflow. Staff who previously spent days compiling spreadsheets now spend hours reviewing automated output and investigating flagged exceptions.
For a mid-sized MGA, this typically recovers fifteen to twenty working days per year, time that redirects to business development, underwriting support, and relationship management.
Error Elimination
Automated mapping, calculation, and validation eliminate the manual errors that undermine reporting quality. Every report applies the same logic, every time. Calculations are consistent. Formatting is correct. Reconciliation is complete.
The result is higher confidence in submitted data, fewer queries from capacity providers, and stronger relationships built on reporting reliability.
Audit Readiness
Every automated bordereaux carries a complete audit trail: which data was included, which rules were applied, which validations passed, and which exceptions were raised. This documentation supports Lloyd's audits, capacity provider reviews, and internal compliance requirements without additional preparation.
Scalability
Adding a new capacity provider relationship requires configuring a new template rather than training staff on another manual process. The reporting system scales with the business without proportional increases in reporting effort.
Getting Started
SwiftCase's insurance solution includes the data integration, business rules engine, and reporting capabilities needed to automate bordereaux reporting. For detailed guidance on implementing automated bordereaux workflows, see our bordereaux reporting automation guide.
The organisations that automate bordereaux reporting gain more than efficiency. They gain confidence in their data, stronger capacity provider relationships, and the ability to scale their delegated authority business without scaling their reporting burden.