One of the greatest exposures brokers face is allegations of negligence or misleading their clients, otherwise known as Errors and Omissions (E&O).
So how do brokers reduce their E&O risk?
Bookkeeping software that tracks and reports on a brokerage’s daily business and accepts payments is one potential solution according to Bill Redford, vice president of product of development at Keal Technology.
“Any and all activity is recorded,” Redford said, speaking about his firm’s software. “We have best practices that we encourage brokers to maintain so they have a complete record of any and all interactions with a customer and the company.
“Let’s say, for example, there’s a policy change and I’m adding on a vehicle. You document when the call comes in, you make sure the policy change is in your system, it has the date, time, you put it in. So it will be very easy to understand exactly when it was added.”
Keal Technology runs two major broker digital solutions, one for P&C and one for commercial brokers, where policy forms pop up in conjunction with Excel, Word and Outlook.
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Redford said creating a policy is intuitive on the software but Keal offers training for the more challenging aspects of the system like payment intake and management.
“There is definitely training that needs to happen,” he said. “Figuring out how to create a customer or a policy is fairly straight forward but when you get into how to get some accounting and billing, so people can pay the policies to the company, or to you through electronic transfers… there’s all kinds of ways to manage and track that.
“But once you have the training it’s fairly intuitive… and there’s lots of flexibility in how you can use and maintain your system.”
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