Bordereaux reconciliation is checking the premium and claims data your delegated-authority partners report against your contracts, prior versions, and the cash that actually arrived. Done well, it catches misreported commission, vanished rows and silent changes months before audit.
Evaluating software rather than learning the process? Start at Bordereaux reconciliation for delegated authority.
A bordereau is the periodic report a coverholder, MGA or cedent sends up to its capacity provider: premium bordereaux list the risks bound and the premium owed, claims bordereaux list claims and their movements. They arrive each period, per partner, in the partner’s own spreadsheet format. The plural is bordereaux.
Three comparisons, in increasing order of difficulty:
Do the rows add up, are dates and identifiers valid, is anything duplicated or missing since last period?
Do commission, tax and levies match the agreed terms, line by line, jurisdiction by jurisdiction?
What changed since the last accepted version, and does reported premium match what was actually paid?
Comparing the premium a partner reports as written against the premium actually paid across. It is the core control in DA credit control, because the gap is where books leak:
The expensive ones are quiet. Across delegated-authority books, the recurring patterns are:
A commission percentage that deviates from the contracted rate, compounding every period it goes unchecked.
Premium moved against the prior version with no justifying transaction. High severity, and invisible without version comparison.
A risk present last period, absent this period, with no cancellation or endorsement to explain it.
IPT and levies that don’t equal rate times base for the row’s jurisdiction.
The same transaction twice in one file, or an amount whose sign contradicts its transaction type.
Policy dates outside the period, invalid identifiers, currency mismatches and implausible FX.
The full library of named checks, with what each one catches and why it matters, is published at bordereaux validation checks.
Every partner has a different layout, and layouts change without notice. The rest compounds from there:
AI reads the documents; rules make the calls. In practice:
That is the architecture behind Brisc’s Bordereaux Analyst. The product detail lives at bordereaux reconciliation, and the ingestion side at bordereaux ingestion and processing.
Claims bordereaux carry their own error patterns: claims that move backwards from closed to open, indemnity that falls without a recovery, totals that don’t add up. We cover them separately: claims bordereaux ingestion and validation.
A Bermuda-based specialty reinsurer audited four years of bordereaux, more than 100,000 premium records, and found a 12% uplift in true profitability hidden in misallocated and unprocessed data. The errors were already there; reconciliation is what made them visible.
Every reporting period, which for most delegated-authority arrangements means monthly, per partner. Errors compound across versions: a commission rate that drifts in March and goes unchecked is baked into every settlement after it, and unpicking it at audit costs far more than catching it at ingestion.
Lloyd’s market standards defining the fields a coverholder should report on premium and claims bordereaux. They standardise what should be present, not what each coverholder’s spreadsheet actually looks like, so reconciliation still has to map each partner’s real-world format before any check can run.
Usually delegated-authority credit control or bordereaux operations, with finance downstream. In the books Brisc works with, matching and exceptions consume 45 to 60% of a credit-control team’s hours, which is why the role is often the first place growth turns into headcount.
In a spreadsheet process, someone notices when formulas break, or nobody notices at all. In an automated process a known layout applies its saved mapping, and an unrecognised one halts for a one-time human mapping rather than guessing. New formats should arrive via configuration, never code.
No. The bordereau is the partner’s statement of record, so silently correcting it destroys the audit trail and hides the dispute. Good practice is to flag every discrepancy with evidence, keep the original verbatim, and resolve the difference with the partner on the record.
No, they are adjacent. Bordereaux reconciliation checks reported premium and claims data against contracts, prior versions and cash. Bank reconciliation matches money arriving in your accounts to the policies it belongs to. The written vs paid check is where the two meet.
30 minutes, no slide deck, your real files: a bordereau, a statement, a submission. Your business is specific; the walkthrough should be too.
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